None of the links contain any analysis of the relationship between cycling miles and accidents; they don't even discuss the number of cyclists or the number of miles they ride. I certainly see more cyclists on the road than I did in the past, and unless something changes fundamentally more cyclists and miles = more accidents and deaths.
They DO mention that the fatality rate for child cyclists has dropped. But something did change there - kids started to wear helmets. Adult cyclists, on the other hand, have largely been wearing helmets since the end of the 80s, and I don't think the rate of helmet use has changed much since then. So we don't have an increase in protection to help prevent accidents.
Finally, these articles appear to lump all cycling injuries together. But a lot of adult cycling (and presumably injury) happens off the road because of the popularity of mountain biking. The statistics are meaningless unless road cycling is separated from off-road cycling.
Daily life on the Enterprise itself is pretty much post-economic. All the basic necessities are provided to all crew members - food, housing, and so forth - and there isn't anything to buy on the ship. We don't see what the crew does when they go on leave; it could be that their leaves take them to other post-economic places, or they may receive money that they can use on those occasions. There is probably also a minor gift economy on the Enterprise - people exchanging handmade things and things they collect while on planetary missions - but we also don't see that. The Enterprise is an exploration ship rather than a trading ship, so it usually doesn't carry cargo for delivery to other places. (The Trouble With Tribbles is a notable exception; the Enterprise carries an emergency shipment of grain. The episode says nothing about whether they would receive any payment for it, or whether the shipment was a humanitarian mission.)
We do see evidence of economic activity outside the ship. Harry Mudd in Mudd's Women sells brides, and he later shows up selling love potions in an episode of the animated series. Cyrano Jones in The Trouble With Tribbles sells pets. Much later we got Deep Space Nine, which definitely has an economy.
It might be more accurate to view the Federation as a paternalistic military society rather than a communist one. Deployed soldiers and sailors (ones in wartime posts rather than peacetime bases) generally receive all their basic needs from the military; they may get salaries but they have few opportunities to spend them. (They can buy some personal luxuries at the PX, gamble their salaries with other soldiers, or spend the money on leave. Peacetime soldiers are another matter as they often live off-base.) The closest current-day parallel would be a submarine; like a starship it is self-contained, so while you are on board you have no daily interaction with anything outside the military.
There is an externality that may have increased the Hugo vote count. There was also a hotly contested race this year to choose the site for the 2017 Worldcon. (Helsinki defeated DC, Montreal, and Nippon.) To vote for that, you had to become at least a supporting member of Sasquan and then also pay an additional site selection voting fee, that additional fee also gets you a supporting membership for the winning Worldcon bid. There were probably some people who were mostly interested in voting for the Worldcon site, but having already paid to be a Sasquan member decided to also cast a Hugo ballot.
In contrast, last year's site selection vote was essentially unopposed. Kansas City had no serious competitor, in part because 2016 is the 40th anniversary of the first Worldcon in Kansas City, a very popular con that had Robert Heinlein as guest of honor. Thus site selection did not have as large a role in getting people to join the 2014 Worldcon, Loncon 3.
Measuring the RAM usage of some applications is tricky because the application adapts to how much RAM is available. Chrome with lots of open tabs is a notable example. If you have tons of memory it will keep all the tabs in RAM fully rendered; switching to another tab is very fast. If you start to run short of memory it will start to discard the rendered versions of tabs; if you switch back to a tab like that Chrome now has to redo the layout, and that takes a bit longer. If things get really desperate it will even throw away the page source (unlikely on a computer but it does happen on the mobile version), which means a reload and possibly a long wait.
It's also the fact that the sample sets keep getting bigger, which gets you modest but real gains in quality. Some virtual instruments are now using multi-samples - sample sets where the instrument is recorded at different volumes/intensities - to get a more accurate model. There are now grand piano sample sets that are over a gigabyte - and that's just ONE instrument.
The reason people block ads is that the advertisers have gone overboard with intrusive advertising. Popup windows are annoying and malfunction on some combinations of hardware and browser. Autoplay videos make your browser crawl, suck up huge amounts of bandwidth, and if the audio also autoplays they annoy everyone around you. Ads that deliver malware to your computer clearly must be blocked. Finally, there are the privacy implications of ad tracking.
If advertising was limited to text and static banners, I wouldn't bother to block it. I don't want the online ad industry to die, I want the online ad industry to return to 1998.
Read up about natural monopolies. There are plenty of places where there simply isn't enough population density to support a second set of infrastructure. Heck, there are places that don't even have enough population to support ONE set of wires, and only have service because of government subsidies or mandates.
Most likely, the profitable markets are ones where they have been operating for a while; they have an established base of passengers and drivers and aren't spending a lot of money to acquire them. The unprofitable markets are ones where they are spending a lot of marketing money to get started or spending a lot on legal defense. There will probably also turn out to be some markets where there just isn't enough demand or a large enough pool of drivers interested in working for Uber to make the service work, and the company will end up abandoning those markets.
Having difficulty getting a taxi is a frequent problem in many US cities. The root cause of the problem is the artificial scarcity of taxis caused by the medallion system. The number of licenses available does not meet the demand. The problem is that once that system is in place and the market value of medallions has become substantial, the medallion holders have a huge vested interest in the system and it is therefore difficult to change. (The market price of medallions in New York City got close to a MILLION dollars before Uber came along and started to reduce their value. Their value has fallen by over 50% and continues to fall.)
I believe there is some need for government oversight of taxis and competing services like Uber, but that the medallion system is fundamentally broken. It should be replaced by a system that issues an unlimited supply of licenses for a modest annual fee - enough to cover inspection of vehicles, background checks of drivers, tests of taxi meters in vehicles that continue to use them, assuring that all vehicles are covered by adequate insurance, and resources to investigate and act if there are problems with issues like disabled accessibility or racial discrimination. Such licenses should be issued regionally rather than by individual cities and towns. Drivers of existing taxis as well as drivers for new companies like Uber and Lyft should be required to get them.
Uber has fundamentally improved the experience of getting a ride in a few ways. Most importantly, they have removed the handling of money from the in-car environment, removing a substantial risk for both drivers and passengers. Also, knowing the cost of your ride before you enter the vehicle is a plus. Uber pricing is variable because of surge pricing, but you are given a current price when you book and that's what you pay. The cost of a regular taxi ride is unpredictable, because you don't know how long the ride will take (rates are usually based on both time and mileage) or which route the driver will choose to take.
Uber has substantial marketing expenses. For example, there are all those free rides that they give to first time users. The drivers are still getting their normal pay for those rides; it's coming out of Uber's marketing budget. Here in Boston they have also been running radio ads to recruit drivers.
Then there is all the money they are spending on lawyers.
That version of MeeGo has had at least three more years of development since Nokia abandoned it. The version they gave up on was not yet ready for prime time. Even now, availability of native MeeGo apps is very limited, though they have added the ability to run Android apps so you can actually use your phone for something besides making phone calls.
Nokia never really had a dominant market position in smartphones. They did have a huge share of phones running Symbian, but most of them didn't have sufficient processing power or display real estate to be used in the way that we now use what we think of as smartphones. They were really feature phones with a limited capability to download and run apps.
Part of it is how your house is designed. If you have a multistory house as is typical here in New England, you don't have a lot of roof for the amount of floor space you have. And what roof you do have is likely to be broken up by dormers, leaving even less space for solar panels. If you have a single story house with an unbroken roof line as is common in some areas and your house faces north/south, you're likely to be able to generate a lot more of your electricity needs.
Sadly, I have no mod points to move this back up. This post should not have been modded down.
There has been a spate of cow posts here on Slashdot recently, usually as part of a first comment attempt. But this one is different for two reasons: it's not the canonical MOOOOO post, and the OP is ACTUALLY ABOUT COWS. So it should have been modded up as a comment on the cow meme, not modded down.
People's internet connections are already straining to stream 1080p video. And even so, the quality of existing 1080p streams is mediocre; visual artifacts are often easy to spot. It is possible to get better looking 1080p video by using more bits; broadcast HD and Blu-Ray both do that. Blu-Ray and streams are mostly encoded with H.264; broadcast digital TV in the US is at a disadvantage because it uses MPEG-2 but it uses enough bits to more than overcome the disadvantage relative to streamed video.
4K ups the ante. For a given level of freedom from artifacts you need about four times as many bits; the exact ratio depends on the content and how well it compresses. The majority of home internet connections aren't up to the challenge of carrying even one 4K stream, let alone multiple streams as you might have in a family or a group household; nor is the rest of the infrastructure of a typical ISP. Using a better codec decreases the number of bits that need to be sent.
And 4K is not the end point. That level of resolution may be adequate for content that you only view at a typical screen distance (as we look at a movie screen, TV set, or computer monitor), but more immersive forms of video such as video walls, where we might look closely at a small part of the picture, will require even higher levels of resolution.
Making you download Solitaire from the Windows Store is a way to entice people to set up Windows Store accounts. Once you are in the door they can try to sell you other stuff.
Fortunately for old Mac users, there are some specialists that will work on them. We have one here in the Boston area, The Computer Loft; those guys will fix old PowerPC Macs as well as the very latest ones.
From the outside, it's impossible to tell what happened to her. She might have been the second best candidate for four different jobs; Google is a place where a lot of people want to work so they get a lot of good applicants. Or she may actually be a victim of age discrimination or sex discrimination or a combination of both; they are very much a thing in tech.
The original Unix may be older, but the software has changed so completely since then that it's not really accurate to say that anybody is still using the original Unix. Unless of course they are - maybe somebody out there is still running a very old version on a vintage computer.
It's not so much that the OS needs huge amounts of memory. It's that the apps do, and that amount keeps increasing over time. The resident size of the current Facebook app on Android, for example, is over 100MB, and since it checks frequently for updates it can't be effectively suspended and thrown out of RAM. Some of Google's own apps, notably the Chrome browser, are also culprits.
iOS doesn't need as much RAM because it's not a full-bore multitasking OS. It does limited background operations, and the scope of those has increased over time, but still stops short of the full thing. That means that iOS doesn't need to have as many apps resident in RAM. Android can also suspend things to disk if necessary, but that tends to mess with the expectation that you can switch instantly to another app. Chrome can also minimize its memory use if the device is running low on RAM; mostly it does that by discarding tabs other than the currently selected one, with the consequence that switching to other tabs is slower because they may have to be rerendered or even downloaded again.
The only spec that is totally out of line is the price tag. But the US price is likely to be significantly lower because it won't include VAT. If it is sold for something more like $400 it might appeal to some people who might have otherwise bought a midrange phone plus a standalone audio player like a HiFi Walkman, FiiO, Pono, etc. But we'll have to hear some real world reports on the sound quality before we'll know whether that market (if it even exists) will be buying.
The electric Tesla has two advantages over the Camaro. First, it's an all wheel drive car so there is twice as much rubber at work. Second, the electric motors deliver full torque all the way down to zero RPM, so the Tesla is faster off the mark.
Sounds like you don't commute by public transit and walking.
If you travel everywhere by car and just carry the laptop at the end points, weight isn't that big an issue. If you go everywhere by public transit and walking, it matters more because you're going to spend a lot more time actually carrying that laptop. It's not unusual to be looking at a mile walk at the end point.
Weight also matters to frequent flyers. First, you may be carrying that laptop for a while; in larger airports the walk to your gate can be significant, and if you are doing transfers for international travel you can face a LOT of walking. (Philadelphia, I'm looking at you.) Second, airlines are cutting back on the permitted weight of carry-on bags, and a heavy laptop might leave you without much weight to spare for the other things you need to take with you.
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None of the links contain any analysis of the relationship between cycling miles and accidents; they don't even discuss the number of cyclists or the number of miles they ride. I certainly see more cyclists on the road than I did in the past, and unless something changes fundamentally more cyclists and miles = more accidents and deaths.
They DO mention that the fatality rate for child cyclists has dropped. But something did change there - kids started to wear helmets. Adult cyclists, on the other hand, have largely been wearing helmets since the end of the 80s, and I don't think the rate of helmet use has changed much since then. So we don't have an increase in protection to help prevent accidents.
Finally, these articles appear to lump all cycling injuries together. But a lot of adult cycling (and presumably injury) happens off the road because of the popularity of mountain biking. The statistics are meaningless unless road cycling is separated from off-road cycling.
Daily life on the Enterprise itself is pretty much post-economic. All the basic necessities are provided to all crew members - food, housing, and so forth - and there isn't anything to buy on the ship. We don't see what the crew does when they go on leave; it could be that their leaves take them to other post-economic places, or they may receive money that they can use on those occasions. There is probably also a minor gift economy on the Enterprise - people exchanging handmade things and things they collect while on planetary missions - but we also don't see that. The Enterprise is an exploration ship rather than a trading ship, so it usually doesn't carry cargo for delivery to other places. (The Trouble With Tribbles is a notable exception; the Enterprise carries an emergency shipment of grain. The episode says nothing about whether they would receive any payment for it, or whether the shipment was a humanitarian mission.)
We do see evidence of economic activity outside the ship. Harry Mudd in Mudd's Women sells brides, and he later shows up selling love potions in an episode of the animated series. Cyrano Jones in The Trouble With Tribbles sells pets. Much later we got Deep Space Nine, which definitely has an economy.
It might be more accurate to view the Federation as a paternalistic military society rather than a communist one. Deployed soldiers and sailors (ones in wartime posts rather than peacetime bases) generally receive all their basic needs from the military; they may get salaries but they have few opportunities to spend them. (They can buy some personal luxuries at the PX, gamble their salaries with other soldiers, or spend the money on leave. Peacetime soldiers are another matter as they often live off-base.) The closest current-day parallel would be a submarine; like a starship it is self-contained, so while you are on board you have no daily interaction with anything outside the military.
There is an externality that may have increased the Hugo vote count. There was also a hotly contested race this year to choose the site for the 2017 Worldcon. (Helsinki defeated DC, Montreal, and Nippon.) To vote for that, you had to become at least a supporting member of Sasquan and then also pay an additional site selection voting fee, that additional fee also gets you a supporting membership for the winning Worldcon bid. There were probably some people who were mostly interested in voting for the Worldcon site, but having already paid to be a Sasquan member decided to also cast a Hugo ballot.
In contrast, last year's site selection vote was essentially unopposed. Kansas City had no serious competitor, in part because 2016 is the 40th anniversary of the first Worldcon in Kansas City, a very popular con that had Robert Heinlein as guest of honor. Thus site selection did not have as large a role in getting people to join the 2014 Worldcon, Loncon 3.
Measuring the RAM usage of some applications is tricky because the application adapts to how much RAM is available. Chrome with lots of open tabs is a notable example. If you have tons of memory it will keep all the tabs in RAM fully rendered; switching to another tab is very fast. If you start to run short of memory it will start to discard the rendered versions of tabs; if you switch back to a tab like that Chrome now has to redo the layout, and that takes a bit longer. If things get really desperate it will even throw away the page source (unlikely on a computer but it does happen on the mobile version), which means a reload and possibly a long wait.
It's also the fact that the sample sets keep getting bigger, which gets you modest but real gains in quality. Some virtual instruments are now using multi-samples - sample sets where the instrument is recorded at different volumes/intensities - to get a more accurate model. There are now grand piano sample sets that are over a gigabyte - and that's just ONE instrument.
The reason people block ads is that the advertisers have gone overboard with intrusive advertising. Popup windows are annoying and malfunction on some combinations of hardware and browser. Autoplay videos make your browser crawl, suck up huge amounts of bandwidth, and if the audio also autoplays they annoy everyone around you. Ads that deliver malware to your computer clearly must be blocked. Finally, there are the privacy implications of ad tracking.
If advertising was limited to text and static banners, I wouldn't bother to block it. I don't want the online ad industry to die, I want the online ad industry to return to 1998.
Read up about natural monopolies. There are plenty of places where there simply isn't enough population density to support a second set of infrastructure. Heck, there are places that don't even have enough population to support ONE set of wires, and only have service because of government subsidies or mandates.
Most likely, the profitable markets are ones where they have been operating for a while; they have an established base of passengers and drivers and aren't spending a lot of money to acquire them. The unprofitable markets are ones where they are spending a lot of marketing money to get started or spending a lot on legal defense. There will probably also turn out to be some markets where there just isn't enough demand or a large enough pool of drivers interested in working for Uber to make the service work, and the company will end up abandoning those markets.
Having difficulty getting a taxi is a frequent problem in many US cities. The root cause of the problem is the artificial scarcity of taxis caused by the medallion system. The number of licenses available does not meet the demand. The problem is that once that system is in place and the market value of medallions has become substantial, the medallion holders have a huge vested interest in the system and it is therefore difficult to change. (The market price of medallions in New York City got close to a MILLION dollars before Uber came along and started to reduce their value. Their value has fallen by over 50% and continues to fall.)
I believe there is some need for government oversight of taxis and competing services like Uber, but that the medallion system is fundamentally broken. It should be replaced by a system that issues an unlimited supply of licenses for a modest annual fee - enough to cover inspection of vehicles, background checks of drivers, tests of taxi meters in vehicles that continue to use them, assuring that all vehicles are covered by adequate insurance, and resources to investigate and act if there are problems with issues like disabled accessibility or racial discrimination. Such licenses should be issued regionally rather than by individual cities and towns. Drivers of existing taxis as well as drivers for new companies like Uber and Lyft should be required to get them.
Uber has fundamentally improved the experience of getting a ride in a few ways. Most importantly, they have removed the handling of money from the in-car environment, removing a substantial risk for both drivers and passengers. Also, knowing the cost of your ride before you enter the vehicle is a plus. Uber pricing is variable because of surge pricing, but you are given a current price when you book and that's what you pay. The cost of a regular taxi ride is unpredictable, because you don't know how long the ride will take (rates are usually based on both time and mileage) or which route the driver will choose to take.
Uber has substantial marketing expenses. For example, there are all those free rides that they give to first time users. The drivers are still getting their normal pay for those rides; it's coming out of Uber's marketing budget. Here in Boston they have also been running radio ads to recruit drivers.
Then there is all the money they are spending on lawyers.
That version of MeeGo has had at least three more years of development since Nokia abandoned it. The version they gave up on was not yet ready for prime time. Even now, availability of native MeeGo apps is very limited, though they have added the ability to run Android apps so you can actually use your phone for something besides making phone calls.
Nokia never really had a dominant market position in smartphones. They did have a huge share of phones running Symbian, but most of them didn't have sufficient processing power or display real estate to be used in the way that we now use what we think of as smartphones. They were really feature phones with a limited capability to download and run apps.
Laptops aren't fussy about power because the battery smooths it all out. Desktop systems are another story.
Part of it is how your house is designed. If you have a multistory house as is typical here in New England, you don't have a lot of roof for the amount of floor space you have. And what roof you do have is likely to be broken up by dormers, leaving even less space for solar panels. If you have a single story house with an unbroken roof line as is common in some areas and your house faces north/south, you're likely to be able to generate a lot more of your electricity needs.
Sadly, I have no mod points to move this back up. This post should not have been modded down.
There has been a spate of cow posts here on Slashdot recently, usually as part of a first comment attempt. But this one is different for two reasons: it's not the canonical MOOOOO post, and the OP is ACTUALLY ABOUT COWS. So it should have been modded up as a comment on the cow meme, not modded down.
Around here you can find old x86 boxes for free on Craigslist. CRT monitors are also plentiful; flat panels occasionally show up.
People's internet connections are already straining to stream 1080p video. And even so, the quality of existing 1080p streams is mediocre; visual artifacts are often easy to spot. It is possible to get better looking 1080p video by using more bits; broadcast HD and Blu-Ray both do that. Blu-Ray and streams are mostly encoded with H.264; broadcast digital TV in the US is at a disadvantage because it uses MPEG-2 but it uses enough bits to more than overcome the disadvantage relative to streamed video.
4K ups the ante. For a given level of freedom from artifacts you need about four times as many bits; the exact ratio depends on the content and how well it compresses. The majority of home internet connections aren't up to the challenge of carrying even one 4K stream, let alone multiple streams as you might have in a family or a group household; nor is the rest of the infrastructure of a typical ISP. Using a better codec decreases the number of bits that need to be sent.
And 4K is not the end point. That level of resolution may be adequate for content that you only view at a typical screen distance (as we look at a movie screen, TV set, or computer monitor), but more immersive forms of video such as video walls, where we might look closely at a small part of the picture, will require even higher levels of resolution.
Making you download Solitaire from the Windows Store is a way to entice people to set up Windows Store accounts. Once you are in the door they can try to sell you other stuff.
Fortunately for old Mac users, there are some specialists that will work on them. We have one here in the Boston area, The Computer Loft; those guys will fix old PowerPC Macs as well as the very latest ones.
From the outside, it's impossible to tell what happened to her. She might have been the second best candidate for four different jobs; Google is a place where a lot of people want to work so they get a lot of good applicants. Or she may actually be a victim of age discrimination or sex discrimination or a combination of both; they are very much a thing in tech.
The original Unix may be older, but the software has changed so completely since then that it's not really accurate to say that anybody is still using the original Unix. Unless of course they are - maybe somebody out there is still running a very old version on a vintage computer.
It's not so much that the OS needs huge amounts of memory. It's that the apps do, and that amount keeps increasing over time. The resident size of the current Facebook app on Android, for example, is over 100MB, and since it checks frequently for updates it can't be effectively suspended and thrown out of RAM. Some of Google's own apps, notably the Chrome browser, are also culprits.
iOS doesn't need as much RAM because it's not a full-bore multitasking OS. It does limited background operations, and the scope of those has increased over time, but still stops short of the full thing. That means that iOS doesn't need to have as many apps resident in RAM. Android can also suspend things to disk if necessary, but that tends to mess with the expectation that you can switch instantly to another app. Chrome can also minimize its memory use if the device is running low on RAM; mostly it does that by discarding tabs other than the currently selected one, with the consequence that switching to other tabs is slower because they may have to be rerendered or even downloaded again.
The only spec that is totally out of line is the price tag. But the US price is likely to be significantly lower because it won't include VAT. If it is sold for something more like $400 it might appeal to some people who might have otherwise bought a midrange phone plus a standalone audio player like a HiFi Walkman, FiiO, Pono, etc. But we'll have to hear some real world reports on the sound quality before we'll know whether that market (if it even exists) will be buying.
The electric Tesla has two advantages over the Camaro. First, it's an all wheel drive car so there is twice as much rubber at work. Second, the electric motors deliver full torque all the way down to zero RPM, so the Tesla is faster off the mark.
Sounds like you don't commute by public transit and walking.
If you travel everywhere by car and just carry the laptop at the end points, weight isn't that big an issue. If you go everywhere by public transit and walking, it matters more because you're going to spend a lot more time actually carrying that laptop. It's not unusual to be looking at a mile walk at the end point.
Weight also matters to frequent flyers. First, you may be carrying that laptop for a while; in larger airports the walk to your gate can be significant, and if you are doing transfers for international travel you can face a LOT of walking. (Philadelphia, I'm looking at you.) Second, airlines are cutting back on the permitted weight of carry-on bags, and a heavy laptop might leave you without much weight to spare for the other things you need to take with you.