You could be a new CPU and a new GPU (even at current inflated GPU prices) and still have some money left over. An ounce of gold currently sells for about $1,300. Some respectable CPU choices would be an Intel i7-8700K ($300 at Micro Center or $350 at Newegg) or a Ryzen 2700X ($320 at Micro Center or Newegg). There are too many GPU choices to go through them all and multiple makers, but even if you went with the most expensive option (leaving out professional cards), a GTX 1080Ti for around $900, you'd still have a bit of change from your ounce of gold. If you want some money left over to buy RAM or an SSD, you could step down to a GTX 1080 (without the Ti) for about $600, or go with a Vega 64 for around $700. (I'd personally choose NVidia for a Windows system because of lower power consumption, but go with AMD for Linux because of the better open source drivers.)
That works well if you're at home. But if you have traveled to some place that is sufficiently distant that you had to fly there, not so much. And there are places like Manhattan where you don't want to drive your own car; parking it is prohibitively expensive. (Paying over $10 per hour and over $50 per day is not uncommon.)
Perhaps you never take such trips or go to places where you don't want your car. But many people do.
It's true that not using cash has security implications. But using cash has safety implications that are far more important for most riders, and also for the drivers. Licensed cabs in big cities have heavy armored walls between the driver and the passengers because the cash that the driver carries makes for a tempting theft target. And the fact that the passenger has to have cash on hand to pay is also a risk. Taking cash out of the equation makes the experience safer, which is why Uber and Lyft drivers can carry passengers in ordinary cars. In most major cities cabs are now required to take credit cards but the fact that the cab CAN accept cash remains. And using a credit card in the cab has its own risks; do you trust that the driver won't skim your information?
The process of hailing a ride with a smartphone is also superior because there are no problems with getting your location (or the place you are going) across to the driver. The traditional cab process has two points of failure; either the dispatcher could misunderstand your location, or the dispatcher could fail to convey it correctly to the driver. And it's inherent to the system; conveying text information by phone and radio is an error-prone process. People can easily confuse similar sounding street names (are you on Foo Street, Foo Avenue, or Foo Court? Or perhaps Flu Street?) and in some cities like Boston there are cases where more than one street has the same name.
The process of waiting for your ride is improved. You know about how long your ride will take to show up even before you book, and once you do the progress of your driver is displayed in real time. You also knew from the start about how much your ride would cost, and now that Uber and Lyft have gone to guaranteed pricing you know EXACTLY what your ride will cost. With a traditional cab it's a guess, and you're at the mercy of a driver who may run up the bill by taking a non-optimal route.
Finally, there is the fact that you can get a ride at all. Until Uber and Lyft came along, many cities had a shortage of cabs due to the protection racket that the medallion system is. (It's not just that the medallions were expensive, it's that the supply was limited... at a level that was inadequate to meet peak demand.) Good luck if you wanted a ride to or from a less-popular neighborhood; you would often have to wait an hour for a cab to take you there. Drivers would sometimes flat-out refuse to take passengers to neighborhoods that they considered dangerous, despite the fact that there are laws prohibiting that. (One driver here in Boston regretted that choice when it turned out that the passenger he refused to carry was a Boston City Councillor. But most refused passengers lack the political clout to do much about it.) Resources at dispatch were also often inadequate, resulting in long waits on the phone before you could request a ride.
There are problems with the Uber paradigm. It's bad for the cases where you NEED an anonymous ride, which might be true for some people who are trying to get away from a dangerous person. The smartphone process does not work well for people with certain disabilities. It disenfranchises the unbanked population, who have no way to pay. (For the most part not having a smartphone is a choice, but not having a bank account may not be.) And there are places where Uber and Lyft do not yet operate.
There are some cases where the traditional cab paradigm works well. Perhaps the most important example is getting a ride from a major public location or event. Getting a ride to the train station or the symphony may be problematic but getting a ride FROM those places is usually easy. And going between a hotel and the airport is easy in either direction.
But for 99% of people looking for a ride that doesn't originate at a major public location, and 99.9% of those people who aren't in Manhattan (the one place I know of where simply hailing a cab on the street has a high rate of success), the process is just plain better. And that's why it's such a success.
Professional cameras are an exception. Sony makes some excellent professional camcorders for news gathering and low-end video production. Arri and RED own the high end of digital filmmakng, most digital Hollywood productions use one of those brands. Sony is popular for documentaries, made-for-TV productions, and corporate videos.
They also make fine still cameras with an emphasis on video features, both for professionals and the prosumer market - not surprising given the company's strength in video. One of those, the A7S (and its successor the A7S II) is groundbreaking in its ability to capture high quality video in very low light - it is usable at ISO 100,000, which is insane in a world where most cameras shoot video at iSO 800 and top out around ISO 3,200. That's a difference of FIVE F-stops - that camera can shoot quality video in situations where you can barely SEE.
They have competition from both the traditional camera companies (Nikon and Canon) and from other electronics companies (Panasonic and Samsung). But Sony is holding its own so far. Some users are still sour on Sony because of their earlier use of the non-standard Memory Stick, but they gave that up years ago and the pro cameras never did use it.
To be fair to Sony, the DVD format includes a do-not-skip flag, and officially licensed products are required to honor it. Sony is a key member of the DVD consortium so they're not about to produce players that violate the license.
The cheap Chinese players, as well as software players other than the brand name ones like PowerDVD, ignore the flag, but they are also not officially licensed products. VLC, for example, perhaps the most popular DVD software on computers, uses the pirated libdvdcss to decode the decryption on discs rather than using a licensed solution.
If you go far enough back that wasn't true. Sony was a technology leader for many years, starting with their pioneering transistor radio. Notable Sony products include the Trinitron TV, Betamax (which ended up losing in the marketplace but it was on the market before VHS), the semi-professional U-Matic video recorder, CD and DVD players, 8mm camcorders, and the Walkman and Discman portable music players. Once other companies came in Sony didn't usually offer the lowest prices; they instead competed on quality and design.
Sony also made a lot of audio products: receivers and the like. Their offerings were solid but not exceptional; their value was usually about equal to other major Japanese brands like Pioneer. They made speakers that were successful in Japan but not in the US; US listeners seem to prefer a slightly different sound.
They haven't been as much of a technology leader in the 21st century. They have produced the PlayStation series and are a key member of the Blu-Ray and Ultra Blu-Ray consortia. They are also a leader in imaging technologies, both as a maker of image sensors that are widely used and with their own camera business (acquired from Minolta). Sony is still a solid player in video cameras but pretty much on a par with others now.
When flat panel TVs took over Sony decided to position itself at the premium end of the market, which turned out to be a precarious spot because other companies quickly matched their quality at lower prices. Then they gave up on flat panel production and switched to making TVs based on other people's panels, which was an even more difficult position to be in if you wanted to sell a premium product. At this point leadership in the TV market has largely shifted to Samsung and LG, which not coincidentally are also the major manufacturer of high quality flat panels. Sony tried a similar course in phones, trying to lean on their design expertise and their brand to sell a high priced product, with little success.
Tesla's initial use of 18650 cells had nothing to do with any inherent advantages or disadvantages of that size; it was about the fact that the size was in high volume production because of its use in laptop computer batteries. If you slice open the removable battery from an older laptop you will probably find 18650 cells inside.
But the laptop computer business has changed. Thin and light designs now dominate the business; those have non-removable flat batteries inside, much like overgrown versions of the ones now found inside cell phones. Meanwhile, Tesla is shifting its car batteries to a larger size of cell to reduce manufacturing costs: fewer cells means fewer interconnects, less complexity in charge balancing hardware and software, and so forth. And now Tesla is a large enough buyer to get Panasonic to make a new size of cell to meet its needs, something that wasn't true back in the company's early days.
With both of these factors in play, the market for 18650 cells is declining. It would make sense for Panasonic to allow Tesla to shift some of its previously contracted orders to the new size, leaving Panasonic's existing capacity available to fill orders for the remaining legacy markets for 18650. If there is a need for such a renegotiation it would make sense for both companies, so Tesla should have no difficulty working out a new deal.
Exactly this. So long as Tesla will still be a customer, Panasonic should be happy to allow them to shift the distribution of cell sizes that they buy.
Electric cars do not yet make financial sense in the US, though if you include the tax benefits they are getting close. Especially the lower priced models like the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, and someday the base version of the Model 3. The purchase price is higher, but recharging is cheaper than gasoline and maintenance costs are lower. Oil prices continue to rise and the cost of making lithium-ion batteries continues to fall. Eventually the lines will cross and full-electric cars will be cost-effective even without tax subsidies.
Meanwhile, some Americans continue to buy them. Not to save money, but to help improve the environment or for the superior driving experience.
There hasn't been enough discussion about the effect of eliminating analog broadcasting on disaster recovery. Quite simply, it would be catastrophic.
Analog has a number of advantages. There is a huge installed base of compatible receivers. They require little power for operation, making long term operation on battery power feasible. The receivers are relatively simple, and many can be built and repaired by users. Equipment to TRANSMIT in analog is also simple and inexpensive and some hobbyists already own it, making it possible to set up a local broadcast in a situation where large scale broadcasting might be disrupted for an extended period. The standards are not encumbered by patents. Broadcasts can be received intelligibly over a wide area, even with terrain obstacles in the way.
Digital is great under the right circumstances, and can provide superior quality and a wider range of programming. But under the wrong circumstances it is far less robust. Fewer receivers exist, so some people won't have access to one. They are basically unrepairable and not buildable at home. The transmitting equipment is complex, not readily available at a reasonable price, and not buildable at home. (The standards are protected by patents that make that even more difficult.) Reception often drops out because of terrain or weather.
Depending on the internet has its own set of problems in that scenario. The internet depends on a lot of technological infrastructure; if that is disrupted it won't work. In a major catastrophe it's not going to work.
Disasters on that scale still exist here and now. Consider how much worse things would have been in Puerto Rico if there had been no FM (and AM) radio broadcasts to disseminate information.
Mandating that all stations be stereo is excessive. Stereo doesn't provide much value for a lot of news and talk programming (notably, anything with only one person talking); it just increases the number of bits used for no good reason. That type of programming also doesn't gain much from high frequency response out to 15 or 20 KHz; more than typical AM radio is good but a cutoff of 8 or 10 KHz can be used.
Like many modern forms of broadcasting, DAB and DAB+ multiplex more than one content stream into one station. Dividing the available pool of bits among the content streams sensibly lets broadcasters provide more content.
I do agree that broadcasters sometimes make bad decisions about the tradeoff of amount of content vs quality. The secondary channels on over-the-air television broadcasts in the US often look like total garbage. And I find Sirius XM impossible to listen to for long periods of time because there is a subtle flaw in their codec that I find irritating though impossible to describe.
One catch with pfSense and OPNsense is that they are not designed to be wireless access points, so you will need one or more separate APs for that. Really high end wireless NICs aren't available as PC plug-in cards in any case. The usual home routers can be used as access points by disabling the routing functions or not using them. If you take a typical home router and plug an Ethernet cable from your router into one of the LAN ports, configure a static IP address in the correct range (optional but recommended as it makes it easier to get to the router's control page if needed), and disable its DHCP server, it will function as an access point. Or you can buy dedicated APs from companies like Ubiquiti Networks ( https://www.ubnt.com/ )
My recommendations for the most secure options for home or small office use:
Dedicated hardware: Asuswrt-Merlin ( https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/ ) combined with one of the compatible ASUS router models. It's being actively supported; new versions appear every one to two months, and would likely appear more quickly if there were a major zero-day exploit. Not as feature-rich as DD-WRT or the like but more frequently updated.
Build your own PC or pre-configured PC: pfSense ( https://www.pfsense.org/ ) or OPNsense ( https://opnsense.org/ ). OPNsense is a fork of pfSense, which in turn is a fork of the now unsupported m0n0wall. They're based on FreeBSD. The companies sell pre-configured systems and support contracts as a source of income, but the software is free and open source and you can roll your own system. A PC has more memory and computing power than a dedicated router box, so these are more feature-rich than anything that runs on one of those boxes.
If you want to use a self-made box, a much better idea is to run software that is dedicated to being a router such as pfSense or OPNsense (a fork of pfSense; both are forks of the now-unsupported m0n0wall). They're based on FreeBSD. Either of those should be as secure as any of the open source software for dedicated router hardware (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc) and will have more features. They're both fully open source. The companies that develop them make money by selling support contracts and pre-configured hardware, but you can also install them on your own hardware.
It wouldn't be that difficult, but Microsoft probably doesn't feel that it's important. Running applications under emulation is always going to be slower than running native ones. 64-bit Windows applications are mostly ones that are still under active development, so it's not that difficult for the developers to do native ARM builds. Aside from device drivers, if the code is written correctly it shouldn't require much more than just building it for a different architecture.
What the 32-bit emulation is really meant for is legacy applications that can't be easily replaced, often because they are no longer under development. The company that developed it may no longer exist, the source code may not be available, or there just aren't enough people still using it for anybody to bother. Those objections are far less likely to apply to 64-bit applications.
One reason is that we're leaving fewer children behind. There are many more programs for students with special needs now, and various mandates requiring schools to offer them. Educating children with special needs is far more costly than educating a non-special student.
Another is transportation expenses. Our society has gotten nervous about allowing children to do anything unsupervised, including walking any distance, so a higher percentage of students are bused to school. That money isn't spent IN the school but it's still part of the budget for education.
I think they will get regulatory approval, because if they don't we will end up with only three wireless networks anyway. Sprint is only still surviving because Softbank has been pumping in money and failing to get the results they had hoped for. if the merger is blocked they're likely to just shut it down and sell off the pieces.
The most recent merger attempt between the companies failed because Softbank was unwilling to give up control; they wanted to run the combined companies. This time the deal involves T-Mobile buying Sprint, and most of the Sprint management would be out the door. The change suggests that Softbank has given up on the US market and wants out.
For T-Mobile, the value is in the customers (who they hope to convert to T-Mobile customers, as they did years ago when they bought MetroPCS), the spectrum rights, and the tower leases. Sprint's other equipment may or may not be useful to T-Mobile, depending on whether it is sufficiently compatible with their network and software. Most of the customers will have to buy new phones (though it's not as bad as it might be because of Sprint's recent emphasis on iPhone sales; those are compatible with both GSM and CDMA networks), and given that necessity some will defect to other networks, but T-Mobile should be able to retain the majority of them.
I don't think we'll see a fourth network happen again, but the growth of multi-network MVNOs may help the competitive picture. MVNOs like Google Fi buy service from more than one of the big networks and offer phones that seamlessly work on all the networks they buy from. Another growth area will be MVNOs that combine cell service with extensive use of WiFi, like Republic Wireless and the newer Xfinity Mobile.
It's a hard problem. There is a direct relationship between car height and fuel economy (extra height makes the car less aerodynamic and thus decreases mileage) so car makers want to keep their cars short for efficiency. If you're tall, and especially if most of your height is in the torso rather than the legs, you're going to find it impossible to sit upright in most cars.
Same deal with the back windows that are difficult to see out of. In the Olden Daisies sedans had nearly vertical back windows, but the aerodynamics of those are terrible. More recent ones have gone to a more gradual dropoff in back, but unless you use a very large rear window (and you can only go so far with that if you want a trunk that is concealed from view) that gives you a higher window.
Look at the difference in the body shape of the Chevrolet Impala, a representative full size sedan, over time. Here is the current 2018 Impala: http://www.chevrolet.com/conte... And here is the 1985 Impala: http://testdrivejunkie.com/wp-... The older version has a long flat hood (needed to accommodate the large engines available at the time); the new one has a shorter hood, reflecting the fact that improvements in engine technology have eliminated the need for 300+ cubic inch engines. (The biggest engine available in the 2018 version is a 3.6 liter V6, which converts to 220 cubic inches. The biggest engine in the 80s was a 5.7 liter V8, or 350 cubic inches, though in some model years the 305 cubic inch version was the largest one offered. Note that the 3.6 liter engine in the 2018 model produces more power than the larger 5.7 liter engine did!) The new one also has a slowly sloping rear windows, while the older one had a nearly vertical rear window.
You could buy a Tesla or a Chevy Bolt, which would allow you to live 200 miles away. (Though the dealership issue is moot for the Tesla anyway.) More EVs with 200+ mile range are coming in the future.
There will still be people for whom EV ownership is not practical. Plug-in hybrids, on the other hand, will work just fine for them.
Taxi and transit use? Most urban vehicles of that type are driven less than 100 miles per day. They'll go with more battery anyway, to make sure they don't run out and to cover energy use for climate control. Still feasible. Electric buses already exist, though nearly all of them are being used in China. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Starting in May 2018, all new cars sold in the US and Canada will have backup cameras. Because of the way car model years work, it's likely that nearly every car on a showroom floor right now already has one. The Trump administration ordered a review of the requirement by the NHTSA, but changing the requirement would require an act of Congress and that did not happen so the mandate is proceeding.
The right way to do this would be instead to have pools drawn on different lines: personal vs business use. All cars and light trucks that are bought as personal transportation or light hauling (think pizza delivery and the like) could replace the current "car" grouping and be subject to one standard. Light trucks bought for business hauling (parcel delivery, farm work, construction work, and so on) would replace the current "light truck" category and be subject to a looser standard.
The point of this would be to eliminate the loophole of selling people vehicles that fall into a looser category as personal transportation. The auto industry would be forced not only to design more efficient vehicles, but might have to take measures to alter the mix of vehicles that they sell. If it takes subsidies to small cars and penalty pricing on SUVs to meet the fuel economy standards, so be it. If it requires companies to discontinue conventional gas-powered cars and move completely to hybrids and electric cars, that's great too.
Some people who favor stricter fuel economies are quick to explain that they don't want to take away your SUVs. I'm not one of those people. I DO want to take away your stupid wasteful SUVs that are used to carry one person and never leaves the road. Deal with it.
Nearly everybody who wants a smartphone already has one. And the ones that most people have are Good Enough so there is less incentive to upgrade. We've seen the same cycle with other tech products like PCs; there was no reason to believe that smartphones would be an exception.
ASUS actually DOES make some great routers. But only if you unlock their full potential by running DD-WRT or ASUSWRT-Merlin on them. Suitable routers include the RT-AC66U, RT-AC68U, RT-AC86U, RT-AC88U, and RT-AC5300. Info on ASUSWRT-Merlin is here: https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/a...
This is meant for tablets and ultra-low-end laptops, which don't have DVD drives. It's true that you can connect one to a USB port, and if you do that Windows will probably fetch the driver from Windows Update. I hope that they make the Registry Editor available for download in case you need it.
Internet Explorer is only needed for compatibility with legacy sites. Edge will still be included, so most users won't miss IE. It would be nice if they would also remove Edge and give you a free choice of browser (either theirs or a third party one), but the code from the Microsoft browser is also used internally for other Windows features so it's impossible to remove all of it.
Slashdot Mirror
You could be a new CPU and a new GPU (even at current inflated GPU prices) and still have some money left over. An ounce of gold currently sells for about $1,300. Some respectable CPU choices would be an Intel i7-8700K ($300 at Micro Center or $350 at Newegg) or a Ryzen 2700X ($320 at Micro Center or Newegg). There are too many GPU choices to go through them all and multiple makers, but even if you went with the most expensive option (leaving out professional cards), a GTX 1080Ti for around $900, you'd still have a bit of change from your ounce of gold. If you want some money left over to buy RAM or an SSD, you could step down to a GTX 1080 (without the Ti) for about $600, or go with a Vega 64 for around $700. (I'd personally choose NVidia for a Windows system because of lower power consumption, but go with AMD for Linux because of the better open source drivers.)
That works well if you're at home. But if you have traveled to some place that is sufficiently distant that you had to fly there, not so much. And there are places like Manhattan where you don't want to drive your own car; parking it is prohibitively expensive. (Paying over $10 per hour and over $50 per day is not uncommon.)
Perhaps you never take such trips or go to places where you don't want your car. But many people do.
It's true that not using cash has security implications. But using cash has safety implications that are far more important for most riders, and also for the drivers. Licensed cabs in big cities have heavy armored walls between the driver and the passengers because the cash that the driver carries makes for a tempting theft target. And the fact that the passenger has to have cash on hand to pay is also a risk. Taking cash out of the equation makes the experience safer, which is why Uber and Lyft drivers can carry passengers in ordinary cars. In most major cities cabs are now required to take credit cards but the fact that the cab CAN accept cash remains. And using a credit card in the cab has its own risks; do you trust that the driver won't skim your information?
The process of hailing a ride with a smartphone is also superior because there are no problems with getting your location (or the place you are going) across to the driver. The traditional cab process has two points of failure; either the dispatcher could misunderstand your location, or the dispatcher could fail to convey it correctly to the driver. And it's inherent to the system; conveying text information by phone and radio is an error-prone process. People can easily confuse similar sounding street names (are you on Foo Street, Foo Avenue, or Foo Court? Or perhaps Flu Street?) and in some cities like Boston there are cases where more than one street has the same name.
The process of waiting for your ride is improved. You know about how long your ride will take to show up even before you book, and once you do the progress of your driver is displayed in real time. You also knew from the start about how much your ride would cost, and now that Uber and Lyft have gone to guaranteed pricing you know EXACTLY what your ride will cost. With a traditional cab it's a guess, and you're at the mercy of a driver who may run up the bill by taking a non-optimal route.
Finally, there is the fact that you can get a ride at all. Until Uber and Lyft came along, many cities had a shortage of cabs due to the protection racket that the medallion system is. (It's not just that the medallions were expensive, it's that the supply was limited... at a level that was inadequate to meet peak demand.) Good luck if you wanted a ride to or from a less-popular neighborhood; you would often have to wait an hour for a cab to take you there. Drivers would sometimes flat-out refuse to take passengers to neighborhoods that they considered dangerous, despite the fact that there are laws prohibiting that. (One driver here in Boston regretted that choice when it turned out that the passenger he refused to carry was a Boston City Councillor. But most refused passengers lack the political clout to do much about it.) Resources at dispatch were also often inadequate, resulting in long waits on the phone before you could request a ride.
There are problems with the Uber paradigm. It's bad for the cases where you NEED an anonymous ride, which might be true for some people who are trying to get away from a dangerous person. The smartphone process does not work well for people with certain disabilities. It disenfranchises the unbanked population, who have no way to pay. (For the most part not having a smartphone is a choice, but not having a bank account may not be.) And there are places where Uber and Lyft do not yet operate.
There are some cases where the traditional cab paradigm works well. Perhaps the most important example is getting a ride from a major public location or event. Getting a ride to the train station or the symphony may be problematic but getting a ride FROM those places is usually easy. And going between a hotel and the airport is easy in either direction.
But for 99% of people looking for a ride that doesn't originate at a major public location, and 99.9% of those people who aren't in Manhattan (the one place I know of where simply hailing a cab on the street has a high rate of success), the process is just plain better. And that's why it's such a success.
Professional cameras are an exception. Sony makes some excellent professional camcorders for news gathering and low-end video production. Arri and RED own the high end of digital filmmakng, most digital Hollywood productions use one of those brands. Sony is popular for documentaries, made-for-TV productions, and corporate videos.
They also make fine still cameras with an emphasis on video features, both for professionals and the prosumer market - not surprising given the company's strength in video. One of those, the A7S (and its successor the A7S II) is groundbreaking in its ability to capture high quality video in very low light - it is usable at ISO 100,000, which is insane in a world where most cameras shoot video at iSO 800 and top out around ISO 3,200. That's a difference of FIVE F-stops - that camera can shoot quality video in situations where you can barely SEE.
They have competition from both the traditional camera companies (Nikon and Canon) and from other electronics companies (Panasonic and Samsung). But Sony is holding its own so far. Some users are still sour on Sony because of their earlier use of the non-standard Memory Stick, but they gave that up years ago and the pro cameras never did use it.
To be fair to Sony, the DVD format includes a do-not-skip flag, and officially licensed products are required to honor it. Sony is a key member of the DVD consortium so they're not about to produce players that violate the license.
The cheap Chinese players, as well as software players other than the brand name ones like PowerDVD, ignore the flag, but they are also not officially licensed products. VLC, for example, perhaps the most popular DVD software on computers, uses the pirated libdvdcss to decode the decryption on discs rather than using a licensed solution.
If you go far enough back that wasn't true. Sony was a technology leader for many years, starting with their pioneering transistor radio. Notable Sony products include the Trinitron TV, Betamax (which ended up losing in the marketplace but it was on the market before VHS), the semi-professional U-Matic video recorder, CD and DVD players, 8mm camcorders, and the Walkman and Discman portable music players. Once other companies came in Sony didn't usually offer the lowest prices; they instead competed on quality and design.
Sony also made a lot of audio products: receivers and the like. Their offerings were solid but not exceptional; their value was usually about equal to other major Japanese brands like Pioneer. They made speakers that were successful in Japan but not in the US; US listeners seem to prefer a slightly different sound.
They haven't been as much of a technology leader in the 21st century. They have produced the PlayStation series and are a key member of the Blu-Ray and Ultra Blu-Ray consortia. They are also a leader in imaging technologies, both as a maker of image sensors that are widely used and with their own camera business (acquired from Minolta). Sony is still a solid player in video cameras but pretty much on a par with others now.
When flat panel TVs took over Sony decided to position itself at the premium end of the market, which turned out to be a precarious spot because other companies quickly matched their quality at lower prices. Then they gave up on flat panel production and switched to making TVs based on other people's panels, which was an even more difficult position to be in if you wanted to sell a premium product. At this point leadership in the TV market has largely shifted to Samsung and LG, which not coincidentally are also the major manufacturer of high quality flat panels. Sony tried a similar course in phones, trying to lean on their design expertise and their brand to sell a high priced product, with little success.
Tesla's initial use of 18650 cells had nothing to do with any inherent advantages or disadvantages of that size; it was about the fact that the size was in high volume production because of its use in laptop computer batteries. If you slice open the removable battery from an older laptop you will probably find 18650 cells inside.
But the laptop computer business has changed. Thin and light designs now dominate the business; those have non-removable flat batteries inside, much like overgrown versions of the ones now found inside cell phones. Meanwhile, Tesla is shifting its car batteries to a larger size of cell to reduce manufacturing costs: fewer cells means fewer interconnects, less complexity in charge balancing hardware and software, and so forth. And now Tesla is a large enough buyer to get Panasonic to make a new size of cell to meet its needs, something that wasn't true back in the company's early days.
With both of these factors in play, the market for 18650 cells is declining. It would make sense for Panasonic to allow Tesla to shift some of its previously contracted orders to the new size, leaving Panasonic's existing capacity available to fill orders for the remaining legacy markets for 18650. If there is a need for such a renegotiation it would make sense for both companies, so Tesla should have no difficulty working out a new deal.
Exactly this. So long as Tesla will still be a customer, Panasonic should be happy to allow them to shift the distribution of cell sizes that they buy.
Electric cars do not yet make financial sense in the US, though if you include the tax benefits they are getting close. Especially the lower priced models like the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, and someday the base version of the Model 3. The purchase price is higher, but recharging is cheaper than gasoline and maintenance costs are lower. Oil prices continue to rise and the cost of making lithium-ion batteries continues to fall. Eventually the lines will cross and full-electric cars will be cost-effective even without tax subsidies.
Meanwhile, some Americans continue to buy them. Not to save money, but to help improve the environment or for the superior driving experience.
There hasn't been enough discussion about the effect of eliminating analog broadcasting on disaster recovery. Quite simply, it would be catastrophic.
Analog has a number of advantages. There is a huge installed base of compatible receivers. They require little power for operation, making long term operation on battery power feasible. The receivers are relatively simple, and many can be built and repaired by users. Equipment to TRANSMIT in analog is also simple and inexpensive and some hobbyists already own it, making it possible to set up a local broadcast in a situation where large scale broadcasting might be disrupted for an extended period. The standards are not encumbered by patents. Broadcasts can be received intelligibly over a wide area, even with terrain obstacles in the way.
Digital is great under the right circumstances, and can provide superior quality and a wider range of programming. But under the wrong circumstances it is far less robust. Fewer receivers exist, so some people won't have access to one. They are basically unrepairable and not buildable at home. The transmitting equipment is complex, not readily available at a reasonable price, and not buildable at home. (The standards are protected by patents that make that even more difficult.) Reception often drops out because of terrain or weather.
Depending on the internet has its own set of problems in that scenario. The internet depends on a lot of technological infrastructure; if that is disrupted it won't work. In a major catastrophe it's not going to work.
Disasters on that scale still exist here and now. Consider how much worse things would have been in Puerto Rico if there had been no FM (and AM) radio broadcasts to disseminate information.
Mandating that all stations be stereo is excessive. Stereo doesn't provide much value for a lot of news and talk programming (notably, anything with only one person talking); it just increases the number of bits used for no good reason. That type of programming also doesn't gain much from high frequency response out to 15 or 20 KHz; more than typical AM radio is good but a cutoff of 8 or 10 KHz can be used.
Like many modern forms of broadcasting, DAB and DAB+ multiplex more than one content stream into one station. Dividing the available pool of bits among the content streams sensibly lets broadcasters provide more content.
I do agree that broadcasters sometimes make bad decisions about the tradeoff of amount of content vs quality. The secondary channels on over-the-air television broadcasts in the US often look like total garbage. And I find Sirius XM impossible to listen to for long periods of time because there is a subtle flaw in their codec that I find irritating though impossible to describe.
One catch with pfSense and OPNsense is that they are not designed to be wireless access points, so you will need one or more separate APs for that. Really high end wireless NICs aren't available as PC plug-in cards in any case. The usual home routers can be used as access points by disabling the routing functions or not using them. If you take a typical home router and plug an Ethernet cable from your router into one of the LAN ports, configure a static IP address in the correct range (optional but recommended as it makes it easier to get to the router's control page if needed), and disable its DHCP server, it will function as an access point. Or you can buy dedicated APs from companies like Ubiquiti Networks ( https://www.ubnt.com/ )
My recommendations for the most secure options for home or small office use:
Dedicated hardware: Asuswrt-Merlin ( https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/ ) combined with one of the compatible ASUS router models. It's being actively supported; new versions appear every one to two months, and would likely appear more quickly if there were a major zero-day exploit. Not as feature-rich as DD-WRT or the like but more frequently updated.
Build your own PC or pre-configured PC: pfSense ( https://www.pfsense.org/ ) or OPNsense ( https://opnsense.org/ ). OPNsense is a fork of pfSense, which in turn is a fork of the now unsupported m0n0wall. They're based on FreeBSD. The companies sell pre-configured systems and support contracts as a source of income, but the software is free and open source and you can roll your own system. A PC has more memory and computing power than a dedicated router box, so these are more feature-rich than anything that runs on one of those boxes.
If you want to use a self-made box, a much better idea is to run software that is dedicated to being a router such as pfSense or OPNsense (a fork of pfSense; both are forks of the now-unsupported m0n0wall). They're based on FreeBSD. Either of those should be as secure as any of the open source software for dedicated router hardware (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc) and will have more features. They're both fully open source. The companies that develop them make money by selling support contracts and pre-configured hardware, but you can also install them on your own hardware.
It wouldn't be that difficult, but Microsoft probably doesn't feel that it's important. Running applications under emulation is always going to be slower than running native ones. 64-bit Windows applications are mostly ones that are still under active development, so it's not that difficult for the developers to do native ARM builds. Aside from device drivers, if the code is written correctly it shouldn't require much more than just building it for a different architecture.
What the 32-bit emulation is really meant for is legacy applications that can't be easily replaced, often because they are no longer under development. The company that developed it may no longer exist, the source code may not be available, or there just aren't enough people still using it for anybody to bother. Those objections are far less likely to apply to 64-bit applications.
Some people enjoy video calls with family members and lovers. The latter aren't always pornographic though they can be.
One reason is that we're leaving fewer children behind. There are many more programs for students with special needs now, and various mandates requiring schools to offer them. Educating children with special needs is far more costly than educating a non-special student.
Another is transportation expenses. Our society has gotten nervous about allowing children to do anything unsupervised, including walking any distance, so a higher percentage of students are bused to school. That money isn't spent IN the school but it's still part of the budget for education.
I think they will get regulatory approval, because if they don't we will end up with only three wireless networks anyway. Sprint is only still surviving because Softbank has been pumping in money and failing to get the results they had hoped for. if the merger is blocked they're likely to just shut it down and sell off the pieces.
The most recent merger attempt between the companies failed because Softbank was unwilling to give up control; they wanted to run the combined companies. This time the deal involves T-Mobile buying Sprint, and most of the Sprint management would be out the door. The change suggests that Softbank has given up on the US market and wants out.
For T-Mobile, the value is in the customers (who they hope to convert to T-Mobile customers, as they did years ago when they bought MetroPCS), the spectrum rights, and the tower leases. Sprint's other equipment may or may not be useful to T-Mobile, depending on whether it is sufficiently compatible with their network and software. Most of the customers will have to buy new phones (though it's not as bad as it might be because of Sprint's recent emphasis on iPhone sales; those are compatible with both GSM and CDMA networks), and given that necessity some will defect to other networks, but T-Mobile should be able to retain the majority of them.
I don't think we'll see a fourth network happen again, but the growth of multi-network MVNOs may help the competitive picture. MVNOs like Google Fi buy service from more than one of the big networks and offer phones that seamlessly work on all the networks they buy from. Another growth area will be MVNOs that combine cell service with extensive use of WiFi, like Republic Wireless and the newer Xfinity Mobile.
It's a hard problem. There is a direct relationship between car height and fuel economy (extra height makes the car less aerodynamic and thus decreases mileage) so car makers want to keep their cars short for efficiency. If you're tall, and especially if most of your height is in the torso rather than the legs, you're going to find it impossible to sit upright in most cars.
Same deal with the back windows that are difficult to see out of. In the Olden Daisies sedans had nearly vertical back windows, but the aerodynamics of those are terrible. More recent ones have gone to a more gradual dropoff in back, but unless you use a very large rear window (and you can only go so far with that if you want a trunk that is concealed from view) that gives you a higher window.
Look at the difference in the body shape of the Chevrolet Impala, a representative full size sedan, over time. Here is the current 2018 Impala: http://www.chevrolet.com/conte... And here is the 1985 Impala: http://testdrivejunkie.com/wp-... The older version has a long flat hood (needed to accommodate the large engines available at the time); the new one has a shorter hood, reflecting the fact that improvements in engine technology have eliminated the need for 300+ cubic inch engines. (The biggest engine available in the 2018 version is a 3.6 liter V6, which converts to 220 cubic inches. The biggest engine in the 80s was a 5.7 liter V8, or 350 cubic inches, though in some model years the 305 cubic inch version was the largest one offered. Note that the 3.6 liter engine in the 2018 model produces more power than the larger 5.7 liter engine did!) The new one also has a slowly sloping rear windows, while the older one had a nearly vertical rear window.
You could buy a Tesla or a Chevy Bolt, which would allow you to live 200 miles away. (Though the dealership issue is moot for the Tesla anyway.) More EVs with 200+ mile range are coming in the future.
There will still be people for whom EV ownership is not practical. Plug-in hybrids, on the other hand, will work just fine for them.
Taxi and transit use? Most urban vehicles of that type are driven less than 100 miles per day. They'll go with more battery anyway, to make sure they don't run out and to cover energy use for climate control. Still feasible. Electric buses already exist, though nearly all of them are being used in China. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Starting in May 2018, all new cars sold in the US and Canada will have backup cameras. Because of the way car model years work, it's likely that nearly every car on a showroom floor right now already has one. The Trump administration ordered a review of the requirement by the NHTSA, but changing the requirement would require an act of Congress and that did not happen so the mandate is proceeding.
Sources:
https://www.autotrader.com/car...
https://www.freedoniagroup.com...
https://www.ceoutlook.com/2017...
The right way to do this would be instead to have pools drawn on different lines: personal vs business use. All cars and light trucks that are bought as personal transportation or light hauling (think pizza delivery and the like) could replace the current "car" grouping and be subject to one standard. Light trucks bought for business hauling (parcel delivery, farm work, construction work, and so on) would replace the current "light truck" category and be subject to a looser standard.
The point of this would be to eliminate the loophole of selling people vehicles that fall into a looser category as personal transportation. The auto industry would be forced not only to design more efficient vehicles, but might have to take measures to alter the mix of vehicles that they sell. If it takes subsidies to small cars and penalty pricing on SUVs to meet the fuel economy standards, so be it. If it requires companies to discontinue conventional gas-powered cars and move completely to hybrids and electric cars, that's great too.
Some people who favor stricter fuel economies are quick to explain that they don't want to take away your SUVs. I'm not one of those people. I DO want to take away your stupid wasteful SUVs that are used to carry one person and never leaves the road. Deal with it.
Nearly everybody who wants a smartphone already has one. And the ones that most people have are Good Enough so there is less incentive to upgrade. We've seen the same cycle with other tech products like PCs; there was no reason to believe that smartphones would be an exception.
ASUS actually DOES make some great routers. But only if you unlock their full potential by running DD-WRT or ASUSWRT-Merlin on them. Suitable routers include the RT-AC66U, RT-AC68U, RT-AC86U, RT-AC88U, and RT-AC5300. Info on ASUSWRT-Merlin is here: https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/a...
This is meant for tablets and ultra-low-end laptops, which don't have DVD drives. It's true that you can connect one to a USB port, and if you do that Windows will probably fetch the driver from Windows Update. I hope that they make the Registry Editor available for download in case you need it.
Internet Explorer is only needed for compatibility with legacy sites. Edge will still be included, so most users won't miss IE. It would be nice if they would also remove Edge and give you a free choice of browser (either theirs or a third party one), but the code from the Microsoft browser is also used internally for other Windows features so it's impossible to remove all of it.