Phones have temperature sensors and will stop charging if the battery temperature gets too high, or throttle the CPU or even power off entirely if it gets too hot. Unless you leave it on the dash of your car in summer and the device can't control its temperature, heat can't really cause a catastrophic failure like this. It's more likely to be the battery developing an internal short circuit due to a manufacturing fault in my opinion. There's no way to handle that besides better quality control.
For this type of installation, size is much less important than price. All those batteries don't need to be inside the city, put them near the power stations where land is usually dirt cheap. MWh / $ is the number you need to look at.
Doesn't matter very much, honestly. Even 100% coal powered electric vehicles are cleaner than gasoline or diesel, and electric vehicles will improve as the cost of wind, solar, etc continue to drop.
Once food making machines become a mature technology, they'll be much *better* than human employees. A machine doesn't have enough imagination to get tired, distracted or forget things. If it's programmed to cook something for 178 seconds, that's exactly how long it gets cooked for, every single time.
Putting millions of people out of work is either horrible or great, depending on whether or not we've done basic income yet.
The only reason the power wall could make sense for individuals is if the electric company overcharges the customer or doesn't pay them enough for the solar power the customer sells back to the grid.
They do. Australian electricity is fairly expensive and we get pennies for generated solar, so charging your battery during the day when you're not home and using that power at peak time in the evening makes sense, and it will make more sense as the price of solar and batteries comes down.
The power companies raise rates and cut feed-in tariffs to maintain their profits, which makes more people buy solar and batteries, which means more rate rises and tariff cuts, which means more solar and batteries.
We could transition to a smart grid, where power is valued depending on how far it needs to be carried from generator to consumer due to the reduced load on the grid. Alternatively, the power companies could spin merrily in their death spiral while crying for government to save them, which seems the most likely possibility.
Tesla have said that the Model 3 was designed to be easy to manufacture. I can't see something like the falcon wing doors being included. Until we get to about 2025 and the Model 4 takes over as the affordable car, then we'll see bells and whistles in Model 3...
Electric car incentives are because electric cars are currently significantly more expensive to manufacture. The incentives bring the cost to the buyer down closer to the price of a gas car.
Nobody says, "I really want a car that's louder, smellier, and helps fund Saudi Arabia!" They buy gas because it's cheaper. So far. Another 5-10 years and electric cars will get down to gas's price point, on top of being much cheaper to run. Reaching that point sooner is the point of electric car incentives.
He's arguing against raising the minimum wage because it's pricing human employees out of the market. Okay, so what's the plan in 5 years when the machines cost half as much? Or 5 years after that, when the machines cost half as much again? Are we going to lower the minimum wage to one dollar an hour?
More than that, if minimum wage employees get pay cuts and job losses like he is threatening... who does he think will have the money to buy his robot-made burgers? Cutting the minimum wage means you spend less on payroll, but your customers are somebody else's employees and they got a pay cut too.
The problem with Windows is the way it handles file access.
Under Linux, when you delete a file it's removed from the directory listing, but it's still there on disk. Any program that was using the file continues using the now 'deleted' file.
So an updater can delete a file that's in use and write a new version of the file. Programs that run from that point on use the new file, programs that are still running from before the update keep using the old, deleted file. That's what lets updates quietly run in the background.
Hydrogen is just a stopgap measure, though. You have to use electricity to make the hydrogen, so in ten years when a car battery has 600+ miles range on a 20 minute charge, why bother?
Who wants to build out tens of thousands of hydrogen filling stations only to have them go obsolete within a decade? I can't see a big hydrogen network being built by anybody with any sense, and without that hydrogen cars won't make any headway.
One of the big advantages with battery powered cars is you already *have* electricity. There might not be a rapid charger anywhere near you, but you can still plug it in to a wall outlet overnight. So you can sell electric cars and then build the infrastructure after they start to take off.
You can join the ranks of people holding on to WinXP virtual machines because they need them to administer that one device that needs a certain version of Java 1.4 and Firefox 3.6.
I went to a website once that had a message where ads would normally be, asking me to turn off my adblocker to support that site. Fine. I did. It loaded an ad. I read the page and then went back to Word or whatever else I was doing.
1.5 hours later, my laptop shuts itself down due to low battery. I'd left the page open when I alt-tabbed away from it and the Flash ad that should have been an animated GIF thrashed my CPU until the battery ran dry a couple of hours sooner than it should've. I still needed to use the laptop and hadn't brought the charger, because I shouldn't have needed it.
Never again. "Please unblock our ads to support the site!" Fuck you.
Most things last longer if they aren't ever powered on. Stuff wears out.
Assuming an SSD has any sort of normal workload and isn't being thrashed by an enterprise database or chain-running disk benchmarks, they will be very obsolete by the time wearing out from writes might be an issue. The SSDs I've seen can even report how worn out they are so they can be replaced and retired.
I've heard the arguments for renting cars and houses.
If you're buying a new car every 3-4 years and selling the old one, it can be cheaper to lease instead. If you're buying a car that's a few years old and keeping it until it's worn out, it's much cheaper to buy outright. You pay it off and spend a number of years with a car and no car payment.
Houses, you don't pay off in just a year or two. When you first take out a loan and buy a house, most of your house payment is just keeping up with the interest with a small portion going towards actually paying down the loan. If you're going to sell the house in 5 years and move, fees and taxes can easily eat up any value that you actually have in the house. So if you're going to be moving semi-frequently, renting isn't much different financially and you don't have to deal with buying, selling, the associated fees and taxes, and the issues of home ownership.
That's the reasoning, anyway. The point is, you have to do the math and figure out what makes sense for you.
What? That's not stupid at all. Microsoft is focused on licenses and piracy when it's their shit and don't care about anyone else's. That's perfectly logical. Same as the musicians you hear about illegally copying graphic art.
'Imply' means something different in formal logic. You can use this line instead: "Just because two things happen at almost the same time doesn't prove that the first one caused the second."
The guy who got shot in the brain could have had a heart attack seconds earlier. You still need to do the autopsy to prove that the shot was the cause of death. Yeah, it probably was, but 'probably' isn't proof.
It's more like you install a 17 gig OS on a 17 gig disk, and then they release a free service pack that adds a ton of stuff. From Face Unlock to data usage limits to VPNs to support for new screen dimensions. And it needs more space for all the extra code. And then they offer security updates that assume you have the free service pack.
They didn't release security fixes for Windows XP SP3 and also backport the fixes to SP2 and SP1.
The Nexus One was abandoned because Google said the hardware was too old. And they have a point - you have to jump through some major hoops to get a modern ROM onto it.
The N1 has 512 MB internal flash, and the way it was partitioned meant Android 4.0 was larger than the N1's system partition. Its partitioning scheme dates from the days when apps couldn't be moved to the SD card, so the system partition is only barely big enough to hold Android 2.3 to allow the maximum possible space for apps. Sure, you can plug it into a PC, repartition and format, load a new system image onto the phone from the PC, use a hack so all apps get silently redirected to an SD card, etc... but there was no way to do an OTA update.
In short: the Nexus One has a critical hardware issue in that it only barely has enough internal space to store its own OS.
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Phones have temperature sensors and will stop charging if the battery temperature gets too high, or throttle the CPU or even power off entirely if it gets too hot. Unless you leave it on the dash of your car in summer and the device can't control its temperature, heat can't really cause a catastrophic failure like this. It's more likely to be the battery developing an internal short circuit due to a manufacturing fault in my opinion. There's no way to handle that besides better quality control.
For this type of installation, size is much less important than price. All those batteries don't need to be inside the city, put them near the power stations where land is usually dirt cheap. MWh / $ is the number you need to look at.
Doesn't matter very much, honestly. Even 100% coal powered electric vehicles are cleaner than gasoline or diesel, and electric vehicles will improve as the cost of wind, solar, etc continue to drop.
Once food making machines become a mature technology, they'll be much *better* than human employees. A machine doesn't have enough imagination to get tired, distracted or forget things. If it's programmed to cook something for 178 seconds, that's exactly how long it gets cooked for, every single time.
Putting millions of people out of work is either horrible or great, depending on whether or not we've done basic income yet.
The only reason the power wall could make sense for individuals is if the electric company overcharges the customer or doesn't pay them enough for the solar power the customer sells back to the grid.
They do. Australian electricity is fairly expensive and we get pennies for generated solar, so charging your battery during the day when you're not home and using that power at peak time in the evening makes sense, and it will make more sense as the price of solar and batteries comes down.
The power companies raise rates and cut feed-in tariffs to maintain their profits, which makes more people buy solar and batteries, which means more rate rises and tariff cuts, which means more solar and batteries.
We could transition to a smart grid, where power is valued depending on how far it needs to be carried from generator to consumer due to the reduced load on the grid. Alternatively, the power companies could spin merrily in their death spiral while crying for government to save them, which seems the most likely possibility.
Tesla have said that the Model 3 was designed to be easy to manufacture. I can't see something like the falcon wing doors being included. Until we get to about 2025 and the Model 4 takes over as the affordable car, then we'll see bells and whistles in Model 3...
Electric car incentives are because electric cars are currently significantly more expensive to manufacture. The incentives bring the cost to the buyer down closer to the price of a gas car.
Nobody says, "I really want a car that's louder, smellier, and helps fund Saudi Arabia!" They buy gas because it's cheaper. So far. Another 5-10 years and electric cars will get down to gas's price point, on top of being much cheaper to run. Reaching that point sooner is the point of electric car incentives.
A new way of encrypting things that has a third key? Sure, but why not wish for world peace and a Star Trek style warp drive while you're at it?
Things that don't currently exist aren't a reasonable solution, either. No matter how often Congress demands them.
Yeah, but instead of 500 workers you now have 100 machines and 10 people doing maintenance.
He's arguing against raising the minimum wage because it's pricing human employees out of the market. Okay, so what's the plan in 5 years when the machines cost half as much? Or 5 years after that, when the machines cost half as much again? Are we going to lower the minimum wage to one dollar an hour?
More than that, if minimum wage employees get pay cuts and job losses like he is threatening... who does he think will have the money to buy his robot-made burgers? Cutting the minimum wage means you spend less on payroll, but your customers are somebody else's employees and they got a pay cut too.
The problem with Windows is the way it handles file access.
Under Linux, when you delete a file it's removed from the directory listing, but it's still there on disk. Any program that was using the file continues using the now 'deleted' file.
So an updater can delete a file that's in use and write a new version of the file. Programs that run from that point on use the new file, programs that are still running from before the update keep using the old, deleted file. That's what lets updates quietly run in the background.
Hydrogen is just a stopgap measure, though. You have to use electricity to make the hydrogen, so in ten years when a car battery has 600+ miles range on a 20 minute charge, why bother?
Who wants to build out tens of thousands of hydrogen filling stations only to have them go obsolete within a decade? I can't see a big hydrogen network being built by anybody with any sense, and without that hydrogen cars won't make any headway.
One of the big advantages with battery powered cars is you already *have* electricity. There might not be a rapid charger anywhere near you, but you can still plug it in to a wall outlet overnight. So you can sell electric cars and then build the infrastructure after they start to take off.
Palm, Inc.
Did anyone actually get fired or did they just run the business into the ground?
"Go and get skills" is decent advice to give to an individual, but it doesn't work society-wide.
Where are we going to get 80 million new skilled jobs for all those newly skilled unemployed people?
You can join the ranks of people holding on to WinXP virtual machines because they need them to administer that one device that needs a certain version of Java 1.4 and Firefox 3.6.
I went to a website once that had a message where ads would normally be, asking me to turn off my adblocker to support that site. Fine. I did. It loaded an ad. I read the page and then went back to Word or whatever else I was doing.
1.5 hours later, my laptop shuts itself down due to low battery. I'd left the page open when I alt-tabbed away from it and the Flash ad that should have been an animated GIF thrashed my CPU until the battery ran dry a couple of hours sooner than it should've. I still needed to use the laptop and hadn't brought the charger, because I shouldn't have needed it.
Never again. "Please unblock our ads to support the site!" Fuck you.
Most things last longer if they aren't ever powered on. Stuff wears out.
Assuming an SSD has any sort of normal workload and isn't being thrashed by an enterprise database or chain-running disk benchmarks, they will be very obsolete by the time wearing out from writes might be an issue. The SSDs I've seen can even report how worn out they are so they can be replaced and retired.
If you lose your psychic license, too bad. You should have seen it coming.
I've heard the arguments for renting cars and houses.
If you're buying a new car every 3-4 years and selling the old one, it can be cheaper to lease instead. If you're buying a car that's a few years old and keeping it until it's worn out, it's much cheaper to buy outright. You pay it off and spend a number of years with a car and no car payment.
Houses, you don't pay off in just a year or two. When you first take out a loan and buy a house, most of your house payment is just keeping up with the interest with a small portion going towards actually paying down the loan. If you're going to sell the house in 5 years and move, fees and taxes can easily eat up any value that you actually have in the house. So if you're going to be moving semi-frequently, renting isn't much different financially and you don't have to deal with buying, selling, the associated fees and taxes, and the issues of home ownership.
That's the reasoning, anyway. The point is, you have to do the math and figure out what makes sense for you.
What? That's not stupid at all. Microsoft is focused on licenses and piracy when it's their shit and don't care about anyone else's. That's perfectly logical. Same as the musicians you hear about illegally copying graphic art.
It makes them hypocrites, not stupid.
I'm not sure there's a business case for it, you can already wirelessly charge iPhones in the microwave.
'Imply' means something different in formal logic. You can use this line instead: "Just because two things happen at almost the same time doesn't prove that the first one caused the second."
The guy who got shot in the brain could have had a heart attack seconds earlier. You still need to do the autopsy to prove that the shot was the cause of death. Yeah, it probably was, but 'probably' isn't proof.
It's more like you install a 17 gig OS on a 17 gig disk, and then they release a free service pack that adds a ton of stuff. From Face Unlock to data usage limits to VPNs to support for new screen dimensions. And it needs more space for all the extra code. And then they offer security updates that assume you have the free service pack. They didn't release security fixes for Windows XP SP3 and also backport the fixes to SP2 and SP1.
Updated software won't fit on the device is a bullshit excuse for not putting updated software on the device?
The Nexus One was abandoned because Google said the hardware was too old. And they have a point - you have to jump through some major hoops to get a modern ROM onto it.
The N1 has 512 MB internal flash, and the way it was partitioned meant Android 4.0 was larger than the N1's system partition. Its partitioning scheme dates from the days when apps couldn't be moved to the SD card, so the system partition is only barely big enough to hold Android 2.3 to allow the maximum possible space for apps. Sure, you can plug it into a PC, repartition and format, load a new system image onto the phone from the PC, use a hack so all apps get silently redirected to an SD card, etc... but there was no way to do an OTA update.
In short: the Nexus One has a critical hardware issue in that it only barely has enough internal space to store its own OS.