When you step into a cab in the US, you have the assumption of not being ripped off, driven around the block, driven dangerously fast, robbed blind, etc.
This is the funniest shit I've read in a while. I hope you're not serious. So, how many cab rides a day do you take, and where exactly?
It's worse than that. The regulation is totally ass-backwards. Flying anything small without FPV is hard and inaccurate, and, presumably, also less safe. I've personally looked through an FPV system installed in a plane that was flown line-of-sight by an experienced pilot doing it the old fashioned way. And all I have to say is that it was some very shitty flying. Sure, if you look at it from a distance, it looks "great". Yet when you see the VSI and the artificial horizon, you can't be but all "the fuck is the pilot on drugs or something?". Understandably, the accuracy of flying decreases with the distance, as gain in the pilot's visual feedback loop decreases with the decreasing size of the plane on the retina. It may be that the video is not quite necessary, but remote VSI and artificial horizon is a must, and those are, in one form or another, the mainstay of FPV.
In many, many places in the U.S., you really want to have a lawyer if you as much as get a speeding ticket past a certain overspeed threshold (say 20mph). The $200 you'll spend on a lawyer is way less than the insurance premium increase you'd get if you didn't get you case pleaded down. Never mind that some judges handle pro se cases with thinly veiled prejudice.
It's physically impossible because the power they need is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the power they're going to get. It's as simple as that. Passive RFID works because the power it needs is on par with available power. Again, it's just that simple.
So, as you might imagine, the devil is in the details. What they have is not passive RFID.
They were in an offsite Amazon data center - offsite from the instances running the live site. Still, they are not immutable, if you have right credentials you can erase them. So, if the data center hosting their live instances was wiped out by a tornado, the data would survive in the offsite location. Here a criminal with a password was more powerful than a natural disaster. Of course this was because they used one set of credentials for everything. They shouldn't have.
The company doesn't work for the stockholders. The company has a mission, and the stockholders who don't agree with it are simply not your stockholders in the first place. They don't bother. The founders of a company are free to set the mission as they see fit. The mission doesn't have to be 100% profit- or ROI-oriented. It's perfectly possible to have a public corporation that's after greater things than money. Just because for example Microsoft isn't set up this way doesn't mean it's a law of nature. Far from it.
CS is a subfield of mathematics. It's useful in software and computer engineering, but it's the engineering field you should be talking about, not a subfield of what is, in essence, an art. And yes, I do agree with Lockhart. Wholeheartedly.
I don't know what kind of magic sauce would allow one to have "IT in the cloud" setup. Windows clients with roaming profiles quickly get to be a drain even on a gigabit network. Even without a roaming profile, anything that isn't the boring old secretarial style work will require a decent bandwidth. Most media work or CAD work can't really be done over your typical cable internet. Those who would most benefit from an "IT in the cloud" type of a service - small businesses - really can't afford having gigabit links to their premises. Neither do I think that the bandwidth from any particular Amazon instance is where it needs to be. Does Amazon run their instances on machines/blades with 10Gbit links?
My wife's camera has a 32GB SD card, and she fills it up regularly. We have terabytes of family photos, and it's just occasional shooting, she's not much into photography, and those aren't raw files either. I don't think it's a very unique kind of a situation.
I'd go farther: if you're a small business, plan on dumping Micros-anything ASAP. If you can reuse the hardware with someone else's software, great, but that's only an added benefit. Micros is now spoiled goods. Everyone and their mother is doing POS these days, I think it's time it became commoditized as an open source project.
What is it with everyone and their dog that they think U.S. laws apply to citizens only? The fuck? Are the people who think that way really that dumb? Protip: law applies to anyone present within the jurisdiction of said law, unless a given law specifically states otherwise. The only group of people that is treated specially within the U.S. Constitution are native people ("Indians").
Steep learning curve would have been good. To have a steep learning curve means that you learn quickly. What they had wasn't a steep learning curve. It was a nearly flat one: you learn and learn and don't make much progress at all.
Improving the build quality is an act finely balanced between improvement and profitability. They can't halt everything while they make improvements. They have a production pipeline and can't continuously rebuild in-process launchers because then they'd not be launching for a few more years. What you see is their chosen locally optimal point between latency of a launch vs. launch throughput.
There's no such thing as antibiotic soap. There is antibacterial soap. Those are very different things. The antibacterial compounds can't be and aren't taken internally and have nothing to do with antibiotics.
Ah yes, the AC problem. I concur. Initially I'd restart the car while driving (no need for starter!) and it usually cleared it for another 20 minutes or so. Eventually I wired power through a manual switch directly to the A/C clutch to override the silly climate controller. I only managed to freeze the evaporator once or twice:)
One stereo problem is due to poor mechanical design of the front panel board, the traces crack and it doesn't respond to keypresses anymore. I repaired it twice before the car was totaled.
Shocks and engine mounts, yes, exhaust from the manifold back, yes. What a pain it was.
That 1st gen S40 was a nightmare. I owned it. It saved my life, but I don't miss it at all. All of them are lemons as far as I'm concerned. At least I got it for cheap. I don't think it was US made, though.
I agree, and I've in fact replaced the spark plugs in my 6 cyl. Volvo after 140k miles. The only discernible difference was that after starting it up, the idle was around 1200RPM whereas normally it would be 800 or so. The idle adaptation took care of it in a couple of minutes. Fuel mileage didn't change. The old plugs really looked like crap, with the platinum spikey electrode completely gone and the thin platinum wire being recessed about 0.2mm into the insulator. They still worked fine.
The quality of "stuff" made in China is usually exactly what the stateside customer orders. Cheap chinese toys aren't of poor quality because they're chinese, they're of poor quality because they are ordered to be so. If a U.S. customer is paying 10 cents for an injection-molded trinket, they get 10 cents worth of a trinket, no less, no more. Design for some of this stuff is still done outside of China, and if the design is crappy, you can't blame the factory for that. Heck, if the chinese design is crappy, then it's still approved by the stateside customer to be just that - a crappy design. The factory then executes the crappy design, and you get a crappy product. Sure,
Asia is pervaded by a cutthroat culture where there's no problem with lying to your customer if only it'll get you financially ahead. But that's just a small part of the problem. The biggest problem is the corporations that approve, order and sell those poorly-designed and poorly-made products. It's ultimately their explicit choice that things are so. We, the customers, pay for it.
Some of the problem with customers is simply their general disdain for everything technical. It seems to be a badge of honor for people not to be able to do the most basic of inquiry into the quality of what they are buying. A tiny bit of engineering fundamentals could be taught in high schools, for crying out loud, if for nothing else but to make people less sheepish when it comes to purchases.
It's only realtime if you can get that GPU to do its calculations when driven from, you know, a real-time operating system. That is often a big problem, as some GPUs come with laughably incomplete specs and there's no way to use them without relying on OS-specific, non-realtime driver binary blobs. Raspberry PI SOC's reverse-engineer is slowly coming to a state that lets one its GPU to do truly realtime computation. It's one of a very few. Maybe Intel documents their integrated graphics sufficiently for use in a RTOS. Other than that it's probably all at the level where you can do proof-of-concepts and can't go beyond that.
Almost any off-the-shelf logic element that's easy to get those days is very fast and has risetimes on the order of 1-10ns. It is actually harder to buy slower logic families, they get discontinued left right and center. You might be flipping that gate at a 100kHz, but it can have harmonics going past 1GHz. People often forget that little detail and wonder why they get interference between "slow" circuits etc.
While you're mostly right when it comes to cookbook designs, once you are off the cookbook path you can certainly design circuits that have better than 0.5% accuracy over temperature and such. Yes, they are not trivial to implement, but it can be done, and once done it's pretty damn impressive in my book at least. This is somewhat valuable when your analog signal chain is part of a safety-critical system, where the software has to be validated and has such an overhead that it's actually often cheaper to do as much work as possible in the analog domain.
And heck, these days it's no biggie to buy an off-the-shelf op-amp that has worst-case offset spec better than 20 bits in 0-5V signal range. The stabilization circuits inside are discrete-time, but still analog.
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When you step into a cab in the US, you have the assumption of not being ripped off, driven around the block, driven dangerously fast, robbed blind, etc.
This is the funniest shit I've read in a while. I hope you're not serious. So, how many cab rides a day do you take, and where exactly?
It's worse than that. The regulation is totally ass-backwards. Flying anything small without FPV is hard and inaccurate, and, presumably, also less safe. I've personally looked through an FPV system installed in a plane that was flown line-of-sight by an experienced pilot doing it the old fashioned way. And all I have to say is that it was some very shitty flying. Sure, if you look at it from a distance, it looks "great". Yet when you see the VSI and the artificial horizon, you can't be but all "the fuck is the pilot on drugs or something?". Understandably, the accuracy of flying decreases with the distance, as gain in the pilot's visual feedback loop decreases with the decreasing size of the plane on the retina. It may be that the video is not quite necessary, but remote VSI and artificial horizon is a must, and those are, in one form or another, the mainstay of FPV.
In many, many places in the U.S., you really want to have a lawyer if you as much as get a speeding ticket past a certain overspeed threshold (say 20mph). The $200 you'll spend on a lawyer is way less than the insurance premium increase you'd get if you didn't get you case pleaded down. Never mind that some judges handle pro se cases with thinly veiled prejudice.
I have my own offsite storage: a few encrypted hard drives distributed among friends. Works great.
It's physically impossible because the power they need is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the power they're going to get. It's as simple as that. Passive RFID works because the power it needs is on par with available power. Again, it's just that simple.
So, as you might imagine, the devil is in the details. What they have is not passive RFID.
They were in an offsite Amazon data center - offsite from the instances running the live site. Still, they are not immutable, if you have right credentials you can erase them. So, if the data center hosting their live instances was wiped out by a tornado, the data would survive in the offsite location. Here a criminal with a password was more powerful than a natural disaster. Of course this was because they used one set of credentials for everything. They shouldn't have.
The company doesn't work for the stockholders. The company has a mission, and the stockholders who don't agree with it are simply not your stockholders in the first place. They don't bother. The founders of a company are free to set the mission as they see fit. The mission doesn't have to be 100% profit- or ROI-oriented. It's perfectly possible to have a public corporation that's after greater things than money. Just because for example Microsoft isn't set up this way doesn't mean it's a law of nature. Far from it.
CS is a subfield of mathematics. It's useful in software and computer engineering, but it's the engineering field you should be talking about, not a subfield of what is, in essence, an art. And yes, I do agree with Lockhart. Wholeheartedly.
I don't know what kind of magic sauce would allow one to have "IT in the cloud" setup. Windows clients with roaming profiles quickly get to be a drain even on a gigabit network. Even without a roaming profile, anything that isn't the boring old secretarial style work will require a decent bandwidth. Most media work or CAD work can't really be done over your typical cable internet. Those who would most benefit from an "IT in the cloud" type of a service - small businesses - really can't afford having gigabit links to their premises. Neither do I think that the bandwidth from any particular Amazon instance is where it needs to be. Does Amazon run their instances on machines/blades with 10Gbit links?
family photos
sub 32GB market
My wife's camera has a 32GB SD card, and she fills it up regularly. We have terabytes of family photos, and it's just occasional shooting, she's not much into photography, and those aren't raw files either. I don't think it's a very unique kind of a situation.
They did have offsite backups, but the credentials required to wipe those backups were the same as the credentials needed to access the live site.
I'd go farther: if you're a small business, plan on dumping Micros-anything ASAP. If you can reuse the hardware with someone else's software, great, but that's only an added benefit. Micros is now spoiled goods. Everyone and their mother is doing POS these days, I think it's time it became commoditized as an open source project.
What is it with everyone and their dog that they think U.S. laws apply to citizens only? The fuck? Are the people who think that way really that dumb? Protip: law applies to anyone present within the jurisdiction of said law, unless a given law specifically states otherwise. The only group of people that is treated specially within the U.S. Constitution are native people ("Indians").
Steep learning curve would have been good. To have a steep learning curve means that you learn quickly. What they had wasn't a steep learning curve. It was a nearly flat one: you learn and learn and don't make much progress at all.
Improving the build quality is an act finely balanced between improvement and profitability. They can't halt everything while they make improvements. They have a production pipeline and can't continuously rebuild in-process launchers because then they'd not be launching for a few more years. What you see is their chosen locally optimal point between latency of a launch vs. launch throughput.
There's no such thing as antibiotic soap. There is antibacterial soap. Those are very different things. The antibacterial compounds can't be and aren't taken internally and have nothing to do with antibiotics.
Ah yes, the AC problem. I concur. Initially I'd restart the car while driving (no need for starter!) and it usually cleared it for another 20 minutes or so. Eventually I wired power through a manual switch directly to the A/C clutch to override the silly climate controller. I only managed to freeze the evaporator once or twice :)
One stereo problem is due to poor mechanical design of the front panel board, the traces crack and it doesn't respond to keypresses anymore. I repaired it twice before the car was totaled.
Shocks and engine mounts, yes, exhaust from the manifold back, yes. What a pain it was.
That 1st gen S40 was a nightmare. I owned it. It saved my life, but I don't miss it at all. All of them are lemons as far as I'm concerned. At least I got it for cheap. I don't think it was US made, though.
I agree, and I've in fact replaced the spark plugs in my 6 cyl. Volvo after 140k miles. The only discernible difference was that after starting it up, the idle was around 1200RPM whereas normally it would be 800 or so. The idle adaptation took care of it in a couple of minutes. Fuel mileage didn't change. The old plugs really looked like crap, with the platinum spikey electrode completely gone and the thin platinum wire being recessed about 0.2mm into the insulator. They still worked fine.
And all of the hundred or so chips that are in the car are made in Asia :) Without those chips you'd have a rather big paperweight :)
The quality of "stuff" made in China is usually exactly what the stateside customer orders. Cheap chinese toys aren't of poor quality because they're chinese, they're of poor quality because they are ordered to be so. If a U.S. customer is paying 10 cents for an injection-molded trinket, they get 10 cents worth of a trinket, no less, no more. Design for some of this stuff is still done outside of China, and if the design is crappy, you can't blame the factory for that. Heck, if the chinese design is crappy, then it's still approved by the stateside customer to be just that - a crappy design. The factory then executes the crappy design, and you get a crappy product. Sure,
Asia is pervaded by a cutthroat culture where there's no problem with lying to your customer if only it'll get you financially ahead. But that's just a small part of the problem. The biggest problem is the corporations that approve, order and sell those poorly-designed and poorly-made products. It's ultimately their explicit choice that things are so. We, the customers, pay for it.
Some of the problem with customers is simply their general disdain for everything technical. It seems to be a badge of honor for people not to be able to do the most basic of inquiry into the quality of what they are buying. A tiny bit of engineering fundamentals could be taught in high schools, for crying out loud, if for nothing else but to make people less sheepish when it comes to purchases.
Yeah, sure, you can be running it bare metal, if that's what you mean.
It's only realtime if you can get that GPU to do its calculations when driven from, you know, a real-time operating system. That is often a big problem, as some GPUs come with laughably incomplete specs and there's no way to use them without relying on OS-specific, non-realtime driver binary blobs. Raspberry PI SOC's reverse-engineer is slowly coming to a state that lets one its GPU to do truly realtime computation. It's one of a very few. Maybe Intel documents their integrated graphics sufficiently for use in a RTOS. Other than that it's probably all at the level where you can do proof-of-concepts and can't go beyond that.
Almost any off-the-shelf logic element that's easy to get those days is very fast and has risetimes on the order of 1-10ns. It is actually harder to buy slower logic families, they get discontinued left right and center. You might be flipping that gate at a 100kHz, but it can have harmonics going past 1GHz. People often forget that little detail and wonder why they get interference between "slow" circuits etc.
While you're mostly right when it comes to cookbook designs, once you are off the cookbook path you can certainly design circuits that have better than 0.5% accuracy over temperature and such. Yes, they are not trivial to implement, but it can be done, and once done it's pretty damn impressive in my book at least. This is somewhat valuable when your analog signal chain is part of a safety-critical system, where the software has to be validated and has such an overhead that it's actually often cheaper to do as much work as possible in the analog domain.
And heck, these days it's no biggie to buy an off-the-shelf op-amp that has worst-case offset spec better than 20 bits in 0-5V signal range. The stabilization circuits inside are discrete-time, but still analog.