I haven't used Apple Maps for a while, but when they launched here it turned out that they'd bought maps from TomTom, who bought them from a company that they acquired in 1992 - and those maps hadn't been updated since. It was an interesting historical snapshot, and mostly buildings hadn't changed (a load of them have been here for the best part of 800 years, so only a few were obviously wrong), but a lot of pubs had changed names since then and so it was quite confusing.
Oh it was far worse than that. They integrated the database just in the most screwed up way. I mean 1992 is old, but 2 days after it launched I was in Cairns which was founded in 1876, and yet somehow Google maps managed to place it 3000km away in the middle of the pacific ocean.
I mean Apple has had some you're holding it wrong style bugs before, but this was the first product launch in the new premium Apple that made them an absolute laughing stock. Whole websites were dedicated to publishing stupid shit that Apple maps was coming up with.
...and to whom they are selling the data. At least I know Apple isn't monetizing the information about where I drive.
I can answer that for Google's behalf: No one. Google doesn't sell your data. They sell access to you. Selling their data would be like Coke starting to sell Coke-cola recipes.
The government should butt out. That would be neutrality. What you're proposing is government interference.
Oh dear. You do realise that the phrase "net neutrality" is about the "net" not the "government" right? I mean net is literally the first word. Speaking of I'm going to put a tool booth up in front of your driveway. You think no regulation should exist and public utilities should be free to the corporate whims? Well you can pay me for leaving your property.
Define successful: Successful in bankrupting its own drivers? Successful in creating a cab company where cabs don't show up? Successful in not having a fixed cost? Successful in not providing required services for minorities? Successful in letting disqualified drivers become chauffeurs?
Maybe you're more the subtle type: Successful in tracking and evading inspection services? Successful in breaching the privacy of users?
Speaking of I have yet to see a single new regulation in the EU levied against Uber. I have however seen plenty of cases where Uber has attempted to circumvent existing legislation including those for the protection and fair treatment of their *employees* and the protection of the users of their service.
It's popular because it's cheap. It's cheap because its skirting the law. And if all that sounds good to you, I have a bridge to sell you.... hmmm that's a slightly different use of that phrase.
Let's start with the top two for bloat: iTunes: Far better library management, linked to online store, plays video, support for Airplay and remote navigation of libraries, underlying framework to integrate with browsers. Windows Media Player: Huge underlying framework to integrate with the entire OS, video support, network streaming support.
Or pick something open source? VNC: You're on Slashdot you should know the capabilities of this one.
Maybe something more nerdy that a lot of geeks use? Foobar: Remote control, web server, proper output management, better customisability, better automation of music tagging, more file format support.
But in any case I can see you agree with my points. Since you agree that people seem to be happy using iTunes I will quote my original reply to you:
Faulty battery maybe, but not with age. If these old batteries had that problem with internal resistance you'd be googling "Why does my phone take 4 hours to charge."
And end of life lithium battery will still happily output 1 or 2 amps and phones generally don't draw that much, even if you're stressing them.
Cool down air like a giant fridge so you can separate it into core components. Specifically we need the pure O2 and sell most of the rest. But frankly it's not that rare of a machine. Many petrochemical sites use 20+MW compressors.
The largest one I've seen is part of a polyester manufacturing process where a 30MW compressor, steam turbine, motor/generator, and energy recovery expander train (with a few gearboxes inbetween) will during the startup process go from nothing to drawing 30MW from the grid, to exporting 20MW back to the grid all within half an hour.
I remember during commissioning we got a nasty letter from the government after telling them we won't export during the test phase, unfortunately someone wired the power meter backwards (and operations and the electrical department didn't communicate very well) so 20MW actually was being exported to the grid. It wasn't until they increased the load on the compressor they noticed the number didn't move in the expected direction:-|
Yes and no. The narratives are based on who bought something for what. In this case it was one state buying the battery to fix it's own grid stability issues, and inadvertently their system kicked in to protect the grid when a plant tripped on the far side of the next state over despite not actually being contracted to do so.
The real point (beyond the usual/. 'Ol Musky' blowing) is that apparently Australia was in spinning reserve violation when this happened. Your supposed to have enough power spinning to cover you single biggest unit/transmission line falling over (as they say in Australia).
The SA power supply is living pretty much on a permanent import, as is TAS. It's no secret that in the major push to adopt green and shutdown coal some states of Australia have a major shortage of baseload supply. Ultimately the 2016 outage was caused due to a grid desynchronisation that was the result of one of the transmission line falling over. This is the short term (100 day as opposed to 2+ years) "solution" to their problem.
Most power supplies I've seen, and made, will accept anything from below 50 to above 60Hz.
No one in the industry cares about your small consumer electronics. An industrial pump suddenly speeding up or slowing down on the other hand is a big frigging deal, as is fluctuating frequency on anything designed not to handle it (think fridge compressors).
But all of that is irrelevant since the extremely tight spec on this is nothing to do the consumers and everything to do with ensuring that 2 giant coal fired power stations are able to provide voltages without huge fluctuation in demand. Grid stability is the key here, not powering your laptop.
And how well did that work in 2016? The answer was it didn't, and on top of a power line going down there was suddenly a loss of 300MW of wind capacity due to stability issues which lead to an overload of the Hayward interconnector which suddenly lossed a further 800MW at which point the system could no longer self sustain and everyone tripped offline.
A car analogy would be fitting here. You have a constant throttle as you drive in a straight line. When you get to a hill the car and engine RPM slows down unless you change the throttle. The car won't respond instantly to a change in throttle but rather takes time to get back to the speed you're trying to achieve. When you get to the end of the hill you may notice you start going faster, and take your foot off the gas.
If you have many different cars with different power ratings and different drivers behind the wheel, trying to keep them at the same speed is difficult.
So you introduce a battery: i.e. something which reduces the slope of the hill.
Demand and supply upsets are presented mostly via deviation from ideal frequency. When there is a slow increase in demand it can present loads on generators and overloads in this scenario is what causes those generators to trip on overload. The energy market can predict these loads quite adequately and the national regulator makes requests of the generators to intervene appropriately. The grid is stable because it can be predicted for small loads (people in large groups tend to do the same thing day after day), and for large loads the suppliers needed to be contacted (e.g. we needed to call the provider every time we wanted to start our 20MW compressor)
During a grid upset i.e. a major load suddenly starting or stopping without warning because something tripped, caught fire, etc, what you see is the generators with massive amounts of inertia taking their time to change. A large coal fired turbine could take several minutes to ramp up steam power to continue to spin at the same speed, likewise with ramping down. A small gas turbine can do it in a matter of several seconds. During these time there is a frequency fluctuation across the grid. If that is serious enough the grid could destabilise to the point where protection systems kick in and trip off the generators. This is needed because frequency response is generally much faster than power based responses for machinery protection.
We had a similar such event when our provider tripped an upstream substation and didn't send us an intertrip signal. Our pathetic little 40MW of generating power suddenly was left trying to power 2 suburbs, a refinery, and a busy international airport. There the turbines suddenly got really loud and tripped less than a second later on under-frequency. Had we had a reasonable size battery chances are we would have ridden through until the battery started failing and then tripped on overpower.
To get to the point: The Tesla battery will do a few things: 30% of it's capacity is dedicated to frequency management, likely control around 50Hz with a small deadband. The remaining 70% is on energy demand and lags much further behind (probably responding within seconds rather than milliseconds) and this is likely under the control of the national energy market as to when it comes in and doesn't.
It was designed to deal with situations with downed lines / plants in South Australia, to keep the lights on there. It wasn't supposed to take over the work from standby plants halfway across the country. That it technically can should surprise nobody. But that's not what it was purchased to do.
Err no. From the onset it had 3 primary goals and even has a strategic reserve in it's capacity (30MWH of it's capacity to be precise) dedicated to frequency management. Heck it's first job was peaking a day before it was even put in service. The only thing that stunned people is just how quickly it responded. There's a good summary of what it was designed and purchased to do here: http://reneweconomy.com.au/wha...
As for your comment on powerlines, you misunderstand the original problem and the original tweet. South Australia didn't lose power because a major downed powerline. They lose power because the major downed powerline caused a sudden upset across the grid resulting in complete desynchronisation between major wind providers as well as interconnectors to Victoria. The power demand last year could have been met with the available supply even with the downed HV line to The battery simply isn't capable of keeping the lights on by itself nor was that the reason it was bought. It provides much needed stability on a grid that has rushed in full steam to adopt non-baseload power.
Yeah but even that isn't true now. Unless you count a calculator which can't add properly functionality that apple shouldn't let you do, or autocorrect that inserts garbage likewise.
I used to think that about Microsoft. Right until their Surface line. I actually have my desktop running the latest version of Windows 10, but on my Surface Pro... that one is ticked to run the Current Branch for Business. It seems Microsoft put just as much effort into testing their own hardware as everyone else's: i.e. let the insiders do the bug checking. Unfortunately few insiders seem to run on Surfaces.
For over one year my SP3 would refuse to wake properly when the SP4 keyboard was attached and folded back into the tablet position. This was fixed (probably by accident) when the new SP (SP5 but who needs numbers right?) keyboard was released forcing Microsoft to write a new driver.
The latest version of Windows 10 locks up the on-screen keyboard if I am in vertical orientation and I open the start menu.
It's like super basic things don't get checked even on hardware where they 100% control the entire chain, and that includes BIOS, Firmware, Drivers, Hardware and Software.
That's a pretty low aim for a premium product. To be clear no one is complaining about Apple not being the best, they are complaining about it not being anywhere as good as it used to be.... But really it's arguable that the latest iOS works better than anything else. It reeks of not having been tested.
It's easiest to think of kernel density estimation as a smoothing algorithm that removes outliers and peaks from statistical data. The Geekbench score is a unitless performance metric used to compare various devices running Geekbench.
What these graphs show is that iPhone 6 running 10.2.0 (implying relatively new devices) all performed in consistently the same way. iPhone 6 11.2.0 (implying not as new devices) show distinct performance groups. Quite critically the fact that there are multiple peaks rather than a smooth trend highlights that the phones appear to be degrading in performance in discrete steps. Note the relative size of peaks on each graph related to the assumed age span of these devices given model and OS version.
Seriously, if you are trying to explain something to me using charts, you're going to have to make it clear what in the flying fuck you are charting.
You rather ask on Slashdot than click the links in the article that explained the statistical methods? Or you could scroll to the bottom of the page for the conclusions.
It means your battery probably needs a screwdriver to swap out instead of just popping open the case
Does it? My case (with gasket) just pops open, and is IP rated. Though I imagine there is a risk if I drop the phone in a pudle that the case may pop off, but really out of the many hundreds of times I've dropped it, it has yet to come apart. (Or crack for that matter *touches wood*)
Batteries don't just have less of a charge when they get older, their peak draw also diminishes.
While you're correct in the physics you're entirely wrong in the application. There's no reason even a 5 year old lithium battery can't provide enough current to keep a phone running at 100% CPU. The internal resistance just doesn't increase enough to matter for a phone.
I often see shit like, "Ten Habits I Have QUIT to Get More Done," and I think, "Maybe quit writing posts like this."
Why? How would it make the person more productive if they stopped doing their job of writing articles that get page hits and likes? Is this guy too stupid to realise that these articles exist not because someone wants to share some amazing fact about their life, but rather that they want to put food on their table?
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't used Apple Maps for a while, but when they launched here it turned out that they'd bought maps from TomTom, who bought them from a company that they acquired in 1992 - and those maps hadn't been updated since. It was an interesting historical snapshot, and mostly buildings hadn't changed (a load of them have been here for the best part of 800 years, so only a few were obviously wrong), but a lot of pubs had changed names since then and so it was quite confusing.
Oh it was far worse than that. They integrated the database just in the most screwed up way. I mean 1992 is old, but 2 days after it launched I was in Cairns which was founded in 1876, and yet somehow Google maps managed to place it 3000km away in the middle of the pacific ocean.
I mean Apple has had some you're holding it wrong style bugs before, but this was the first product launch in the new premium Apple that made them an absolute laughing stock. Whole websites were dedicated to publishing stupid shit that Apple maps was coming up with.
...and to whom they are selling the data. At least I know Apple isn't monetizing the information about where I drive.
I can answer that for Google's behalf: No one. Google doesn't sell your data. They sell access to you. Selling their data would be like Coke starting to sell Coke-cola recipes.
The government should butt out. That would be neutrality. What you're proposing is government interference.
Oh dear. You do realise that the phrase "net neutrality" is about the "net" not the "government" right? I mean net is literally the first word. Speaking of I'm going to put a tool booth up in front of your driveway. You think no regulation should exist and public utilities should be free to the corporate whims? Well you can pay me for leaving your property.
Define successful:
Successful in bankrupting its own drivers?
Successful in creating a cab company where cabs don't show up?
Successful in not having a fixed cost?
Successful in not providing required services for minorities?
Successful in letting disqualified drivers become chauffeurs?
Maybe you're more the subtle type:
Successful in tracking and evading inspection services?
Successful in breaching the privacy of users?
Speaking of I have yet to see a single new regulation in the EU levied against Uber. I have however seen plenty of cases where Uber has attempted to circumvent existing legislation including those for the protection and fair treatment of their *employees* and the protection of the users of their service.
It's popular because it's cheap. It's cheap because its skirting the law. And if all that sounds good to you, I have a bridge to sell you .... hmmm that's a slightly different use of that phrase.
What other commonly used ones do you want?
Let's start with the top two for bloat:
iTunes: Far better library management, linked to online store, plays video, support for Airplay and remote navigation of libraries, underlying framework to integrate with browsers.
Windows Media Player: Huge underlying framework to integrate with the entire OS, video support, network streaming support.
Or pick something open source?
VNC: You're on Slashdot you should know the capabilities of this one.
Maybe something more nerdy that a lot of geeks use?
Foobar: Remote control, web server, proper output management, better customisability, better automation of music tagging, more file format support.
But in any case I can see you agree with my points. Since you agree that people seem to be happy using iTunes I will quote my original reply to you:
LOL, saving RAM in this day and age?
Faulty battery maybe, but not with age. If these old batteries had that problem with internal resistance you'd be googling "Why does my phone take 4 hours to charge."
And end of life lithium battery will still happily output 1 or 2 amps and phones generally don't draw that much, even if you're stressing them.
The problem with using a google for symptoms to prove a point is: https://imgur.com/gallery/fFgF...
Cool down air like a giant fridge so you can separate it into core components. Specifically we need the pure O2 and sell most of the rest. But frankly it's not that rare of a machine. Many petrochemical sites use 20+MW compressors.
The largest one I've seen is part of a polyester manufacturing process where a 30MW compressor, steam turbine, motor/generator, and energy recovery expander train (with a few gearboxes inbetween) will during the startup process go from nothing to drawing 30MW from the grid, to exporting 20MW back to the grid all within half an hour.
I remember during commissioning we got a nasty letter from the government after telling them we won't export during the test phase, unfortunately someone wired the power meter backwards (and operations and the electrical department didn't communicate very well) so 20MW actually was being exported to the grid. It wasn't until they increased the load on the compressor they noticed the number didn't move in the expected direction :-|
Remember the failure of the Amphi-car? it was neither a very good boat nor a very good car...
And yet far better than driving a cat that toes a boat that can carry a car across water.
Yes and no. The narratives are based on who bought something for what. In this case it was one state buying the battery to fix it's own grid stability issues, and inadvertently their system kicked in to protect the grid when a plant tripped on the far side of the next state over despite not actually being contracted to do so.
The real point (beyond the usual /. 'Ol Musky' blowing) is that apparently Australia was in spinning reserve violation when this happened. Your supposed to have enough power spinning to cover you single biggest unit/transmission line falling over (as they say in Australia).
The SA power supply is living pretty much on a permanent import, as is TAS. It's no secret that in the major push to adopt green and shutdown coal some states of Australia have a major shortage of baseload supply. Ultimately the 2016 outage was caused due to a grid desynchronisation that was the result of one of the transmission line falling over. This is the short term (100 day as opposed to 2+ years) "solution" to their problem.
Most power supplies I've seen, and made, will accept anything from below 50 to above 60Hz.
No one in the industry cares about your small consumer electronics. An industrial pump suddenly speeding up or slowing down on the other hand is a big frigging deal, as is fluctuating frequency on anything designed not to handle it (think fridge compressors).
But all of that is irrelevant since the extremely tight spec on this is nothing to do the consumers and everything to do with ensuring that 2 giant coal fired power stations are able to provide voltages without huge fluctuation in demand. Grid stability is the key here, not powering your laptop.
And how well did that work in 2016? The answer was it didn't, and on top of a power line going down there was suddenly a loss of 300MW of wind capacity due to stability issues which lead to an overload of the Hayward interconnector which suddenly lossed a further 800MW at which point the system could no longer self sustain and everyone tripped offline.
4 seconds is too slow on a modern grid.
Trying to remember why it wouldn't have worked.
It didn't work because people didn't understand the cause of the 2016 outage, nor what this system was purchased to do.
A car analogy would be fitting here. You have a constant throttle as you drive in a straight line. When you get to a hill the car and engine RPM slows down unless you change the throttle. The car won't respond instantly to a change in throttle but rather takes time to get back to the speed you're trying to achieve. When you get to the end of the hill you may notice you start going faster, and take your foot off the gas.
If you have many different cars with different power ratings and different drivers behind the wheel, trying to keep them at the same speed is difficult.
So you introduce a battery: i.e. something which reduces the slope of the hill.
Demand and supply upsets are presented mostly via deviation from ideal frequency. When there is a slow increase in demand it can present loads on generators and overloads in this scenario is what causes those generators to trip on overload. The energy market can predict these loads quite adequately and the national regulator makes requests of the generators to intervene appropriately. The grid is stable because it can be predicted for small loads (people in large groups tend to do the same thing day after day), and for large loads the suppliers needed to be contacted (e.g. we needed to call the provider every time we wanted to start our 20MW compressor)
During a grid upset i.e. a major load suddenly starting or stopping without warning because something tripped, caught fire, etc, what you see is the generators with massive amounts of inertia taking their time to change. A large coal fired turbine could take several minutes to ramp up steam power to continue to spin at the same speed, likewise with ramping down. A small gas turbine can do it in a matter of several seconds. During these time there is a frequency fluctuation across the grid. If that is serious enough the grid could destabilise to the point where protection systems kick in and trip off the generators. This is needed because frequency response is generally much faster than power based responses for machinery protection.
We had a similar such event when our provider tripped an upstream substation and didn't send us an intertrip signal. Our pathetic little 40MW of generating power suddenly was left trying to power 2 suburbs, a refinery, and a busy international airport. There the turbines suddenly got really loud and tripped less than a second later on under-frequency. Had we had a reasonable size battery chances are we would have ridden through until the battery started failing and then tripped on overpower.
To get to the point: The Tesla battery will do a few things: 30% of it's capacity is dedicated to frequency management, likely control around 50Hz with a small deadband. The remaining 70% is on energy demand and lags much further behind (probably responding within seconds rather than milliseconds) and this is likely under the control of the national energy market as to when it comes in and doesn't.
It was designed to deal with situations with downed lines / plants in South Australia, to keep the lights on there. It wasn't supposed to take over the work from standby plants halfway across the country. That it technically can should surprise nobody. But that's not what it was purchased to do.
Err no. From the onset it had 3 primary goals and even has a strategic reserve in it's capacity (30MWH of it's capacity to be precise) dedicated to frequency management. Heck it's first job was peaking a day before it was even put in service. The only thing that stunned people is just how quickly it responded. There's a good summary of what it was designed and purchased to do here: http://reneweconomy.com.au/wha...
As for your comment on powerlines, you misunderstand the original problem and the original tweet. South Australia didn't lose power because a major downed powerline. They lose power because the major downed powerline caused a sudden upset across the grid resulting in complete desynchronisation between major wind providers as well as interconnectors to Victoria. The power demand last year could have been met with the available supply even with the downed HV line to The battery simply isn't capable of keeping the lights on by itself nor was that the reason it was bought. It provides much needed stability on a grid that has rushed in full steam to adopt non-baseload power.
Yeah but even that isn't true now. Unless you count a calculator which can't add properly functionality that apple shouldn't let you do, or autocorrect that inserts garbage likewise.
I used to think that about Microsoft. Right until their Surface line. I actually have my desktop running the latest version of Windows 10, but on my Surface Pro ... that one is ticked to run the Current Branch for Business. It seems Microsoft put just as much effort into testing their own hardware as everyone else's: i.e. let the insiders do the bug checking. Unfortunately few insiders seem to run on Surfaces.
For over one year my SP3 would refuse to wake properly when the SP4 keyboard was attached and folded back into the tablet position. This was fixed (probably by accident) when the new SP (SP5 but who needs numbers right?) keyboard was released forcing Microsoft to write a new driver.
The latest version of Windows 10 locks up the on-screen keyboard if I am in vertical orientation and I open the start menu.
It's like super basic things don't get checked even on hardware where they 100% control the entire chain, and that includes BIOS, Firmware, Drivers, Hardware and Software.
That's a pretty low aim for a premium product. To be clear no one is complaining about Apple not being the best, they are complaining about it not being anywhere as good as it used to be. ... But really it's arguable that the latest iOS works better than anything else. It reeks of not having been tested.
It's easiest to think of kernel density estimation as a smoothing algorithm that removes outliers and peaks from statistical data. The Geekbench score is a unitless performance metric used to compare various devices running Geekbench.
What these graphs show is that iPhone 6 running 10.2.0 (implying relatively new devices) all performed in consistently the same way. iPhone 6 11.2.0 (implying not as new devices) show distinct performance groups. Quite critically the fact that there are multiple peaks rather than a smooth trend highlights that the phones appear to be degrading in performance in discrete steps. Note the relative size of peaks on each graph related to the assumed age span of these devices given model and OS version.
Seriously, if you are trying to explain something to me using charts, you're going to have to make it clear what in the flying fuck you are charting.
You rather ask on Slashdot than click the links in the article that explained the statistical methods? Or you could scroll to the bottom of the page for the conclusions.
It means your battery probably needs a screwdriver to swap out instead of just popping open the case
Does it? My case (with gasket) just pops open, and is IP rated. Though I imagine there is a risk if I drop the phone in a pudle that the case may pop off, but really out of the many hundreds of times I've dropped it, it has yet to come apart. (Or crack for that matter *touches wood*)
Batteries don't just have less of a charge when they get older, their peak draw also diminishes.
While you're correct in the physics you're entirely wrong in the application. There's no reason even a 5 year old lithium battery can't provide enough current to keep a phone running at 100% CPU. The internal resistance just doesn't increase enough to matter for a phone.
Just don't try and jump start a car with it.
I often see shit like, "Ten Habits I Have QUIT to Get More Done," and I think, "Maybe quit writing posts like this."
Why? How would it make the person more productive if they stopped doing their job of writing articles that get page hits and likes? Is this guy too stupid to realise that these articles exist not because someone wants to share some amazing fact about their life, but rather that they want to put food on their table?
Batteries swell when they worn out. And they wear out faster at higher temperature.
If they do this in 2 days then it is still a phone design flaw.
If Microsoft was to be truly fair, Facebook's apps would get yanked from the Microsoft Store as well.
Microsoft are being fair like Apple is being fair.
"We run an open ecosystem* providing you don't compete with us with any feature."
"*Terms and conditions subject to change whenever I feel like it"