"The number of people who want to wear a watch is extremely high"
LMAO. Really. Thanks for the laugh. I work for a university and get to interact with many people on a daily basis, and I use public transportation for most of my commute. I can count on one hand (and have fingers left over) the number of people wearing a watch.
Sounds like a local cultural thing where you live.
The wristwatch is currently a multi-billion dollar industry and (perhaps surprisingly) shows no sign of declining.
The number of people who want to wear a watch is extremely high. And those people like to switch watches often. It's a fashion product. No, the problem for the smartwatch industry is not that people buy few watches. The problem is that most people buy many watches in the $20-$150 range.
A smartwatch maker will have to create a $149 smartwatch that is fashionable by current trends and works great with both Android and iOS, then make a profit before the year is up and then start over again with a new fashion design for the next year.
The market for expensive luxury watches is big in terms of money, but there you are correct. The people who pay $200+ for a watch tend to want an heirloom product that will last for many years and have a value on the used market. Apple might perhaps be able to break into that market.
I think the switch to long upgrade cycles happened with the iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5s was still selling like crazy up until very recently when, I assume, Apple began switching the production lines over to the SE model. The iPhone 4s was probably the last iPhone that people replaced after 1-2 years. From now on iPhone owners will be on 2+ year replacement cycles.
On the Android side you still see a lot of people with the Galaxy S3. I doubt Samsung or anyone else will be able to make a phone that makes you want to replace your Galaxy S7 before it breaks or wears out.
Longevity is exactly why iPad sales are dropping. Almost everyone who wants an iPad and can afford the price has already bought one. The rate at which they sell iPads is now probably roughly inversely proportional to how long they last.
Apple has three options if they want to make more money: 1. Decrease the price, so that more people can afford iPads. This will increase sales, but probably not do much to increase profits. 2. Design new iPads for planned obsolescence. Put in a crappy battery, or an OLED screen that wears out quickly. 3. Introduce radical improvements to new models. This might be hard to do since the current iPads are pretty close to perfect.
But you know what? It's fine for a product to stay the same if the product is good. I'm sure Apple can think of other uses for their engineers and designers.
I don't know, but maybe they're working their way through a monster order of 16 GB flash chips that they placed years ago. Apple may have over-estimated back in 2013 or so how many iPhones and iPads they would sell.
Just wait until ads are spliced into video stream itself. No way to block that other than some pattern recognition scheme.
Yeah, I believe there are readily available algorithms. The tagging would be easy to crowdsource, a button in the browser that the user could click when they see an ad.
If the ad industry teams up with the major OS and hardware companies and come up with some crap that prevents user space software from accessing streaming video data directly, you could still use the microphone on your computer and run an algorithm on the audio.
I'm pretty sure someone messed up the numbers, because they don't make any sense.
The current MacBook Pro has an SSD that is only 10x slower than its RAM in terms of data rate (not in terms of latency of course). This new SSD would be 100x faster than the RAM, which would be pointless.
That part about everyone having a Swiss bank account sounds wonderful to me. I think every person deserves a little tax haven of their own. (IIRC Switzerland is no longer useful as a tax haven, but that's besides the point.)
I'm guessing that anyone who surprises us with a nuclear detonation, or more probably a radiological attack like a dirty bomb, is going to *tell us that they did it*, because you don't just set off nuclear bombs or dirty bombs and run away and go "tee hee".
It's not like someone had to figure out who flew the planes into the WTC towers, right?
The public is prone to believing all sorts of implausible things, like for instance that the WTC towers were destroyed by the president, who is a space lizard...
So the government did have to come up with evidence, even though it was obvious from the start that the perpetrators were Saudi Arabian Islamic radicals.
Your idea should be fairly easy to do the math on, if you have the data on the Merlin engine. Can the Merlin engine ramp up thrust fast enough to compensate for a rising ocean wave at the last moment? I doubt that data is publicly available, thought.
If you had data on the weight distribution of the first stage and the mechanical characteristics of the landing legs you could also run simulations to see if the stage would tip over and fall in heavy seas after a successful landing. Again, I doubt you can get that data unless you work for SpaceX.
It's really mostly about speed and kinetic energy.
The Blue Orbital New Shepard first stage and the Falcon 9 first stage are both suborbital vehicles, but the F9 is faster and way more energetic in terms of energy per unit of mass. Here are some numbers:
New Shepard first stage Speed at MECO: 1250 m/s Kinetic energy per kilogram: 0,8 MJ
Falcon 9 first stage, LEO launch Speed at MECO: 1650 m/s Kinetic energy per kilogram: 1,4 MJ
Falcon 9 first stage, geostationary launch: Speed at MECO: 2250 m/s Kinetic energy per kilogram: 2,5 MJ
The Falcon 9 first stage also has to navigate to its landing site, while the New Shepard just has to basically go straight up and down.
An actual orbital vehicle like the Falcon 9 second stage or the Dragon spacecraft travels at at least 8500 m/s and has 36 MJ/kg of kinetic energy when it begins entry. Landing a second stage of a rocket like the Falcon 9 will obviously be incredibly difficult.
Right now, both of the barges have horizontal thrusters that will keep the barges in 1 place. In that regard, it makes much easier for the craft to come down. However, the barges do not have vertical thrusters, so, they will pitch and roll in the same location. Without these, it is going to be impossible for these to land on the barge during heavy seas such as what was seen. On a calmer day, with say 1 m waves and under, the stages will do just fine.
If the ship itself is stationary in the horizontal plane then all they really need to do is to make sure the platform on to of the ship is horizontal and not moving in the z-axis.
They could probably mount the platform on top of some actuators that could compensate for the motion in the z-axis.
I haven't bought one in over a decade, and even my most hardcore gaming friends I have don't own one. Also, other than Microsoft employees, I have never met someone that has one of those XBox things.
Okay, but the PS4 is doing great. Maybe you should buy one of those. I hear there are roughly 20 good games for it by now.
The simple solution now that high school is practically mandatory is to have a handful of tracks that students can take:
1. STEM - basic curriculum plus advanced math and other subjects that prepare you for a STEM degree. 2. Social science - basic curriculum plus courses that prepare you for degrees in law, government science, etc. Enough math that you have a fighting chance in STEM if you change your mind later. 3. Art, creative writing, music - basic curriculum plus courses that prepare you for life as a struggling artist. Students should make sure to be rich, or hot enough to marry rich. 4. Sports - basic curriculum plus lots of sports. Students should make sure to be good at sports. Once injured, the student should switch tracks to... 5. Trade skills - basic curriculum plus training in a trade skill of the student's choice. The student will probably need additional trade school after graduating high school. Front end web coding and backend web coding should be two of the trade skills.
In general, if you detect that an input device has been tampered with you can save the user by disabling it, especially if you cut the power to it completely. A fingerprint sensor might have an embedded radio that phones home and sends any fingerprints that it captures to the attacker and an embedded battery to power the radio, so it's not 100% airtight.
An output device is much more serious. Imagine if someone switched your screen for one that contains an embedded computer and an embedded radio. The screen could potentially even detect and reject any warning messages that the system attempts to display.
Why the sudden implementation of gifs now? They're about 15 years too late... shouldn't they be pushing for gifv/webm?
Simple. It's because of smartphones and a particular technical limitation about gifs that makes them suitable for viewing on smartphones...
The thing about gifs is that they are unable to play sound, which means you can be 100% sure you can view one on your smartphone without risking notifying everyone within earshot that you're watching this or that video clip.
Yeah, I don't think Apple has anything to fear from low cost phones in general. Europeans who can't afford to drive a nice car will often splash out on fancy clothes, phones and other sub-$1000 status markers, the iPhone being one of the most popular ones.
Sure, if you can find an efficient way to power them. I guess the chargers / AC/DC-converters that phones ship with are probably horribly inefficient.
Also, what happens when your cluster of phones all try to access the Internet at the same time?
The total world production of smartphones and tablets is now over 1 billion per year and many of those units have multi-core chips. The number of CPU cores that get discarded or recycled each year will surely top a billion within a couple of years. That is a significant resource if you can find a way to use it efficiently.
Yeah, the best way would definitely be to organise an effort to set up dedicated hardware.
Most developing countries are probably capable of doing that, especially now that you can pretty much get a used smartphone for free. Build a smartphone app, get some used smartphones from a recycling center, install the app on all of them, put one smartphone on a stable surface (such as a basement floor) in every government office around the country and make sure the office workers know how to maintain the system (keep the phone connected to the charger, to the wifi network, restart the app if it crashes, etc).
But the article that we're discussing is about a research project at a university, which means that part of their job is to look into other ways of doing things. Maybe the crowdsourcing app could supplement the government-organised detection system.
I'm not an expert, but I imagine they would do at least these three things:
1. Correlate waveforms recorded by multiple phones in multiple places, i.e. look for a single fingerprint in the waveforms. If it's a bunch of different waveforms then it's probably not an earthquake. 2. For those waveforms that match the fingerprint: plot the velocity that the waves would have to be moving at in order to cause the waveforms in those particular places at those particular times and see if the speeds are consistent with the speed that earthquakes travel at and if the velocity vectors diverge from an epicentre. If the speeds are too low or too high or if the vectors do not diverge from an epicentre then it's not an earthquake, 3. Compare the waveforms with known waveforms from historical earthquakes, i.e. see if it looks anything like an earthquake.
In order to fool the system you would have to have multiple people in multiple places doing the same "silly walk" at just the right times.
Yeah, come to think of it, if you have a large enough installed base then you could just rely on the phones that are connected to a charger at any given time.
But yeah, you could also just take an old smartphone, run it off of a car battery and have the app keep the CPU and WiFi on at all times. The amount of data that you would send if you sent a 50 Hz signal without any compression is on the order of 2 GB per month.
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"The number of people who want to wear a watch is extremely high"
LMAO. Really. Thanks for the laugh. I work for a university and get to interact with many people on a daily basis, and I use public transportation for most of my commute. I can count on one hand (and have fingers left over) the number of people wearing a watch.
Sounds like a local cultural thing where you live.
The wristwatch is currently a multi-billion dollar industry and (perhaps surprisingly) shows no sign of declining.
The number of people who want to wear a watch is extremely high. And those people like to switch watches often. It's a fashion product. No, the problem for the smartwatch industry is not that people buy few watches. The problem is that most people buy many watches in the $20-$150 range.
A smartwatch maker will have to create a $149 smartwatch that is fashionable by current trends and works great with both Android and iOS, then make a profit before the year is up and then start over again with a new fashion design for the next year.
The market for expensive luxury watches is big in terms of money, but there you are correct. The people who pay $200+ for a watch tend to want an heirloom product that will last for many years and have a value on the used market. Apple might perhaps be able to break into that market.
I think the switch to long upgrade cycles happened with the iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5s was still selling like crazy up until very recently when, I assume, Apple began switching the production lines over to the SE model. The iPhone 4s was probably the last iPhone that people replaced after 1-2 years. From now on iPhone owners will be on 2+ year replacement cycles.
On the Android side you still see a lot of people with the Galaxy S3. I doubt Samsung or anyone else will be able to make a phone that makes you want to replace your Galaxy S7 before it breaks or wears out.
Longevity is exactly why iPad sales are dropping. Almost everyone who wants an iPad and can afford the price has already bought one. The rate at which they sell iPads is now probably roughly inversely proportional to how long they last.
Apple has three options if they want to make more money:
1. Decrease the price, so that more people can afford iPads. This will increase sales, but probably not do much to increase profits.
2. Design new iPads for planned obsolescence. Put in a crappy battery, or an OLED screen that wears out quickly.
3. Introduce radical improvements to new models. This might be hard to do since the current iPads are pretty close to perfect.
But you know what? It's fine for a product to stay the same if the product is good. I'm sure Apple can think of other uses for their engineers and designers.
I don't know, but maybe they're working their way through a monster order of 16 GB flash chips that they placed years ago. Apple may have over-estimated back in 2013 or so how many iPhones and iPads they would sell.
Just wait until ads are spliced into video stream itself. No way to block that other than some pattern recognition scheme.
Yeah, I believe there are readily available algorithms. The tagging would be easy to crowdsource, a button in the browser that the user could click when they see an ad.
If the ad industry teams up with the major OS and hardware companies and come up with some crap that prevents user space software from accessing streaming video data directly, you could still use the microphone on your computer and run an algorithm on the audio.
I'm pretty sure someone messed up the numbers, because they don't make any sense.
The current MacBook Pro has an SSD that is only 10x slower than its RAM in terms of data rate (not in terms of latency of course). This new SSD would be 100x faster than the RAM, which would be pointless.
That part about everyone having a Swiss bank account sounds wonderful to me. I think every person deserves a little tax haven of their own. (IIRC Switzerland is no longer useful as a tax haven, but that's besides the point.)
I'm guessing that anyone who surprises us with a nuclear detonation, or more probably a radiological attack like a dirty bomb, is going to *tell us that they did it*, because you don't just set off nuclear bombs or dirty bombs and run away and go "tee hee".
It's not like someone had to figure out who flew the planes into the WTC towers, right?
The public is prone to believing all sorts of implausible things, like for instance that the WTC towers were destroyed by the president, who is a space lizard...
So the government did have to come up with evidence, even though it was obvious from the start that the perpetrators were Saudi Arabian Islamic radicals.
Your idea should be fairly easy to do the math on, if you have the data on the Merlin engine. Can the Merlin engine ramp up thrust fast enough to compensate for a rising ocean wave at the last moment? I doubt that data is publicly available, thought.
If you had data on the weight distribution of the first stage and the mechanical characteristics of the landing legs you could also run simulations to see if the stage would tip over and fall in heavy seas after a successful landing. Again, I doubt you can get that data unless you work for SpaceX.
I suppose the Reddit moderators work there.
It's really mostly about speed and kinetic energy.
The Blue Orbital New Shepard first stage and the Falcon 9 first stage are both suborbital vehicles, but the F9 is faster and way more energetic in terms of energy per unit of mass. Here are some numbers:
New Shepard first stage
Speed at MECO: 1250 m/s
Kinetic energy per kilogram: 0,8 MJ
Falcon 9 first stage, LEO launch
Speed at MECO: 1650 m/s
Kinetic energy per kilogram: 1,4 MJ
Falcon 9 first stage, geostationary launch:
Speed at MECO: 2250 m/s
Kinetic energy per kilogram: 2,5 MJ
The Falcon 9 first stage also has to navigate to its landing site, while the New Shepard just has to basically go straight up and down.
An actual orbital vehicle like the Falcon 9 second stage or the Dragon spacecraft travels at at least 8500 m/s and has 36 MJ/kg of kinetic energy when it begins entry. Landing a second stage of a rocket like the Falcon 9 will obviously be incredibly difficult.
Right now, both of the barges have horizontal thrusters that will keep the barges in 1 place. In that regard, it makes much easier for the craft to come down. However, the barges do not have vertical thrusters, so, they will pitch and roll in the same location. Without these, it is going to be impossible for these to land on the barge during heavy seas such as what was seen. On a calmer day, with say 1 m waves and under, the stages will do just fine.
If the ship itself is stationary in the horizontal plane then all they really need to do is to make sure the platform on to of the ship is horizontal and not moving in the z-axis.
They could probably mount the platform on top of some actuators that could compensate for the motion in the z-axis.
I haven't bought one in over a decade, and even my most hardcore gaming friends I have don't own one. Also, other than Microsoft employees, I have never met someone that has one of those XBox things.
Okay, but the PS4 is doing great. Maybe you should buy one of those. I hear there are roughly 20 good games for it by now.
The simple solution now that high school is practically mandatory is to have a handful of tracks that students can take:
1. STEM - basic curriculum plus advanced math and other subjects that prepare you for a STEM degree.
2. Social science - basic curriculum plus courses that prepare you for degrees in law, government science, etc. Enough math that you have a fighting chance in STEM if you change your mind later.
3. Art, creative writing, music - basic curriculum plus courses that prepare you for life as a struggling artist. Students should make sure to be rich, or hot enough to marry rich.
4. Sports - basic curriculum plus lots of sports. Students should make sure to be good at sports. Once injured, the student should switch tracks to...
5. Trade skills - basic curriculum plus training in a trade skill of the student's choice. The student will probably need additional trade school after graduating high school. Front end web coding and backend web coding should be two of the trade skills.
1 developer for each 100,000 users. Coincidence...or aliens?
Either one of those, or a sudden resurgence of feudalism. You might want to join as a contributor just to be sure.
What's everyone else's experiences with smartphones?
I can communicate by text anywhere and everywhere... I am expected to do so, too.
I can use the web anywhere and everywhere.
I no longer get lost outdoors. I still get lost in large shopping malls and other large indoor places.
I always have a decent compact camera with me.
Podcasts, music and ebooks are invaluable whenever I have to sit and wait somewhere.
(Of course, you can get all of these benefits by carrying a tablet, like an iPad Mini or a small Android tablet with you.)
In general, if you detect that an input device has been tampered with you can save the user by disabling it, especially if you cut the power to it completely. A fingerprint sensor might have an embedded radio that phones home and sends any fingerprints that it captures to the attacker and an embedded battery to power the radio, so it's not 100% airtight.
An output device is much more serious. Imagine if someone switched your screen for one that contains an embedded computer and an embedded radio. The screen could potentially even detect and reject any warning messages that the system attempts to display.
Why the sudden implementation of gifs now? They're about 15 years too late... shouldn't they be pushing for gifv/webm?
Simple. It's because of smartphones and a particular technical limitation about gifs that makes them suitable for viewing on smartphones...
The thing about gifs is that they are unable to play sound, which means you can be 100% sure you can view one on your smartphone without risking notifying everyone within earshot that you're watching this or that video clip.
Yeah, I don't think Apple has anything to fear from low cost phones in general. Europeans who can't afford to drive a nice car will often splash out on fancy clothes, phones and other sub-$1000 status markers, the iPhone being one of the most popular ones.
Basic communication, e.i voice, text and email is arguably as important as those things that you list.
Sure, if you can find an efficient way to power them. I guess the chargers / AC/DC-converters that phones ship with are probably horribly inefficient.
Also, what happens when your cluster of phones all try to access the Internet at the same time?
The total world production of smartphones and tablets is now over 1 billion per year and many of those units have multi-core chips. The number of CPU cores that get discarded or recycled each year will surely top a billion within a couple of years. That is a significant resource if you can find a way to use it efficiently.
Yeah, the best way would definitely be to organise an effort to set up dedicated hardware.
Most developing countries are probably capable of doing that, especially now that you can pretty much get a used smartphone for free. Build a smartphone app, get some used smartphones from a recycling center, install the app on all of them, put one smartphone on a stable surface (such as a basement floor) in every government office around the country and make sure the office workers know how to maintain the system (keep the phone connected to the charger, to the wifi network, restart the app if it crashes, etc).
But the article that we're discussing is about a research project at a university, which means that part of their job is to look into other ways of doing things. Maybe the crowdsourcing app could supplement the government-organised detection system.
I'm not an expert, but I imagine they would do at least these three things:
1. Correlate waveforms recorded by multiple phones in multiple places, i.e. look for a single fingerprint in the waveforms. If it's a bunch of different waveforms then it's probably not an earthquake.
2. For those waveforms that match the fingerprint: plot the velocity that the waves would have to be moving at in order to cause the waveforms in those particular places at those particular times and see if the speeds are consistent with the speed that earthquakes travel at and if the velocity vectors diverge from an epicentre. If the speeds are too low or too high or if the vectors do not diverge from an epicentre then it's not an earthquake,
3. Compare the waveforms with known waveforms from historical earthquakes, i.e. see if it looks anything like an earthquake.
In order to fool the system you would have to have multiple people in multiple places doing the same "silly walk" at just the right times.
Yeah, come to think of it, if you have a large enough installed base then you could just rely on the phones that are connected to a charger at any given time.
But yeah, you could also just take an old smartphone, run it off of a car battery and have the app keep the CPU and WiFi on at all times. The amount of data that you would send if you sent a 50 Hz signal without any compression is on the order of 2 GB per month.