In the Netherlands, plowing is rare enough that it won't be a significant factor. Snow deep enough to need plowing occurs maybe 1-2 times per winter, and many winters we don't have snow at all. Mostly the roads are just salted.
The biggest source of micro'plastics' from roads is from tire and brake wear. Tarmac roads also produce microscopic particles from road wear.
Much of this debris collects around the roadside, where the next rainfall will sweep it into the sewer system. The Dutch sewer system is very well equipped to filter out small particles.
I don't buy DRM as the reason to remove the headphone jack. What did Apple (who started this no-jack idiocy) do a few years ago? Going against the entire music industry at the time, it removed the DRM from all music in iTunes.
You're coming dangerously close to saying scientist aren't allowed to speak about their work in public until it's in large-scale production.
Sadly, news outlets are bad at handling the time between the scientific breakthrough and its practical application. If you were to track the battery breakthough stories thorougly, I'd bet you'd find many of them are in use right now. The initial claim of '3x better than existing batteries' has been found to have drawbacks ("if we do that, batteries fail after 10 cycles") but the technology can be used to increase capacity by 30% while increasing the number of charge cycles by 10%. Now the numbers aren't so headline-grabbing anymore, but they're still a useful improvement over the previous generation battery. Where else do you think incremental improvements come from?
My '10x' estimate was low, it's closer to 20x for the last 30 years. Current Li-ions have twice the storage density of those early ones. And going from 100 to 200 Wh/kg is a much bigger deal than the previous doubling.
So the bung argument is still "woe is us, no battery improvement research ever reaches the market".
If it were all bullshit, we'd still be on lead-acid batteries. In the last 30 years, we've gone from lead-acid via NiCd and NiMH to Li-ion, with many improvements in each from the time they were first introduced until the time they were superseded. Battery capacity has increased by a factor of at least 10. Outside the bubble of the semiconductor industry and Moore's Law, that's massive progress.
Yes, not every breakthrough makes it into production. But there are plenty that do.
Also, we're not the Wall Street Times, this is a technology site. I want to know about interesting technological developments, and I don't want to limit my knowledge to just the ones that reach mainstream production.
1000 m resolution may have been the old standard for Antarctic maps, but first-world countries have long had much better maps than that. In the Netherlands, pretty much the whole country has been surveyed with an accuracy better than 1 m (by the Kadaster, the office that tracks land ownership).
Solar power does not allow for this because they require things light, spread out, and therefore difficult to defend.
Solar and wind are spread out, and therefore difficult to attack with more than local impact. To get the same impact as shutting down a single power station, you'd have to destroy thousands of windmills or a city's worth of houses.
The most annoying issue about conference calls using Skype and/or a speakerphone: when you start speaking, audio from the other end is cut off, which leads to a lot of collisions and garbled words.
Reflections/glare are annoying and create trouble. Lack of light (to the point where your monitor is the brightest light source in the room) is also problematic and can generate headaches, fatigue etc. And the other way round (having your desk face the window, so your background is much brighter than the monitor) isn't nice either. The best solution is even illumination levels, and everything set up to eradicate glare.
The vehicle will be produced on the same line as the company's C-Class Saloon and Estate, GLC and GLC Coupe.... "Our decision to produce electric vehicles on the same line as models with combustion engines enables us to respond flexibly to demand and use plant capacity to best effect.
In case you don't realize, the GLC and C-class are related, but rather different vehicles (completely different body, lots of commonality internally). The $12B figure is from TFA.
Mercedes all said they are just getting start and aren't dedicating a factory because they don't want to over-commit to the market.
They aren't dedicating a factory because they don't need to. They've got an assembly line that's flexible enough to produce two very different vehicles in an arbitrary ratio. This is a superior solution to a dedicated production line. And they can roll out this flexibility to other assembly lines when those are tooled up for new vehicles, so in a few years they'll be able to do half their total production as EVs. Make no mistake, Mercedes may just be getting started, but this won't be a tentative, small-scale effort. A $12B investment is huge.
In high school, we used to run calculator races (usually timing how long it took to calculate 99!). Some cheaper calculators would buzz audibly under load, or take noticeably longer when the device was cold. Later in college I got an HP 42 which was so much faster than everything else I got banned from competition.
Knowing how Lego specifies their bricks, "exactly" is the right word. For a long time, Lego manufacturing used the tightest tolerances on plastic products in the world (on the order of 2 micrometer, IIRC). They've since been overtaken, but this is the reason 40 year-old Lego bricks still work perfectly, while clone products tend to fall apart. Lego won't change to new plastics until they get this right.
I like having permanent summer time. Around here, that means the sun is at its highest around 14:00, giving a very nice skew of daylight away from the very early morning (when I'm asleep) and towards the evening (where it's useful).
File Explorer is worse than ever. The last major update fucked up file associations for images (to promote their crappy new image program). A few weeks ago I got upgrade nags even though I'm running the corporate edition where you're supposed to be able to set time blocks where nagging doesn't happen. Windows 10 is a pile of shit and Microsoft is playing around with themes.
Apple knows this and has built its charging circuits with this in mind. When you plug in a Mac or iOS device, it will charge until full, then charging stops. Then, as long as the device is plugged in, it runs on mains power. When the battery self-discharges to 95% (after a few days), charging starts again. This means the device can be left plugged in indefinitely.
This has been common knowledge among device makers for a decade or more. Every laptop uses a variation on this scheme (and has to, because lots of laptops live their life being plugged in 95% of the time).
We had Studer PR99s. The brakes were probably worn - dynamic braking (by switching from REW to FF) was faster than just hitting STOP. These decks lifted the heads automatically (or rather, they lifted the tape away from the stationary heads), but still there were noticeable grooves in the heads because the decks were used constantly.
About 25 years ago, I worked for a radio station as a sound engineer. They used open-reel tape decks as their main recording medium, and we had loads of Ampex 456 reels in use. Now most tape manufacturers sold their tape on plastic reels. Ampex however used reels with aluminium flanges. Because we were always in a hurry when doing live radio, we engineers had the habit of braking the reels by hand when rewinding them. When doing that on a plastic spool, the worst that could happen was overheated fingers from the friction. On the Ampex reels however you had to beware of the 3 large holes in the flange; if you caught one of those, the aluminium would cut right through your fingers.
Slashdot Mirror
In the Netherlands, plowing is rare enough that it won't be a significant factor. Snow deep enough to need plowing occurs maybe 1-2 times per winter, and many winters we don't have snow at all. Mostly the roads are just salted.
The biggest source of micro'plastics' from roads is from tire and brake wear. Tarmac roads also produce microscopic particles from road wear.
Much of this debris collects around the roadside, where the next rainfall will sweep it into the sewer system. The Dutch sewer system is very well equipped to filter out small particles.
In the Netherlands, gutters are connected to the sewer system, which has rigorous filtering before any water is allowed out.
I don't buy DRM as the reason to remove the headphone jack. What did Apple (who started this no-jack idiocy) do a few years ago? Going against the entire music industry at the time, it removed the DRM from all music in iTunes.
Did you see the graph I linked to? In the last 10 years we went from 100 Wh/kg to 200 Wh/kg, i.e. more advancement than in the 50 years before.
You're coming dangerously close to saying scientist aren't allowed to speak about their work in public until it's in large-scale production.
Sadly, news outlets are bad at handling the time between the scientific breakthrough and its practical application. If you were to track the battery breakthough stories thorougly, I'd bet you'd find many of them are in use right now. The initial claim of '3x better than existing batteries' has been found to have drawbacks ("if we do that, batteries fail after 10 cycles") but the technology can be used to increase capacity by 30% while increasing the number of charge cycles by 10%. Now the numbers aren't so headline-grabbing anymore, but they're still a useful improvement over the previous generation battery. Where else do you think incremental improvements come from?
My '10x' estimate was low, it's closer to 20x for the last 30 years. Current Li-ions have twice the storage density of those early ones. And going from 100 to 200 Wh/kg is a much bigger deal than the previous doubling.
So the bung argument is still "woe is us, no battery improvement research ever reaches the market".
If it were all bullshit, we'd still be on lead-acid batteries. In the last 30 years, we've gone from lead-acid via NiCd and NiMH to Li-ion, with many improvements in each from the time they were first introduced until the time they were superseded. Battery capacity has increased by a factor of at least 10. Outside the bubble of the semiconductor industry and Moore's Law, that's massive progress.
Yes, not every breakthrough makes it into production. But there are plenty that do.
Also, we're not the Wall Street Times, this is a technology site. I want to know about interesting technological developments, and I don't want to limit my knowledge to just the ones that reach mainstream production.
1000 m resolution may have been the old standard for Antarctic maps, but first-world countries have long had much better maps than that. In the Netherlands, pretty much the whole country has been surveyed with an accuracy better than 1 m (by the Kadaster, the office that tracks land ownership).
Solar power does not allow for this because they require things light, spread out, and therefore difficult to defend.
Solar and wind are spread out, and therefore difficult to attack with more than local impact. To get the same impact as shutting down a single power station, you'd have to destroy thousands of windmills or a city's worth of houses.
The most annoying issue about conference calls using Skype and/or a speakerphone: when you start speaking, audio from the other end is cut off, which leads to a lot of collisions and garbled words.
Reflections/glare are annoying and create trouble. Lack of light (to the point where your monitor is the brightest light source in the room) is also problematic and can generate headaches, fatigue etc. And the other way round (having your desk face the window, so your background is much brighter than the monitor) isn't nice either.
The best solution is even illumination levels, and everything set up to eradicate glare.
Citation
The vehicle will be produced on the same line as the company's C-Class Saloon and Estate, GLC and GLC Coupe. ...
"Our decision to produce electric vehicles on the same line as models with combustion engines enables us to respond flexibly to demand and use plant capacity to best effect.
In case you don't realize, the GLC and C-class are related, but rather different vehicles (completely different body, lots of commonality internally). The $12B figure is from TFA.
Mercedes all said they are just getting start and aren't dedicating a factory because they don't want to over-commit to the market.
They aren't dedicating a factory because they don't need to. They've got an assembly line that's flexible enough to produce two very different vehicles in an arbitrary ratio. This is a superior solution to a dedicated production line.
And they can roll out this flexibility to other assembly lines when those are tooled up for new vehicles, so in a few years they'll be able to do half their total production as EVs. Make no mistake, Mercedes may just be getting started, but this won't be a tentative, small-scale effort. A $12B investment is huge.
In high school, we used to run calculator races (usually timing how long it took to calculate 99!). Some cheaper calculators would buzz audibly under load, or take noticeably longer when the device was cold.
Later in college I got an HP 42 which was so much faster than everything else I got banned from competition.
Knowing how Lego specifies their bricks, "exactly" is the right word. For a long time, Lego manufacturing used the tightest tolerances on plastic products in the world (on the order of 2 micrometer, IIRC). They've since been overtaken, but this is the reason 40 year-old Lego bricks still work perfectly, while clone products tend to fall apart. Lego won't change to new plastics until they get this right.
I like having permanent summer time. Around here, that means the sun is at its highest around 14:00, giving a very nice skew of daylight away from the very early morning (when I'm asleep) and towards the evening (where it's useful).
File Explorer is worse than ever. The last major update fucked up file associations for images (to promote their crappy new image program). A few weeks ago I got upgrade nags even though I'm running the corporate edition where you're supposed to be able to set time blocks where nagging doesn't happen. Windows 10 is a pile of shit and Microsoft is playing around with themes.
no, you bribe the police officer and then put the bribe in your tax statement as a deductible.
If you've ever wanted a particle accelerator on your desk, and a CRT monitor just doesn't do it for you, I found just the thing.
Apple knows this and has built its charging circuits with this in mind. When you plug in a Mac or iOS device, it will charge until full, then charging stops. Then, as long as the device is plugged in, it runs on mains power. When the battery self-discharges to 95% (after a few days), charging starts again. This means the device can be left plugged in indefinitely.
This has been common knowledge among device makers for a decade or more. Every laptop uses a variation on this scheme (and has to, because lots of laptops live their life being plugged in 95% of the time).
We had Studer PR99s. The brakes were probably worn - dynamic braking (by switching from REW to FF) was faster than just hitting STOP.
These decks lifted the heads automatically (or rather, they lifted the tape away from the stationary heads), but still there were noticeable grooves in the heads because the decks were used constantly.
About 25 years ago, I worked for a radio station as a sound engineer. They used open-reel tape decks as their main recording medium, and we had loads of Ampex 456 reels in use.
Now most tape manufacturers sold their tape on plastic reels. Ampex however used reels with aluminium flanges. Because we were always in a hurry when doing live radio, we engineers had the habit of braking the reels by hand when rewinding them. When doing that on a plastic spool, the worst that could happen was overheated fingers from the friction. On the Ampex reels however you had to beware of the 3 large holes in the flange; if you caught one of those, the aluminium would cut right through your fingers.
is a vast overestimate of the sign's importance. It's nothing more than a bloody advertisement, and we need fewer ads in our life, not more.
At one point, Apple had a line of servers that ran AIX.
Canadian children have massive opportunity to enter water
Surely you forgot to add, "They just have to bring a big axe to get through the thick ice layer on top first"