To follow up on that, it is possible to derive G. From Wikipedia "The gravitational constant is taken as the basis of the Planck units: it is equal to the cube of the Planck length divided by the product of the Planck mass and the square of Planck time" In Planck units, by definition, they are all 1, so G=1. However, we still need precise measurements for everything else, I mean I can't tell your height in plank lengths without first knowing how long a plank length is.
I suppose it is possible, but I also think that it isn't worth the weight, cost and complexity. A small leak like that doesn't look like a big deal, they didn't even wake the crew up.
Fixing small problems like that is a good reason why there are humans on board. Humans are very versatile, especially when equipped with duct tape.
Here is the idea. Power company produces 1 TWh of renewable and 10TWh of fossil power per year. Facebook needs 100GWh, GiveNoFuck Inc. needs 1TWh. In the end both companies use 10% renewable. Now Facebook, by paying a small premium, tells power company "I want full 100% renewable", so they assign 100GWh of their renewable production to Facebook and at the same time, GiveNoFuck Inc. now runs at 0% renewable, at maybe a slightly lower price. Not a single solar panel has been installed, not a single gram of coal has left the plant, but Facebook is now "clean".
Interesting that we have come to this. I never thought I would agree with you but I partially do.
Libraries are great, I mean, if I want to play mp3 files, there is no way I am going to write my own decoder, and access the audio using raw system calls. But it seems that nowadays, more and more coders are so scared of reinventing the wheel that they bring the semi truck that goes with it, when all they need is a skid. And I am talking about good coders, who know how to write an algorithm, and actually understand the piece of code they found on stackoverflow. These are also the kind of people who act all smug in interviews by answering "just use libXXX" instead of the 10 line algorithm the interviewer expects. It looks like they want to show that their knowledge of frameworks makes them superior to whose who do things by themselves.
Come on, just because the lack of code reuse was a problem back in the days doesn't mean that software must be made entirely out of Lego bricks. We need some balance.
Another use for VR is for things like modeling and floor planning. My company has a few experimental projects related to this. If you know about Tlit Brush, that's the idea, but targeted at businesses rather than consumers. It also has an undeniable wow factor when showing stuff to potential customers.
Real estate development is not a more appropriate profession for these people. Energy plays a large part in real estate development now, and if they aren't able to know the difference between a Wh and a watt, they are going to mislead you, and unlike with journalists who write forgettable articles, it may cost you a lot of money.
It is just that the self taught coders you met are exceptional. I mean, why was that self-taught coder hired? It is most likely because he has shown that he really is good, otherwise, the recruiter would have played it safe and hire someone with a degree instead. Also, why did they chose to code? For a CS graduate, it is a natural choice, for someone without a degree, it must be that he really wanted to do that because of an innate talent or passion.
I've met people who became coders at a time very few people had CS degrees and demand was high. And well, they do solve problems creatively, while breaking everything else in the process. To put it bluntly, most of them were terrible coders. But now, times have changed, and people in general are better trained with computers, so there is no reason to hire unqualified employees unless they are somehow exceptional.
I'm in France, where almost everyone has an TV antenna, I've never seen a homemade one being used in practice. Unless by "homemade antenna", you mean a piece of wire sticking out of the RF connector, with no fucks given about the proper shape or dimensions.
I know it can be done easily but at the same time, why bother when you can buy them for 10 to 30€ if you don't find one in a dumpster, unless you enjoy building stuff that is.
If you want to do VR right now, get a 1070 (1060-6GB to 1080 depending on your budget). Personally VR is the only reason I am looking into high end GPUs. For regular games, pretty much anything goes nowadays if you are willing to tone down the settings a little bit. AMD's APUs look very appealing in that regard, it will probably be my next purchase for my second PC.
Why would you get a Vega 64 that is not cheap and struggles with some of the most demanding current VR titles? I understand that you want to focus on the next technologies (like Vulkan, where AMD fares better) but running current games comfortably should be a requirement. If you are hell bent on buying AMD, I'd wait for AMD's response to the nVidia 20XX series. They may not improve performance but a massive price drop is a possibility. Vega 64 performance at, say $300 becomes much more interesting.
Low literacy? It is hard to find data for "the west" because it is so high it is not statistically meaningful. The world in general is at 86% and improving. If we use the education index of the HDI, which is based on the number of expected years of schooling, we see an upward trend everywhere in the world, including the west. The HDI itself, which also includes life expectancy and GNI per capita as proxies for health and wealth respectively is also improving.
In fact, if you look at all the stats related to human development, the positives greatly outweigh the negatives everywhere in the world.
AMD currently doesn't have cards that match nVidia on the high end. No competition there, nVidia is free to overprice. The only thing nVidia has to do in order to compete with AMD is to drop the price of their 1070s. Something they probably won't do because they don't want to compete with themselves just to piss off AMD.
It is not an new situation: nVidia occupying the high end with high priced, high performance cards and AMD occupying the midrange with good value cards is typical.
Right now, I am not a fan of AMD's discrete GPUs. Their APUs are great though.
I have played with flight sims on a small screen, in VR, and I fly real life light aircraft.
VR is a big step up over the small screen, if only for the ability to look around you. It actually looks like flying, and that alone is, I think, a great selling point for VR. But still, we are in video game territory, There is no way you are going to skip these flight hours if you want to fly actual planes, it simply doesn't feel the same.
Instrument training is another matter. IFR is all about looking at gauges and screens, pushing buttons and turning knobs. That's something you can so on your computer. You still need flight hours, so that you learn how to keep looking at your gauges and screens while ignoring what you senses tell you;)
I understand it is not a sports car but 90 km/h is ridiculous for a grownup's car today. A good portion of my daily commute is done on road with a 110 km/h speed limit. And I am not even talking about highways, where that car may not even be legal. A car like the Smart Fortwo is barely larger but it is at least capable of highway speeds, which means it can be used to access any kind of road safely.
There are two "extremely useful" things that I found in smartwatches, but they are present in $15 fitness trackers too as they just involve the vibrator.
Silent alarm and notifications. Vibrations are much easier to feel on your wrist, and can even wake you up, so no need for a loud alarm that wake up everybody around you. And same thing for notifications. In loud environments where you can't hear your phone ring and you are too active to feel the vibrations, this is one of the only thing you can feel. Nice in music festival when you need to get in touch with your group.
That's my use case. But I suppose there are others. For example, when you can pick up your phone because both your hands are taken or dirty, like when you are cooking. Which would call for an always-on screen, building on GP's idea.
I don't think GP was thinking about AMD damaging Intel. Rather that AMD is now a serious, and much needed competitor, just like in the Athlon days.
As for ARM biting Intel, I don't think that's really the case. Compared to Intel/AMD, ARM plays in the cutthroat market of mobile devices, with low power, low performance, low price chips. In fact, Intel has an ARM license, and they used it to make the XScale line. It is not the only halfassed attempt from Intel at the mobile market, but I guess the margins are too low for them. Luckily for Intel (and AMD now), all these mobile devices connect to big, fat servers, where there is a lot of money to be made. ARM for servers don't seem too take off, which is unsurprising considering that most ARM manufacturers don't have much experience in high performance computing.
As bad as it sounds, putting special safeguards on data of the very wealthy is good.
The rest of us are already protected by the fact we don't stand out. I've never been followed by paparazzi, I don't have stuff that attract professional thieves or any family member worth kidnapping for ransom, I don't have an army of suckers asking me for favors anywhere I go. So who will go out of their way to get my data? I could put my personal phone number online for everyone to see and nothing will happen since it doesn't have much more value than picking a number at random.
Multi-tiered systems are common. Handicapped people for example are allowed priority access almost everywhere. Witnesses get special protection. It is not because they are privileged, it is because their status turn things that are benign into a very big deal.
One could argue that being wealthy is much more desirable than being handicapped, and that they already have a lot of privileges through their connections. However, while I disagree that they should be able to do thing us mortals can't do unpunished, I also disagree with the idea of putting them at risk by treating them like the normal people they aren't. Two wrongs don't make a right you now.
If you buy your phone cash, without going through your carrier, it should be unlocked. There are some caveats. For example some Samsung phones require you to activate your phone with a SIM card from the country you bought it from, and only then, it is usable worldwide. Also you need to check that the frequencies your phone supports match the one your country use.
Now if you are talking about bootloader unlock, for installing custom ROMs, I suggest you take a look at xda-developers.com. A lot of flagship phones are, as long as you bought the off carrier, but you still need to check. You may also lose some functionality, like Android Pay or Samsung Knox, and the warranty policies differ.
Sure, you can hack a pacemaker and kill its wearer. You can also shoot him with a gun, poison him, bomb him, whatever. It is made even easier by the fact that people who wear pacemakers aren't usually at the peak of their shape.
But like they say in obligatory xkcd, most people aren't murderers.
To make things clear, yes, it happens. Women get groped in crowds, it is not specific to Japan, not specific to trains, and not even specific to women, though it is a common combination. It is a result of overcrowded trains in during rush hours. And maybe a cultural issue where women are less likely to report or fight back. I mean, if I did that in New York, I would expect a well deserved kick in the balls. And it is not like Japan does nothing about it, for example, they have women only cars for that reason.
No really, trains in Japan are extremely safe for both men and women. Though the Japanese, who take that safety for granted, may have a different opinion, and would probably panic just thinking about NY subways.
If you are particularly sensitive to motion sickness, devs will use you as a guinea pig in order to test how nauseating their work is.
I mean, we are not equal when it comes to motion sickness, and it is in best interest for everyone that everything is done to make VR accessible to everyone, possibly through the use of comfort options. But in order to know which parts cause problems and which countermeasure are effective, it has to be tested by someone with a low tolerance, because others won't notice.
Except almost no one wants super thin keyboards, except as a trade-off. The actuating mechanism is irrelevant, it is all about the course and tactile feedback. Very thin keyboards don't have enough course and are uncomfortable.
About longevity, even well designed rubber dome keyboards can last for more than a decade and be water resistant. Fancy switches can make things even better but they are not really a necessity for the average user.
Slashdot Mirror
To follow up on that, it is possible to derive G.
From Wikipedia "The gravitational constant is taken as the basis of the Planck units: it is equal to the cube of the Planck length divided by the product of the Planck mass and the square of Planck time"
In Planck units, by definition, they are all 1, so G=1. However, we still need precise measurements for everything else, I mean I can't tell your height in plank lengths without first knowing how long a plank length is.
I suppose it is possible, but I also think that it isn't worth the weight, cost and complexity.
A small leak like that doesn't look like a big deal, they didn't even wake the crew up.
Fixing small problems like that is a good reason why there are humans on board. Humans are very versatile, especially when equipped with duct tape.
It is not that hard to use 100% renewable energy.
Here is the idea. Power company produces 1 TWh of renewable and 10TWh of fossil power per year. Facebook needs 100GWh, GiveNoFuck Inc. needs 1TWh. In the end both companies use 10% renewable. Now Facebook, by paying a small premium, tells power company "I want full 100% renewable", so they assign 100GWh of their renewable production to Facebook and at the same time, GiveNoFuck Inc. now runs at 0% renewable, at maybe a slightly lower price. Not a single solar panel has been installed, not a single gram of coal has left the plant, but Facebook is now "clean".
Interesting that we have come to this. I never thought I would agree with you but I partially do.
Libraries are great, I mean, if I want to play mp3 files, there is no way I am going to write my own decoder, and access the audio using raw system calls. But it seems that nowadays, more and more coders are so scared of reinventing the wheel that they bring the semi truck that goes with it, when all they need is a skid. And I am talking about good coders, who know how to write an algorithm, and actually understand the piece of code they found on stackoverflow. These are also the kind of people who act all smug in interviews by answering "just use libXXX" instead of the 10 line algorithm the interviewer expects. It looks like they want to show that their knowledge of frameworks makes them superior to whose who do things by themselves.
Come on, just because the lack of code reuse was a problem back in the days doesn't mean that software must be made entirely out of Lego bricks. We need some balance.
Reminds me of a quote from Contact
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept secret.
Another use for VR is for things like modeling and floor planning. My company has a few experimental projects related to this. If you know about Tlit Brush, that's the idea, but targeted at businesses rather than consumers. It also has an undeniable wow factor when showing stuff to potential customers.
Real estate development is not a more appropriate profession for these people. Energy plays a large part in real estate development now, and if they aren't able to know the difference between a Wh and a watt, they are going to mislead you, and unlike with journalists who write forgettable articles, it may cost you a lot of money.
Hire a cheater and he will find the most efficient way of taking your money. Spoiler alert: it doesn't involve doing the work you are paying him for.
It is a selection bias.
It is just that the self taught coders you met are exceptional. I mean, why was that self-taught coder hired? It is most likely because he has shown that he really is good, otherwise, the recruiter would have played it safe and hire someone with a degree instead. Also, why did they chose to code? For a CS graduate, it is a natural choice, for someone without a degree, it must be that he really wanted to do that because of an innate talent or passion.
I've met people who became coders at a time very few people had CS degrees and demand was high. And well, they do solve problems creatively, while breaking everything else in the process. To put it bluntly, most of them were terrible coders. But now, times have changed, and people in general are better trained with computers, so there is no reason to hire unqualified employees unless they are somehow exceptional.
...hauling around those big books.
For me that's the critical skill. And with smartphones getting bigger and bigger, it may become relevant again.
I'm in France, where almost everyone has an TV antenna, I've never seen a homemade one being used in practice. Unless by "homemade antenna", you mean a piece of wire sticking out of the RF connector, with no fucks given about the proper shape or dimensions.
I know it can be done easily but at the same time, why bother when you can buy them for 10 to 30€ if you don't find one in a dumpster, unless you enjoy building stuff that is.
If you want to do VR right now, get a 1070 (1060-6GB to 1080 depending on your budget). Personally VR is the only reason I am looking into high end GPUs. For regular games, pretty much anything goes nowadays if you are willing to tone down the settings a little bit. AMD's APUs look very appealing in that regard, it will probably be my next purchase for my second PC.
Why would you get a Vega 64 that is not cheap and struggles with some of the most demanding current VR titles? I understand that you want to focus on the next technologies (like Vulkan, where AMD fares better) but running current games comfortably should be a requirement. If you are hell bent on buying AMD, I'd wait for AMD's response to the nVidia 20XX series. They may not improve performance but a massive price drop is a possibility. Vega 64 performance at, say $300 becomes much more interesting.
Low literacy? It is hard to find data for "the west" because it is so high it is not statistically meaningful. The world in general is at 86% and improving.
If we use the education index of the HDI, which is based on the number of expected years of schooling, we see an upward trend everywhere in the world, including the west. The HDI itself, which also includes life expectancy and GNI per capita as proxies for health and wealth respectively is also improving.
In fact, if you look at all the stats related to human development, the positives greatly outweigh the negatives everywhere in the world.
AMD currently doesn't have cards that match nVidia on the high end. No competition there, nVidia is free to overprice.
The only thing nVidia has to do in order to compete with AMD is to drop the price of their 1070s. Something they probably won't do because they don't want to compete with themselves just to piss off AMD.
It is not an new situation: nVidia occupying the high end with high priced, high performance cards and AMD occupying the midrange with good value cards is typical.
Right now, I am not a fan of AMD's discrete GPUs. Their APUs are great though.
I have played with flight sims on a small screen, in VR, and I fly real life light aircraft.
VR is a big step up over the small screen, if only for the ability to look around you. It actually looks like flying, and that alone is, I think, a great selling point for VR. But still, we are in video game territory, There is no way you are going to skip these flight hours if you want to fly actual planes, it simply doesn't feel the same.
Instrument training is another matter. IFR is all about looking at gauges and screens, pushing buttons and turning knobs. That's something you can so on your computer. You still need flight hours, so that you learn how to keep looking at your gauges and screens while ignoring what you senses tell you ;)
I understand it is not a sports car but 90 km/h is ridiculous for a grownup's car today. A good portion of my daily commute is done on road with a 110 km/h speed limit. And I am not even talking about highways, where that car may not even be legal.
A car like the Smart Fortwo is barely larger but it is at least capable of highway speeds, which means it can be used to access any kind of road safely.
There are two "extremely useful" things that I found in smartwatches, but they are present in $15 fitness trackers too as they just involve the vibrator.
Silent alarm and notifications. Vibrations are much easier to feel on your wrist, and can even wake you up, so no need for a loud alarm that wake up everybody around you. And same thing for notifications. In loud environments where you can't hear your phone ring and you are too active to feel the vibrations, this is one of the only thing you can feel. Nice in music festival when you need to get in touch with your group.
That's my use case. But I suppose there are others. For example, when you can pick up your phone because both your hands are taken or dirty, like when you are cooking. Which would call for an always-on screen, building on GP's idea.
I don't think GP was thinking about AMD damaging Intel.
Rather that AMD is now a serious, and much needed competitor, just like in the Athlon days.
As for ARM biting Intel, I don't think that's really the case. Compared to Intel/AMD, ARM plays in the cutthroat market of mobile devices, with low power, low performance, low price chips. In fact, Intel has an ARM license, and they used it to make the XScale line. It is not the only halfassed attempt from Intel at the mobile market, but I guess the margins are too low for them. Luckily for Intel (and AMD now), all these mobile devices connect to big, fat servers, where there is a lot of money to be made.
ARM for servers don't seem too take off, which is unsurprising considering that most ARM manufacturers don't have much experience in high performance computing.
As bad as it sounds, putting special safeguards on data of the very wealthy is good.
The rest of us are already protected by the fact we don't stand out. I've never been followed by paparazzi, I don't have stuff that attract professional thieves or any family member worth kidnapping for ransom, I don't have an army of suckers asking me for favors anywhere I go. So who will go out of their way to get my data? I could put my personal phone number online for everyone to see and nothing will happen since it doesn't have much more value than picking a number at random.
Multi-tiered systems are common. Handicapped people for example are allowed priority access almost everywhere. Witnesses get special protection. It is not because they are privileged, it is because their status turn things that are benign into a very big deal.
One could argue that being wealthy is much more desirable than being handicapped, and that they already have a lot of privileges through their connections. However, while I disagree that they should be able to do thing us mortals can't do unpunished, I also disagree with the idea of putting them at risk by treating them like the normal people they aren't. Two wrongs don't make a right you now.
If you buy your phone cash, without going through your carrier, it should be unlocked.
There are some caveats. For example some Samsung phones require you to activate your phone with a SIM card from the country you bought it from, and only then, it is usable worldwide. Also you need to check that the frequencies your phone supports match the one your country use.
Now if you are talking about bootloader unlock, for installing custom ROMs, I suggest you take a look at xda-developers.com. A lot of flagship phones are, as long as you bought the off carrier, but you still need to check. You may also lose some functionality, like Android Pay or Samsung Knox, and the warranty policies differ.
Sure, you can hack a pacemaker and kill its wearer. You can also shoot him with a gun, poison him, bomb him, whatever. It is made even easier by the fact that people who wear pacemakers aren't usually at the peak of their shape.
But like they say in obligatory xkcd, most people aren't murderers.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
To make things clear, yes, it happens. Women get groped in crowds, it is not specific to Japan, not specific to trains, and not even specific to women, though it is a common combination. It is a result of overcrowded trains in during rush hours. And maybe a cultural issue where women are less likely to report or fight back. I mean, if I did that in New York, I would expect a well deserved kick in the balls. And it is not like Japan does nothing about it, for example, they have women only cars for that reason.
No really, trains in Japan are extremely safe for both men and women. Though the Japanese, who take that safety for granted, may have a different opinion, and would probably panic just thinking about NY subways.
If you are particularly sensitive to motion sickness, devs will use you as a guinea pig in order to test how nauseating their work is.
I mean, we are not equal when it comes to motion sickness, and it is in best interest for everyone that everything is done to make VR accessible to everyone, possibly through the use of comfort options. But in order to know which parts cause problems and which countermeasure are effective, it has to be tested by someone with a low tolerance, because others won't notice.
Except almost no one wants super thin keyboards, except as a trade-off. The actuating mechanism is irrelevant, it is all about the course and tactile feedback. Very thin keyboards don't have enough course and are uncomfortable.
About longevity, even well designed rubber dome keyboards can last for more than a decade and be water resistant. Fancy switches can make things even better but they are not really a necessity for the average user.
This will never fly.
It will, most like through a window.