You make an argument that would be compelling if it was actually, you know, "true". You claim Tesla can't manage to mass-produce and sell their cars at a profit, even though they've been doing so for a while and are now ramping up to even larger scale. You claim "the market isn't there" even though they're selling as many as they can make and have a long waiting list. You can reach any conclusion you want to reach if you start by inventing your own facts.
Nissan produce EVs that normal people can afford, but they don't go very fast or very far, don't have a widespread charging network, and their batteries are notorious for degrading over time (due to their inadequate cooling system). I have no comment on the value of Nissan stock, but I wouldn't buy it based on the assumption that the Leaf is going to take over the world.
And as for Tesla's terrible financials Have you checked Ford's debt load?
I made a bundle on Tesla's stock back during the big run-up when the Model S was introduced and started winning awards. I wouldn't touch the stock today. I think the company probably has a bright future, but it's already priced very high. However, the Tesla brand is definitely not going away. The company could go broke tomorrow, and it would just be scooped up by another car maker, or maybe even a tech company like Apple. It would be a bloodbath for Tesla stock and bond holders, but largely a non-event for Tesla customers.
I've seen this theory going around, that other car makers--the big boys, established companies that have been in business for decades--are just waiting until Tesla has done all the expensive R&D for them and primed the market, then they're all going to pile in with their own electric cars and crush poor, naive Tesla.
Good luck with that. So far I haven't seen any indication that any established car makers have the ability to mass-produce a desirable (in particular, long-range) electric car and sell it at a profit, and I haven't seen any indication that any of them are ramping up for an attempt to do so. A recent poll of auto executives found a solid majority of them still expect battery-electric cars to fail in the marketplace, and quite a few of them still think hydrogen fuel cells are the future. Are these the guys who are going to green-light EV production on a massive scale?
The latest "Tesla killer" to get a lot of buzz was the Jaguar I-Pace. They flew a bunch of reporters out to Portugal to show it off, and the machine seems to have impressed many of them. But how many do Jaguar plan to make? How many are they even able to make? The latest numbers I've seen suggest that Tesla are now out-producing Jaguar. I don't mean they're making more electric cars than Jaguar; I mean they're making more cars that Jaguar's total automotive output.
I think it's funny how I've already seen attempts to spin this negative for Tesla no matter what the sales numbers are. Backlog of orders isn't shrinking? Poor Tesla, they just can't mass-produce them like a real car company, they'll never catch up. Backlog of orders shrinks? Poor Tesla, they're stuck building a product that there just isn't that much demand for after all. Everything is grist for the mill of skeptics.
I saw the same "report" that you saw, and it was nothing but a rumor. Then Elon Musk responded saying it was false, but didn't release any actual numbers. So I guess you can believe whatever you want to believe. As for the "huge debt load", it's nothing compared to Ford, but somehow I don't see people raging on Ford all the time.
Maybe you should try visiting Austin sometime. And as far as charging stations in Texas, please let me introduce you to plugshare.com!
Just as an exercise, I zoomed the plugshare map in on the Houston / Galveston area, and it popped up 208 charging locations. And then just for fun I filtered out everything except Tesla-specific locations (i.e. filtering out ones a Tesla would require a simple adapter to use), and came up with 66. However If you actually live in the Houston / Galveston area, you'd probably never use any of them. If you are like most Tesla owners you'd charge your car at home and only use other charging points when you actually travel out of town anyhow.
They could have just gone back to Captain Thunder, which was his original name when his first comic was in development. DC have actually used that name a few times in different contexts, sometimes for alt-universe versions of him. Wikipedia has all the lowdown on that if you're curious.
Yes, it grinds. But then I don't think DC have ever understood the character or known what to do with him ever since they acquired him from Fawcett. If you go back and read the original comics that made him a huge success back in the 1940s, they're silly, they're whimsical, sometimes surreal, they're fun, and they're the absolute diametric opposite of the DC mentality where every comic has to become the Dark Knight. I watched this new Shazam movie trailer, looking for some hint that they know where they are going with this, and... I am still uncertain. At least they are going more lighthearted with it, but I won't really be a believer until I see him to go the jungles of Venus and get mobbed by Dr. Sivana's army of giant toads.
I've seen 2010, and I found it quite forgettable. I mean, I remember bits and pieces of it, but it didn't make that much of an impression. It's tough to live in the shadow of a giant.
Kubruck: This ending in the book, I just dunno... Clarke seems to think it's OK, but I'm just not happy with it. I don't have any better ideas, though. I guess I better use it, but I can deck it out with a bunch of psychedelic BS and make it look all trippy and mysterious. Yeah, that's the trick.
Real die-hard keyboard geeks tend to favor the IBM Model F that came with the original IBM PC, XT and AT systems. They're built like tanks compared with the flimsy plastic Model M, and the key action is better. However, they do require a converter to use on modern PCs, and the key layout is kind of funky and takes a bit of getting used to.
The other thing that has to be said is If you are willing to put in the time and money, today you can build a keyboard from readily available parts that (IMHO) beats the Model F, and you can customize it to fit your own preferences while you're at it. Here's my own personal example http://zobeid.zapto.org/misc/z...
I've seen some documents on the "Mastered for iTunes" program, and they look good in theory. In practice I believe they are only guidelines offered by Apple, but they are not enforced in any way whatsoever. I'm not aware of any incentive for music studios to actually master their online tracks any differently from their CD tracks. And frankly I don't understand *why* studios routinely ruin their CDs to begin with. Given that they do, I don't understand *why* they wouldn't ruin the files they distribute to digital services in exactly the same way.
If I get my hands on a well-mastered audio CD that sounds good, I'm happy to rip it to MP3 or (better) AAC/MP4 and add it to my iTunes library. Then it goes on my phone, and then I can play it in my car, everything. The digital compression is very good now, and any difference in sound quality is of no significant consequence to my less-than-perfect ears, even when I listen on high quality headphones.
The problem is, if I get my hands only a badly-mastered CD that sounds like garbage, there's nothing I can do to fix it. And if I go to buy the files online instead, from ITMS or Amazon, or if I stream it or whatever, in most cases the source of those files was the same badly-mastered CD. And the result is that the only way I can get a decent-sounding version of the recording, in many cases, is the buy the LP record, then needle-drop it and process that to AAC files, and then put those tracks into my iTunes library. And you know, that's absolutely bonkers. It's crazy that after all we've been through, and all the technology we have now, that I have to resort to this in order to get music that sounds OK.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format--and not without good reason. They're more durable than cassettes or LP records. They don't have DRM, region codes or ridiculous menus to wade through like DVDs. The audio quality is fantastic without lossy (or otherwise!) digital compression. They were hyped as having "digitally perfect" sound, and although that may not have been strictly technically true, the specifications are actually pretty close to the capabilities of the human ear. It was marketed as a serious audiophile format, and it lived up to that.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I personally put a pretty good portion of blame on the crushing dynamic range compression that so many rock-and-pop CDs are afflicted with. It's infuriating when disc after disc after disc comes out ruined (deliberately, it seems?) with bad mastering. It's got to where I'm afraid to buy any CD pressed after about 2000 or so. I'd rather get the LP release if I can, just because they generally don't lay on the super-compression.
No, no! I went to school in small-town rural Texas, and our school excelled in the all-important subjects of football and cheerleading. And, you know, probably English too, I guess.
The hardware doesn't look that bad to me. I mean Much better specs than Ouya, Ubuntu instead of Android, and a standard hardware platform instead of the chaos of Steam Machines. The promo video also seems to imply that "Atari" understand we can't live on recycled 2600 junk, and there will be coin-op arcade games and even some modernized ones following the model of Tempest 4000. If those actually materialize, they could possibly get me on board.
But it's a YEAR away, even assuming there are no further delays (haha!). And right now you can play Atari Vault on Steam, while Tempest 4000 will be on Steam and other platforms real soon now, way before the new VCS ships. There had better be some new things revealed for the software catalog in the coming year if they want this to be viable.
Here's a suggestion: Cut a deal with Warner Bros. Entertainment who (according to Professor Wikipedia) now own all the rights to all the coin operated games developed by "Atari Games" after the split in 1984. I'm talking about: Marble Madness, Gauntlet, RoadBlasters, STUN Runner, Klax, Vindicators, and a ton of others. They turned out some real classics that AFAIK have not appeared on home systems (outside of MAME, of course!).
The medium is the message. Warning labels on products are viewed by consumers as warnings.
It's the same problem with GMO labeling. If you write on the label that "this product was produced with genetic engineering", people will easily take away the implication that they're being warned away from something harmful—even though it doesn't say that at all.
Safety is NASA's top priority. That's not even their decision. A requirement that safety be NASA's top priority was passed through the Congress and signed by the President, and it's the law of the land. If they really take that law literally and fully comply with it, then the solution is to never fly. Astronauts are safest on the ground.
Besides, flying astronauts into space doesn't really advance the mission of our manned spaceflight program. If we *really* want to funnel federal money into established aerospace contractors and the right congressional districts, then the optimum way to do that is to endlessly develop spacecraft and never fly them.
We could bring endangered African cheetahs over here to the USA and let them chase after pronghorn antelope in exactly the way that our now-extinct American cheetah (Miracinonyx) once did. (And this idea wouldn't even be possible to contemplate if we hadn't first saved the pronghorn from near-extinction by over-hunting.)
The majority of this documented trend seems to be based on hunting. And that makes sense, because for the majority of human existence we were hunter-gatherers.
The shift to agriculture marked a big change in human society, but agriculture hasn't been kind to large animals either. We've put up fences to impede their movement, and we've treated them as pests that prey on our livestock or trample and eat our crops.
Now we're in another big shift, to industrialization. How will an ever-more-industrialized world treat large animals? Although poaching is still a problem in certain parts of the world, for various reasons, it does seem like hunting is on the way out. We're only beginning to see how traditional agriculture may shift toward high-intensity farming in enclosed environments: greenhouses, hydroponics, vertical farming, etc. Human population has become huge, globally, and yet we're ever more concentrated in cities, while rural areas are becoming depopulated and semi-abandoned.
It looks to me like these trends bode well for large animals. The reasons we've had in the past for killing them are in decline.
Deep Time? What does that even mean? There's just time, and one bit of time is just like another. If a gold coin doesn't corrode in 3000 years, repeating that 20,000 more times isn't going to change the outcome. (And if it did, there would be no such thing as naturally occurring gold nuggets.) I live on top of the world's biggest deposit of Cretaceous age limestone. We find dinosaur tracks here. We find bits and pieces of plants that washed into the sea and were buried in silt. They're carbonized, yes, but they're recognizable. Even bits of protein have been recovered from dinosaur bones.
This idea has been batted around in science fiction circles since the 1990s if not earlier. I guess maybe it's news now if actual scientists are taking it somewhat seriously for the first time? At least it's the first time I've heard about.
I'm skeptical anyhow. If a prior civilization was ever truly widespread, I don't see how we wouldn't find remnants of it. There's a lot of stuff we produce that doesn't rot or corrode away with the passage of time. We'd be turning up their flint tools and stone sculptures, their pottery shards, their bricks, their broken bits of concrete, not to mention anything fashioned from noble metals (including aluminum). You can dig up gold coins that were buried several thousand years ago, and they come up looking like new. It's hard to see how additional millions of years would make much difference there.
Slashdot Mirror
You make an argument that would be compelling if it was actually, you know, "true". You claim Tesla can't manage to mass-produce and sell their cars at a profit, even though they've been doing so for a while and are now ramping up to even larger scale. You claim "the market isn't there" even though they're selling as many as they can make and have a long waiting list. You can reach any conclusion you want to reach if you start by inventing your own facts.
Nissan produce EVs that normal people can afford, but they don't go very fast or very far, don't have a widespread charging network, and their batteries are notorious for degrading over time (due to their inadequate cooling system). I have no comment on the value of Nissan stock, but I wouldn't buy it based on the assumption that the Leaf is going to take over the world.
And as for Tesla's terrible financials Have you checked Ford's debt load?
I made a bundle on Tesla's stock back during the big run-up when the Model S was introduced and started winning awards. I wouldn't touch the stock today. I think the company probably has a bright future, but it's already priced very high. However, the Tesla brand is definitely not going away. The company could go broke tomorrow, and it would just be scooped up by another car maker, or maybe even a tech company like Apple. It would be a bloodbath for Tesla stock and bond holders, but largely a non-event for Tesla customers.
I've seen this theory going around, that other car makers--the big boys, established companies that have been in business for decades--are just waiting until Tesla has done all the expensive R&D for them and primed the market, then they're all going to pile in with their own electric cars and crush poor, naive Tesla.
Good luck with that. So far I haven't seen any indication that any established car makers have the ability to mass-produce a desirable (in particular, long-range) electric car and sell it at a profit, and I haven't seen any indication that any of them are ramping up for an attempt to do so. A recent poll of auto executives found a solid majority of them still expect battery-electric cars to fail in the marketplace, and quite a few of them still think hydrogen fuel cells are the future. Are these the guys who are going to green-light EV production on a massive scale?
The latest "Tesla killer" to get a lot of buzz was the Jaguar I-Pace. They flew a bunch of reporters out to Portugal to show it off, and the machine seems to have impressed many of them. But how many do Jaguar plan to make? How many are they even able to make? The latest numbers I've seen suggest that Tesla are now out-producing Jaguar. I don't mean they're making more electric cars than Jaguar; I mean they're making more cars that Jaguar's total automotive output.
I think it's funny how I've already seen attempts to spin this negative for Tesla no matter what the sales numbers are. Backlog of orders isn't shrinking? Poor Tesla, they just can't mass-produce them like a real car company, they'll never catch up. Backlog of orders shrinks? Poor Tesla, they're stuck building a product that there just isn't that much demand for after all. Everything is grist for the mill of skeptics.
I saw the same "report" that you saw, and it was nothing but a rumor. Then Elon Musk responded saying it was false, but didn't release any actual numbers. So I guess you can believe whatever you want to believe. As for the "huge debt load", it's nothing compared to Ford, but somehow I don't see people raging on Ford all the time.
Maybe you should try visiting Austin sometime. And as far as charging stations in Texas, please let me introduce you to plugshare.com!
Just as an exercise, I zoomed the plugshare map in on the Houston / Galveston area, and it popped up 208 charging locations. And then just for fun I filtered out everything except Tesla-specific locations (i.e. filtering out ones a Tesla would require a simple adapter to use), and came up with 66. However If you actually live in the Houston / Galveston area, you'd probably never use any of them. If you are like most Tesla owners you'd charge your car at home and only use other charging points when you actually travel out of town anyhow.
They could have just gone back to Captain Thunder, which was his original name when his first comic was in development. DC have actually used that name a few times in different contexts, sometimes for alt-universe versions of him. Wikipedia has all the lowdown on that if you're curious.
Yes, it grinds. But then I don't think DC have ever understood the character or known what to do with him ever since they acquired him from Fawcett. If you go back and read the original comics that made him a huge success back in the 1940s, they're silly, they're whimsical, sometimes surreal, they're fun, and they're the absolute diametric opposite of the DC mentality where every comic has to become the Dark Knight. I watched this new Shazam movie trailer, looking for some hint that they know where they are going with this, and... I am still uncertain. At least they are going more lighthearted with it, but I won't really be a believer until I see him to go the jungles of Venus and get mobbed by Dr. Sivana's army of giant toads.
Thanks for explaining that to us. We are all enlightened by your analysis. :P
More to the point, somebody has been buying computers from System76. They've been in business for years, and they only seem to keep getting bigger.
I've seen 2010, and I found it quite forgettable. I mean, I remember bits and pieces of it, but it didn't make that much of an impression. It's tough to live in the shadow of a giant.
Kubruck: This ending in the book, I just dunno... Clarke seems to think it's OK, but I'm just not happy with it. I don't have any better ideas, though. I guess I better use it, but I can deck it out with a bunch of psychedelic BS and make it look all trippy and mysterious. Yeah, that's the trick.
Real die-hard keyboard geeks tend to favor the IBM Model F that came with the original IBM PC, XT and AT systems. They're built like tanks compared with the flimsy plastic Model M, and the key action is better. However, they do require a converter to use on modern PCs, and the key layout is kind of funky and takes a bit of getting used to.
The other thing that has to be said is If you are willing to put in the time and money, today you can build a keyboard from readily available parts that (IMHO) beats the Model F, and you can customize it to fit your own preferences while you're at it. Here's my own personal example http://zobeid.zapto.org/misc/z...
I've seen some documents on the "Mastered for iTunes" program, and they look good in theory. In practice I believe they are only guidelines offered by Apple, but they are not enforced in any way whatsoever. I'm not aware of any incentive for music studios to actually master their online tracks any differently from their CD tracks. And frankly I don't understand *why* studios routinely ruin their CDs to begin with. Given that they do, I don't understand *why* they wouldn't ruin the files they distribute to digital services in exactly the same way.
If I get my hands on a well-mastered audio CD that sounds good, I'm happy to rip it to MP3 or (better) AAC/MP4 and add it to my iTunes library. Then it goes on my phone, and then I can play it in my car, everything. The digital compression is very good now, and any difference in sound quality is of no significant consequence to my less-than-perfect ears, even when I listen on high quality headphones.
The problem is, if I get my hands only a badly-mastered CD that sounds like garbage, there's nothing I can do to fix it. And if I go to buy the files online instead, from ITMS or Amazon, or if I stream it or whatever, in most cases the source of those files was the same badly-mastered CD. And the result is that the only way I can get a decent-sounding version of the recording, in many cases, is the buy the LP record, then needle-drop it and process that to AAC files, and then put those tracks into my iTunes library. And you know, that's absolutely bonkers. It's crazy that after all we've been through, and all the technology we have now, that I have to resort to this in order to get music that sounds OK.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format--and not without good reason. They're more durable than cassettes or LP records. They don't have DRM, region codes or ridiculous menus to wade through like DVDs. The audio quality is fantastic without lossy (or otherwise!) digital compression. They were hyped as having "digitally perfect" sound, and although that may not have been strictly technically true, the specifications are actually pretty close to the capabilities of the human ear. It was marketed as a serious audiophile format, and it lived up to that.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I personally put a pretty good portion of blame on the crushing dynamic range compression that so many rock-and-pop CDs are afflicted with. It's infuriating when disc after disc after disc comes out ruined (deliberately, it seems?) with bad mastering. It's got to where I'm afraid to buy any CD pressed after about 2000 or so. I'd rather get the LP release if I can, just because they generally don't lay on the super-compression.
No, no! I went to school in small-town rural Texas, and our school excelled in the all-important subjects of football and cheerleading. And, you know, probably English too, I guess.
In school I was taught to use an exclamation point only after a command or an exclamation, not to "convey true enthusiasm".
The hardware doesn't look that bad to me. I mean Much better specs than Ouya, Ubuntu instead of Android, and a standard hardware platform instead of the chaos of Steam Machines. The promo video also seems to imply that "Atari" understand we can't live on recycled 2600 junk, and there will be coin-op arcade games and even some modernized ones following the model of Tempest 4000. If those actually materialize, they could possibly get me on board.
But it's a YEAR away, even assuming there are no further delays (haha!). And right now you can play Atari Vault on Steam, while Tempest 4000 will be on Steam and other platforms real soon now, way before the new VCS ships. There had better be some new things revealed for the software catalog in the coming year if they want this to be viable.
Here's a suggestion: Cut a deal with Warner Bros. Entertainment who (according to Professor Wikipedia) now own all the rights to all the coin operated games developed by "Atari Games" after the split in 1984. I'm talking about: Marble Madness, Gauntlet, RoadBlasters, STUN Runner, Klax, Vindicators, and a ton of others. They turned out some real classics that AFAIK have not appeared on home systems (outside of MAME, of course!).
The medium is the message. Warning labels on products are viewed by consumers as warnings.
It's the same problem with GMO labeling. If you write on the label that "this product was produced with genetic engineering", people will easily take away the implication that they're being warned away from something harmful—even though it doesn't say that at all.
We should continue honoring the importance of GNU and Linux to the systemd project.
Safety is NASA's top priority. That's not even their decision. A requirement that safety be NASA's top priority was passed through the Congress and signed by the President, and it's the law of the land. If they really take that law literally and fully comply with it, then the solution is to never fly. Astronauts are safest on the ground.
Besides, flying astronauts into space doesn't really advance the mission of our manned spaceflight program. If we *really* want to funnel federal money into established aerospace contractors and the right congressional districts, then the optimum way to do that is to endlessly develop spacecraft and never fly them.
We could bring endangered African cheetahs over here to the USA and let them chase after pronghorn antelope in exactly the way that our now-extinct American cheetah (Miracinonyx) once did. (And this idea wouldn't even be possible to contemplate if we hadn't first saved the pronghorn from near-extinction by over-hunting.)
The majority of this documented trend seems to be based on hunting. And that makes sense, because for the majority of human existence we were hunter-gatherers.
The shift to agriculture marked a big change in human society, but agriculture hasn't been kind to large animals either. We've put up fences to impede their movement, and we've treated them as pests that prey on our livestock or trample and eat our crops.
Now we're in another big shift, to industrialization. How will an ever-more-industrialized world treat large animals? Although poaching is still a problem in certain parts of the world, for various reasons, it does seem like hunting is on the way out. We're only beginning to see how traditional agriculture may shift toward high-intensity farming in enclosed environments: greenhouses, hydroponics, vertical farming, etc. Human population has become huge, globally, and yet we're ever more concentrated in cities, while rural areas are becoming depopulated and semi-abandoned.
It looks to me like these trends bode well for large animals. The reasons we've had in the past for killing them are in decline.
Deep Time? What does that even mean? There's just time, and one bit of time is just like another. If a gold coin doesn't corrode in 3000 years, repeating that 20,000 more times isn't going to change the outcome. (And if it did, there would be no such thing as naturally occurring gold nuggets.) I live on top of the world's biggest deposit of Cretaceous age limestone. We find dinosaur tracks here. We find bits and pieces of plants that washed into the sea and were buried in silt. They're carbonized, yes, but they're recognizable. Even bits of protein have been recovered from dinosaur bones.
This idea has been batted around in science fiction circles since the 1990s if not earlier. I guess maybe it's news now if actual scientists are taking it somewhat seriously for the first time? At least it's the first time I've heard about.
I'm skeptical anyhow. If a prior civilization was ever truly widespread, I don't see how we wouldn't find remnants of it. There's a lot of stuff we produce that doesn't rot or corrode away with the passage of time. We'd be turning up their flint tools and stone sculptures, their pottery shards, their bricks, their broken bits of concrete, not to mention anything fashioned from noble metals (including aluminum). You can dig up gold coins that were buried several thousand years ago, and they come up looking like new. It's hard to see how additional millions of years would make much difference there.