This is one product, from a guy who basically "subsidises" loss-making products in order to gain headlines, that does one very limited job, and has done for a very short period of time.
It's not acting as battery backup to ANYTHING. It's just smoothing a load, in effect. It's a big, giant UPS such as always been used - but it's not used to backup, it's used to smooth (same way that the biggest use of a UPS is to regulate the incoming power, not actually spend most of its life running all the kit off battery alone). And the energy companies have had those for decades, it's just a slightly different chemistry.
And Tesla's things are basically sold in a way that other companies would say "You've lined up a bunch of standardised lithium cells in a box and then sold them at cost? Yeah, of course it'll work, and of course you can make it cheap. Where's the profit?". This is why nobody "follows" what Tesla etc. does... any fool can launch satellites, give away cars, etc. if they are just throwing billions at doing it for cost-only (no profit). And of course you can then get cheap launches, and projects like this done cheaply. Because you're not paying for a sustainable product from a profitable business. You're paying for a standard thing that can be replicated in minutes by any battery firm in the world, but they'd ask you for the cost Tesla are charging, and some profit on top.
Believe it or not, a company giving things away at cost isn't a business partner you want in more than the short-term. If this thing stops working tomorrow, the electrical suppliers involved are in no big loss. Tuck it under "prototypes and testing" and move on. They wouldn't replace every similar box they have with something from Tesla. And Tesla wouldn't be able to supply them even if they did... they run on a knife-edge to be "first", not to provide a sustainable business, and they've come close to bankruptcy a lot of times and had to seek more investment.
Any fool can make a product and give their time away for free and the product at cost. And, sure, they'll pinch bits of the market. But what they won't do is own the market because everyone will be going "Yeah... and what happens when you have an unexpected expense and fold on me?".
Fact is, Tesla and all Musk properties literally do nothing that anyone else couldn't have done at any point. There's no magic sauce at all. This Tesla boxes are standard lithium cells packed into a standard kind of power conversion equipment such as can be found in all kinds of industries. What they do is sacrifice ALL their profit to get their name in the news.
The electrical companies could get one of these units from anyone else tomorrow. But it would cost more. And when it comes to "let's just roll this out across the our entire network", they will do that rather than touch Tesla. But while Tesla are basically giving them away, of course they'll use them.
"Not a sustainable business model" basically sums up every Musk property you see. They're all buoyed up by huge investment and break even at best. And their products are really nothing special at all.
Hell, yesterday, Musk managed to make "Our upright-landing rocket fucked up, couldn't land upright and so just crashed into the ocean, like dozens of others have done" into a positive headline.
"To reach such a high clock speed (the i7-7740K normally has a base clock speed of 4.3 GHz), some serious cooling was needed, and liquid helium took temperatures down to -250 degrees Celsius."
Not the kind of technology that the average household is ever going to see.
You aren't gonna get into the double-digit GHz with standard single-core performance with an ordinary device (i.e. not liquid-cooled superconducty stuff).
That's just a fact of life, and physics. And such, we need to parallelise everything we can. There's nothing you might need to perform "ordinary" computing (including games) that can't really be parallelised well. Almost everything can. But we haven't bothered.
The wake-up call was 3D graphics, yes, but the reality is that everything needs to be threaded, thread-safe and parallelisable. The objections come from people who find it tricky to program that way, because we were almost all brought up on the concept of a list of instructions that you just run in order, and very few people were ever taught anything different. For decades "multi-threading" was just being able to run two such programs (if you did it carefully) in parallel, not actually parallelising the task or the solution.
Fact is, until something like quantum computing becomes mainstream (which is a way off, and still needs everyone to totally up-end their programming paradigms), you're stuck at the clock-speeds that you are and all you can do is add thousands of cores at that clock speed.
Notice how tiny embedded processors have come along in leaps and bounds, from microcontroller speeds to several GHz in a battery-powered device, but top-end processors are still stuck in the 4GHz range (and that's 1GHz but we can ramp up for short periods nowadays, which is even weirder!). That's your warning.
If you're single-threading in this day and age your days are numbered. Likely you'll get thousands of 5GHz cores (limited as they may be) before you ever see a 10Ghz machine (if ever).
Not only can I see the difference between 480 and 720... the really important thing... is that I don't care.
If I sat and squinted and dots, sure I can see them. But I know the image is made of dots. It's always been made of dots. My old CRT had coloured dots just the same (i.e. three colours).
I didn't care then, and I don't care now. Because... when those dots are moving, you can't see them.
The real test is "at what point were you swearing at your TV because it wasn't good enough?". I don't ever remember complaining about PAL, non-HD, VHS-recorded video. And I could tell the difference between recorded and broadcast even back then. As we go forward in time through to the current day, literally the only technology that gave me a "worse" picture that I noticed was VideoCD, and that was because MPEG artefacts were "new".
I can never, in my entire life, remember watching the latest movie of the day and thinking "Oh, gosh, if only this was higher resolution, it looks so blocky and awful and it's ruining my enjoyment". I thought that about video games (I started out with a ZX Spectrum). I thought that about memory sizes, processor speeds, hard disk capacities.
But I have never once had a movie ruined because of the quality of reproduction of the technology (rather than a specific problem with a particular device). I watched Aliens on VHS and it engrossed me and scared the crap out of me just the same as it still does. Not because I didn't know any different - I had a SVGA monitor with live-TV in a window for many years before people ever even knew what HD was. But because it doesn't matter.
I think the same about audio - I don't notice that 7.1 because it doesn't matter to me. The images that go with them aren't ACTUALLY behind / above / to the side of me - I have to keep my eyes fixed forward. So 7.1 makes no sense to me. I honestly can't justify more than stero, if I'm honest and even that is optional. You could watch 99% of TV shows in equal mono and you'd not notice.
The people fussing about these things are the worst offenders - while literally looking for a reason to upgrade all the time, they also say how much better 4K is than HD, and HD was than SD. But never did they complain when they went and bought all their collection and equipment in HD again that it would all be a waste as obviously they would see the pixels and would be better waiting for 4K, no?
It's a nonsense. I can spot a stuck pixel at 50 paces on a PC. But watching movies or TV? The resolution barely matters one jot.
HDR is EXACTLY THE SAME. I've never sat there thinking "Oh, if only there were more colours available or a bigger range" with modern technology (even though I did that in the 8-bit and 16-bit era because you couldn't get games / paint programs / digitisers that could reproduce photo-realistic images then so any attempt to do so was obvious).
Same with digital cameras and the megapixel battles.
Honestly... you guys all fight over it. Because you'll never be happy. Because at no point have you ever had "that's great... that's the best that image is going to be for me". I pity you for that. You're pissing money away on things that I would never need to. I don't see how that's a status symbol to advertise.
Meanwhile, if the world's technology had stopped at 480i, 16-bit colour, and 44KHz stereo sound, I wouldn't have cared one bit.
When you're penalising carbon production with financial penalties, and subsidising solar and wind, what do you expect? You're forcing them out of the market.
Coal itself is profitable (even with the above 40% make a profit). It's the artificial entities around it that make it not so.
And you'll find that out when those subsidies end (which themselves only exist because they are cheaper than paying the "carbon fine"). Wind and solar are next to useless across most of the world.
Question: Given that nuclear is basically zero-carbon, and can do the always-available thing of coal, and is in the same scale of production as fossil fuels, why the hell are we shutting them down for silly child's windmills?
I live in London. I struggled to get any signal at all. The UK turned off analogue years ago. And DVB-T / T2 literally wouldn't get a signal. I gave up trying for the last year.
I only returned to it recently (the RPi DVB-T hat looked cool and I wanted to set up tvheadend) and then ended up with the following config:
- A huge loft aerial that gets nothing, even with a booster, despite being in between some of the UK's biggest transmitters - Crystal Palace and Hemel Hempstead. I literally bought it myself as I couldn't believe that the signal from a HUGE shared aerial could be as weak as it was, and it ended up being even weaker. Despite being huge, dedicated, amplified and aligned precisely with very precise diagnostic tools with explicit signal statistics beyond "signal strength". - A shared loft aerial and a serious amount of kit to share it across three properties (the boxes for it are in my loft and I googled them and they cost GBP1000 each). - A GBP50 signal booster off Amazon on the end of it to actually bring the signal from something that "can see but can't lock on" to something that locks on enough to actually watch TV. - At least two DVB-T sticks, the RPi hat thing and I even borrowed an ordinary TV because I was convinced something was wrong. - A whole bunch of new coax, because even the manual-crimped ones affected the signal I was getting so I had to go "perfect" all the way.
Bear in mind that I live in a third-floor flat, with clear-line-of-sight (if not actual sight because of the distance involved) to both transmitters. I live inside the M25 (basically the road that circles and demarks "London" proper). We have 4G and fibre and all kinds of things, I'm not out in the sticks somewhere.
And it was a struggle involving boosters, new cable, loft aerials, pissing about aligning them precisely etc.
I'm trying to do DVB-S too now, because we also have a shared one of those. That looks to be better, according to my neighbours, but it's still not this a case of "use OTA, it'll work".
For the last year, I paid for a subscription to TVPlayer.com - it was just easier than faffing about. Bear in mind that I never paid for broadband (DSL), and was streaming it all over 4G... that actually worked out better, cheaper and gave me more channels than anything OTA, even including the data package.
I spent nearly GBP100 on kit to get a DVB-T signal I could watch. And that was in an already-established house with GBP1000 of shared aerial equipment.
Don't even ask about HD channels. I don't care and didn't look, but I have a small handful of whatever is on there, and they only mirror the SD channels but cut-out more.
If that's the kind of problem I'm seeing just miles from Central London, I highly doubt that "just use OTA digital" is going to be the end-solution for everyone that's filling up their data with Netflix.
You can be sure that in the year hence, and with Amazon rolling their own, that they are now at least on a par with some more traditional setups.
They literally only have to be a dollar cheaper (whether in power usage or purchase cost) to start taking over.
Most people *aren't* maxing out their servers 24/7/365.25. As such, ARM could be a serious threat. Especially if they can come in anywhere near cheap or they offer other advantages (e.g. presumably, if Amazon are making their own chips, they know EXACTLY what's running on their hardware and can optimise to their exact needs, like Google does with its own motherboards etc. in-house - both security and performance get a boost from that).
Shops have been trying to make it a thing, for about 2-3 years now.
After some footage of Black Friday Walmart rampages a few years back on the news, suddenly shops decided they wanted that and tried to induce it.
Pretty much nobody cares. To us, it's just a pre-Christmas sale when you spend most of December Christmas shopping anyway. And the price reductions are even more fake than other sales. At least "January sales" actually happen as shops sell off leftover stock. Not everywhere, but they do.
Black Friday is also not just a "day"... it's a week and they're trying to make it a month. Nobody really cares. It's all hype and rubbish. There's literally no increase in sales over what you'd expect before Christmas.
It's not like the US where you effectively get two holidays in short succession. We get Christmas, and that's it. So nobody is going to splash out in November because everyone who was going to buy you gifts for Christmas will do the old "Oh, no, don't buy that, leave it for later (because I've already decided to buy it for you and I have no other ideas!)".
A few pence for a catch-all domain name that just forwards to my "real" email, and I catch companies out like this all the time.
Best bit is when you start getting the "I know your password" scams with random emails and you can see people's customer database is compromised - because even in that case, you can just change the email assigned to that account (if you still want to use it!) and carry on regardless.
If I do HaveIBeenPwned.com on my domain, there are all kinds of addresses that have become public... but they are all easily traced back to source because only one source ever had each of them.
Like anything else when your credentials are compromised - stop using that service, null-route the email address given to them, change the account email and password (even if you never use them again, you don't want anyone else doing so either), and carry on with life.
I honestly do not understand anyone using a single credential (email address) across every service they ever use.
P.S. Once had a firm spam me on the email address that I'd given to their competitor. Turned out - and I literally had the CEO talking to me at that point - that a new employee of theirs had stolen the entire contact list from their old company in order to boost his sales... informed both companies and the data protection office and let them resolve it.
There are only a few games that have ever really impressed me, and that scene is one of them. I remember being annoyed at the enemy appearing and shooting because I wanted to just look down and look around at it. The sights, wind noise, the "depth" of the bridge, it all worked perfectly.
I can only imagine what's possible nowadays with modern graphics hardware, a VR headset an story-tellers / scene-setters like that. But without something like Half-Life 3 most of us will never buy the equipment and so never know.
I no longer chase top-end hardware for games. I'm just constantly disappointed in the breaking of the mood with silly races, grinding, collect-this-stuff and XBox controls popping up over everything. None of them tell a story any more. HL/HL2 did. I'd go back and replay it constantly but there's a bit in HL2 that always crashes my machines... where you're being bombarded inside a town as you try to enter a building? That always breaks the mood and I struggle to continue through to the non-ending after that.
There aren't many moments in gaming that I truly remember. Some of them are quite odd (e.g. I loved Trine when I first saw it). But HL and HL2 and even the little HL2 teaser for HDR they put out... I remember those. And Quake. Most other things are just play-it, complete-it, never-touch-it.
So impossible that you were worried about other nation's getting there first?
And neither you - nor those other nations, nor anyone else - has bothered to go back, not even once, not even for a fleeting visit like originally in 50 years.
Not much over 50 years before Apollo, planes didn't exist. Now, 50 years after, we still haven't been back to the Moon even once.
Because it's expensive, risky, wasteful and unsustainable even with current technology. And the Moon is only ~400,000 km away. Mars is 54,600,000 km away.
Even getting there is ONE HUNDRED TIMES more difficult than the thing we did once, 50 years ago, and haven't even tried to replicate ever since.
And the difficulty and expense of all those things you mention is orders of magnitude greater than living in the Antarctic, which nobody does. Even the ISS doesn't have proper permanent residents, and that's only a day away if there's anything majorly wrong.
Heat: Antarctica lowest: â'89.2 ÂC Mars lowest: â'153 ÂC
Heating something from -153 to room temperature is the same energy as boiling it twice over. And you're doing that all day, every day, constantly and hoping the insulation saves you some power.
Power isn't free either, you need a whole bunch of equipment with a limited lifespan in a very harsh environment (see above) producing an AWFUL lot of power just to keep the temperature up and the lights on.
Water: Collect it from where? How do you get more when you start having kids and living there? Nobody cares about recycling what you have but the processes are not 100% efficient... you'll lose water every time you use some. You'll need regular water sent to you by Earth or someone, or a way to generate it en-masse that we don't really have yet.
Food: Now that you have limited water stocks, you need more water. Lots more water. More water to sustain the food year-round than you drink as pure-water yourself.
And that food doesn't grow out of nothing. It requires energy. From the soil, fertilizers, the sunlight, etc. It gets an awful lot of energy on Earth. It gets NOTHING on Mars except what you bring with you. E=mc^2. Though I'm slightly misusing it, you need an awful lot of solar power to make anything approaching a physical thing you can eat from the raw materials around you (which you will use up and need to be replenished from off-world sources unless you're literally synthesising food from pure energy, which you're not going to be for a few centuries yet). Watch/Read The Martian - terrible movie/book, precisely because you only need look at the calculations done in it to realise the amount of stuff you need for even one human to live any length of time.
Plants give out O2. Presuming you have them. You'd need about 700 potted plants to generate enough O2 and, more importantly, consume the CO2 that you're exhaling and choking yourself with. Per person. For anything from 5-10 people, you would need an entire garden centre or thereabouts. 24/7. Lit up, growing, thriving, fertilised, sustainable, no disease, etc.
Small groups may be able to survive for limited amounts of time presuming they have a reliable supply of very expensive and heavy equipment coming from Earth all the time.
You can no more "live on Mars" than you can "live on the Antarctic", or the bottom of the ocean... you need a lot of equipment and a ton of support and hope like hell that nothing goes wrong, and do it for short trips, with people willing to risk their lives and accept an awful lot of compromise.
NOT "Hey, let's all move there and start a family."
He thinks that if he just burns all his money away to achieve them, that everyone else will join in. (P.S. That's not the case).
So he has a number of unprofitable adventures - that literally only make any money at all because of a) hype, b) people buying things being sold way under the cost of production, c) because it's a "designer" brand.
He can afford to throw all his money away on electric cars, space launches etc. and OBVIOUSLY everyone will jump on and say "Here, just launch this for me"... of course they will. He's basically giving it away.
Is he changing the industry? Not really. Is he improving the planet? Not at all. Is he showing viability and profitability anywhere that wasn't already obvious? No. He can't even make the batteries for the cars any cheaper even when he builds them himself en-masse. Literally, all he's doing is producing the same kit as everyone else could, in some silly ways, cutting some dangerous corners in places, and people are taking advantage to get something that from anywhere that wasn't just throwing money away would cost a lot more.
This he sees as a success. Depending on how you look at it, it's sort-of charity but not quite. It's charity to people who can afford space launches, $30,000 vehicles and digging tunnels through mountains.
Musk's tech is the same as everyone else's. Sidelined by "playboy" ideas like vertical-landing and rocket re-use (actually more expensive and dangerous than just ditching the thing), "sorta-self-driving-but-we-can't-say-that", running a power station from batteries, and publicity stunts like launching a car into space, etc.
When Musk runs out of money, there's nothing left. This is why he can state that he won't patent any of his innovations - there really aren't any to patent. The batteries are standard batteries, the cars are nothing that Ford couldn't knock out of the sales graphs ten-fold within a year (but why would they, they'd make almost no money from them at all, like Tesla). It's more "billionaire playboy building toy rockets because it's cool" than science, or even business.
He's a liability sponge for self-driving and space launches (and has had some spectacular failures, the upright-landing thing goes wrong quite a lot they just don't show you), and the vacuum-train idea and the tunnel-boring. Let him dig it, pay for the basic costs, who cares if his company goes bankrupt doing it, now you have 99% of a tunnel dug for you for basically less-than-cost.
Of course the big places back him and encourage him. But in terms of actual innovation, profitability, etc. he's not doing anything of interest at all.
But if you nod at him and play his ego, he just might build that tunnel that you honestly could never have afforded to do so, basically for free or at cost, and take all the responsibility if it goes wrong. Of course people glad-hand him in that respect!
Keep your mouths shut, boys, if he fucks up, we sue him, if he does it we get a free tunnel!
To sustain enough steam to power the world you would need, not unsurprisingly, the entire world's current supply of oil, gas, nuclear fission, solar, wind, hydro, etc. Because... that's pretty much what we use it to do (I'm excluding all losses here, for simplicity).
One you achieve fusion, you can literally power the entire world from 867 tonnes of hydrogen per year. That's maybe a shipping container full of hydrogen. Something we can pull out of the ocean.
For reference, we would need to burn 12 billion tonnes of oil, 10.4 billion tonnes of gas or even 7000 tonnes of uranium to do the same.
Pretty much the only thing more powerful is complete utilisation of E=mc^2 - merging antimatter and matter and capturing the blast. You'd only need 3 tonnes of antimatter to power the world in that instance.
Fusion, if it can be made to work, could power the entire world from one power station. Of course, that's not what would happen - we'd just end up USING UP all that energy and every country would have half a dozen of them. We'd end up synthesising rare materials and doing all the things we can't currently do because of the sheer amount of energy they require, rather than actually just settle on current usage coming from one place.
But it literally is an order of magnitude more energy than the nuclear reactors we have now, which are orders of magnitude more energy than even coal and oil, which are orders of magnitude more energy than anything else.
And it looks like we could viably do it inside the next century or so.
With that amount of energy, you could easily obliterate the planet, or fire things into space like they were paper planes.
"Let's have a piece of software, written by a third party, which runs as an elevated user and is capable of intercepting every file access, replacing content, scanning and modifying all memory for every user, even root/SYSTEM-owned processes, which inserts itself into every file, I/O and process hook, which starts as one of the first things on boot, and tells us whether or not other processes should be blindly trusted, by checking against a list of hashes of 'known-bad' things, which constantly updates automatically from an Internet server with proprietary-format instructions (that we can't dig into) from a third-party probably in Russia or the US, and do this to 'improve security'. Oh, and maybe even let it intercept and decide the veracity of every network packet on all network interfaces. Yeah, right. No problem there."
Or we could make an OS where such things aren't even possible for antivirus, let alone normal processes, and thus secure ourselves that way.
It's to do with the bonds between the parts of the nucleus, and the conversion of mass to energy.
If you take a bunch of 1 proton (Hydrogen) atoms which have
one or two extra neutrons (Deuterium, Triterium) and smash them together you will form an atom with more protons (Helium) and no neutrons, and get a bunch of "spare" neutrons which are either a) obliterated or b) ejected.
E=mc^2. A neutron worth of mass converted to energy is an awful lot.
In fission, you do something different. You take U235, fire another neutron at it, and it splits into two lighter elements, a bunch more neutrons get ejected (which keep the chain reaction going) and some of those get obliterated by the forces involved.
E=mc^2 again.
It's not about "you changed two things between two identical states and got free energy by doing so". It's "you used two different way of smashing things together, which results in one of the neutrons involved being obliterated and changed from mass to energy, and give you a bunch of waste products that you can't just recombine to get what you started with because some of it is now energy.
Fusion is also harder because you have MUCH tinier things that you need to smash together, and they don't want to do it naturally, whereas with fission the U235 becomes U236 quite easily, which is inherently unstable and will explode of its own accord very quickly anyway.
It's about "binding energy" of the start and end products. The binding energy (literally the energy used in the bonds that hold the thing together) of what you get out HAS TO BE LESS than the binding energy of what you put in. That's true for both fission of big atoms and fusion of tiny ones, but almost nothing in-between.
Which is why it's REALLY HARD to make the things in the middle which only really occur in stars because they have so much energy being given out that they can end up literally forging elements that wouldn't exist in any smaller reaction, just by chance.
The one run by a guy who used to make bits for laser printers?
Yeah, I wouldn't hold much hope.
He may be way more qualified than I could ever be, but it just sounds like a PhD with an idea to me. There are literally millions of those kinds of people round the globe, and he hasn't really shown anything special or different.
Hell, his Wiki article still harps on about some amazing micromirror thing that would revolutionise the telecoms industry which he seems to have just... done nothing about.
Would trust this guy to come up with a new type of laser printer. Wouldn't expect him to somehow solve fusion in a way that nobody else in the world could.
And the combined population of Europe is 741m (we passed 330m in 1916), pretty much has no border whatsoever (you could class the UK Channel as one of the only real "borders" as you know them... everywhere else you can literally just walk or drive between countries, unchallenged, at 70mph without stopping) and literally only two countries come anywhere close to having your gun ownership, yet NOT ONE OF THEM is within two orders of magnitude of your police-killing rates. Your point is?
Europe is certainly not all "European white" (hey, nice blaming the other races, well done! But European was the scene of some of the largest racial tensions in world history, if you don't remember that), is one of the most diverse continents, and is literally still splitting itself into pieces over immigration and other problems.
Lecture me when you can make a non-racist, non-bollocks statement about why your police are shooting and killing thousands more people each year than any other police force in the entire world (even when you combine an entire CONTINENT of police forces) - including places like South Africa.
They singularly failed to do anything, despite a lot of hot air, about the Retro Computers Limited scandal.
£250k of investment, about 10 prototype units to show for it, and IndieGoGo promised / threatened lawsuits and all kinds and did literally NOTHING about it. They now just close queries from backers of it, and don't issue public statements on it.
If you want to fix yourself, IGG, fix that campaign and go through with your promises. Or you should have shut up and said "You're on your own" to backers from the very start, and at least reply in that respect when they query.
I've never used the platform, but I've used Kickstarter and a few others and they've always delivered and responded for me. I certainly wouldn't touch them now.
The way to judge a company is not by products, prices, or anything else. The only thing that matters is how they deal with established or previous customers. IGG suck in that respect, despite making a lot of noise to the contrary they literally did nothing about someone walking off with £250k when they were threatening them with lawsuits if they didn't deliver. And the guy is still around, still active, still running other companies... it's not like he did a runner to Barbados, like some of the scam Kickstarter-esque things.
Switzerland and Finland have almost as high gun-ownership, no problem.
And, again, if the problem is that even the police are too scared of everyone having weapons, maybe it's time to stop being the most heavily-armed-citizens country by introducing some fecking gun control.
And you might also want to ask "Why are police at risk of people shooting them, when they just charge in and start shooting innocent people for no good reason and then get away with it?"
Slashdot Mirror
Woah there.
That's just not true.
This is one product, from a guy who basically "subsidises" loss-making products in order to gain headlines, that does one very limited job, and has done for a very short period of time.
It's not acting as battery backup to ANYTHING. It's just smoothing a load, in effect. It's a big, giant UPS such as always been used - but it's not used to backup, it's used to smooth (same way that the biggest use of a UPS is to regulate the incoming power, not actually spend most of its life running all the kit off battery alone). And the energy companies have had those for decades, it's just a slightly different chemistry.
And Tesla's things are basically sold in a way that other companies would say "You've lined up a bunch of standardised lithium cells in a box and then sold them at cost? Yeah, of course it'll work, and of course you can make it cheap. Where's the profit?". This is why nobody "follows" what Tesla etc. does... any fool can launch satellites, give away cars, etc. if they are just throwing billions at doing it for cost-only (no profit). And of course you can then get cheap launches, and projects like this done cheaply. Because you're not paying for a sustainable product from a profitable business. You're paying for a standard thing that can be replicated in minutes by any battery firm in the world, but they'd ask you for the cost Tesla are charging, and some profit on top.
Believe it or not, a company giving things away at cost isn't a business partner you want in more than the short-term. If this thing stops working tomorrow, the electrical suppliers involved are in no big loss. Tuck it under "prototypes and testing" and move on. They wouldn't replace every similar box they have with something from Tesla. And Tesla wouldn't be able to supply them even if they did... they run on a knife-edge to be "first", not to provide a sustainable business, and they've come close to bankruptcy a lot of times and had to seek more investment.
Any fool can make a product and give their time away for free and the product at cost. And, sure, they'll pinch bits of the market. But what they won't do is own the market because everyone will be going "Yeah... and what happens when you have an unexpected expense and fold on me?".
Fact is, Tesla and all Musk properties literally do nothing that anyone else couldn't have done at any point. There's no magic sauce at all. This Tesla boxes are standard lithium cells packed into a standard kind of power conversion equipment such as can be found in all kinds of industries. What they do is sacrifice ALL their profit to get their name in the news.
The electrical companies could get one of these units from anyone else tomorrow. But it would cost more. And when it comes to "let's just roll this out across the our entire network", they will do that rather than touch Tesla. But while Tesla are basically giving them away, of course they'll use them.
"Not a sustainable business model" basically sums up every Musk property you see. They're all buoyed up by huge investment and break even at best. And their products are really nothing special at all.
Hell, yesterday, Musk managed to make "Our upright-landing rocket fucked up, couldn't land upright and so just crashed into the ocean, like dozens of others have done" into a positive headline.
I said developed country.
"Polygraph tests are a $2 billion industry in the US"
And completely inadmissable in any court in every developed country.
They're bunk. Nonsense. Tripe. Bullshit.
This one will be no different.
"To reach such a high clock speed (the i7-7740K normally has a base clock speed of 4.3 GHz), some serious cooling was needed, and liquid helium took temperatures down to -250 degrees Celsius."
Not the kind of technology that the average household is ever going to see.
You aren't gonna get into the double-digit GHz with standard single-core performance with an ordinary device (i.e. not liquid-cooled superconducty stuff).
That's just a fact of life, and physics. And such, we need to parallelise everything we can. There's nothing you might need to perform "ordinary" computing (including games) that can't really be parallelised well. Almost everything can. But we haven't bothered.
The wake-up call was 3D graphics, yes, but the reality is that everything needs to be threaded, thread-safe and parallelisable. The objections come from people who find it tricky to program that way, because we were almost all brought up on the concept of a list of instructions that you just run in order, and very few people were ever taught anything different. For decades "multi-threading" was just being able to run two such programs (if you did it carefully) in parallel, not actually parallelising the task or the solution.
Fact is, until something like quantum computing becomes mainstream (which is a way off, and still needs everyone to totally up-end their programming paradigms), you're stuck at the clock-speeds that you are and all you can do is add thousands of cores at that clock speed.
Notice how tiny embedded processors have come along in leaps and bounds, from microcontroller speeds to several GHz in a battery-powered device, but top-end processors are still stuck in the 4GHz range (and that's 1GHz but we can ramp up for short periods nowadays, which is even weirder!). That's your warning.
If you're single-threading in this day and age your days are numbered. Likely you'll get thousands of 5GHz cores (limited as they may be) before you ever see a 10Ghz machine (if ever).
Plenty of people survive falling asleep behind the wheel.
Just not usually the ones who are in the path of the car.
The driver? Pretty much they stand a good chance of living in a modern car no matter what they hit.
I have a 75" inch projected screen.
Not only can I see the difference between 480 and 720... the really important thing... is that I don't care.
If I sat and squinted and dots, sure I can see them. But I know the image is made of dots. It's always been made of dots. My old CRT had coloured dots just the same (i.e. three colours).
I didn't care then, and I don't care now. Because... when those dots are moving, you can't see them.
The real test is "at what point were you swearing at your TV because it wasn't good enough?". I don't ever remember complaining about PAL, non-HD, VHS-recorded video. And I could tell the difference between recorded and broadcast even back then. As we go forward in time through to the current day, literally the only technology that gave me a "worse" picture that I noticed was VideoCD, and that was because MPEG artefacts were "new".
I can never, in my entire life, remember watching the latest movie of the day and thinking "Oh, gosh, if only this was higher resolution, it looks so blocky and awful and it's ruining my enjoyment". I thought that about video games (I started out with a ZX Spectrum). I thought that about memory sizes, processor speeds, hard disk capacities.
But I have never once had a movie ruined because of the quality of reproduction of the technology (rather than a specific problem with a particular device). I watched Aliens on VHS and it engrossed me and scared the crap out of me just the same as it still does. Not because I didn't know any different - I had a SVGA monitor with live-TV in a window for many years before people ever even knew what HD was. But because it doesn't matter.
I think the same about audio - I don't notice that 7.1 because it doesn't matter to me. The images that go with them aren't ACTUALLY behind / above / to the side of me - I have to keep my eyes fixed forward. So 7.1 makes no sense to me. I honestly can't justify more than stero, if I'm honest and even that is optional. You could watch 99% of TV shows in equal mono and you'd not notice.
The people fussing about these things are the worst offenders - while literally looking for a reason to upgrade all the time, they also say how much better 4K is than HD, and HD was than SD. But never did they complain when they went and bought all their collection and equipment in HD again that it would all be a waste as obviously they would see the pixels and would be better waiting for 4K, no?
It's a nonsense. I can spot a stuck pixel at 50 paces on a PC. But watching movies or TV? The resolution barely matters one jot.
HDR is EXACTLY THE SAME. I've never sat there thinking "Oh, if only there were more colours available or a bigger range" with modern technology (even though I did that in the 8-bit and 16-bit era because you couldn't get games / paint programs / digitisers that could reproduce photo-realistic images then so any attempt to do so was obvious).
Same with digital cameras and the megapixel battles.
Honestly... you guys all fight over it. Because you'll never be happy. Because at no point have you ever had "that's great... that's the best that image is going to be for me". I pity you for that. You're pissing money away on things that I would never need to. I don't see how that's a status symbol to advertise.
Meanwhile, if the world's technology had stopped at 480i, 16-bit colour, and 44KHz stereo sound, I wouldn't have cared one bit.
When you're penalising carbon production with financial penalties, and subsidising solar and wind, what do you expect? You're forcing them out of the market.
Coal itself is profitable (even with the above 40% make a profit). It's the artificial entities around it that make it not so.
And you'll find that out when those subsidies end (which themselves only exist because they are cheaper than paying the "carbon fine"). Wind and solar are next to useless across most of the world.
Question: Given that nuclear is basically zero-carbon, and can do the always-available thing of coal, and is in the same scale of production as fossil fuels, why the hell are we shutting them down for silly child's windmills?
Sometimes it's not that easy.
I live in London. I struggled to get any signal at all. The UK turned off analogue years ago. And DVB-T / T2 literally wouldn't get a signal. I gave up trying for the last year.
I only returned to it recently (the RPi DVB-T hat looked cool and I wanted to set up tvheadend) and then ended up with the following config:
- A huge loft aerial that gets nothing, even with a booster, despite being in between some of the UK's biggest transmitters - Crystal Palace and Hemel Hempstead. I literally bought it myself as I couldn't believe that the signal from a HUGE shared aerial could be as weak as it was, and it ended up being even weaker. Despite being huge, dedicated, amplified and aligned precisely with very precise diagnostic tools with explicit signal statistics beyond "signal strength".
- A shared loft aerial and a serious amount of kit to share it across three properties (the boxes for it are in my loft and I googled them and they cost GBP1000 each).
- A GBP50 signal booster off Amazon on the end of it to actually bring the signal from something that "can see but can't lock on" to something that locks on enough to actually watch TV.
- At least two DVB-T sticks, the RPi hat thing and I even borrowed an ordinary TV because I was convinced something was wrong.
- A whole bunch of new coax, because even the manual-crimped ones affected the signal I was getting so I had to go "perfect" all the way.
Bear in mind that I live in a third-floor flat, with clear-line-of-sight (if not actual sight because of the distance involved) to both transmitters. I live inside the M25 (basically the road that circles and demarks "London" proper). We have 4G and fibre and all kinds of things, I'm not out in the sticks somewhere.
And it was a struggle involving boosters, new cable, loft aerials, pissing about aligning them precisely etc.
I'm trying to do DVB-S too now, because we also have a shared one of those. That looks to be better, according to my neighbours, but it's still not this a case of "use OTA, it'll work".
For the last year, I paid for a subscription to TVPlayer.com - it was just easier than faffing about. Bear in mind that I never paid for broadband (DSL), and was streaming it all over 4G... that actually worked out better, cheaper and gave me more channels than anything OTA, even including the data package.
I spent nearly GBP100 on kit to get a DVB-T signal I could watch. And that was in an already-established house with GBP1000 of shared aerial equipment.
Don't even ask about HD channels. I don't care and didn't look, but I have a small handful of whatever is on there, and they only mirror the SD channels but cut-out more.
If that's the kind of problem I'm seeing just miles from Central London, I highly doubt that "just use OTA digital" is going to be the end-solution for everyone that's filling up their data with Netflix.
I dunno... looks pretty competitive to me, for a first try:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ar...
You can be sure that in the year hence, and with Amazon rolling their own, that they are now at least on a par with some more traditional setups.
They literally only have to be a dollar cheaper (whether in power usage or purchase cost) to start taking over.
Most people *aren't* maxing out their servers 24/7/365.25. As such, ARM could be a serious threat. Especially if they can come in anywhere near cheap or they offer other advantages (e.g. presumably, if Amazon are making their own chips, they know EXACTLY what's running on their hardware and can optimise to their exact needs, like Google does with its own motherboards etc. in-house - both security and performance get a boost from that).
We don't.
Shops have been trying to make it a thing, for about 2-3 years now.
After some footage of Black Friday Walmart rampages a few years back on the news, suddenly shops decided they wanted that and tried to induce it.
Pretty much nobody cares. To us, it's just a pre-Christmas sale when you spend most of December Christmas shopping anyway. And the price reductions are even more fake than other sales. At least "January sales" actually happen as shops sell off leftover stock. Not everywhere, but they do.
Black Friday is also not just a "day"... it's a week and they're trying to make it a month. Nobody really cares. It's all hype and rubbish. There's literally no increase in sales over what you'd expect before Christmas.
It's not like the US where you effectively get two holidays in short succession. We get Christmas, and that's it. So nobody is going to splash out in November because everyone who was going to buy you gifts for Christmas will do the old "Oh, no, don't buy that, leave it for later (because I've already decided to buy it for you and I have no other ideas!)".
I use unique addresses per account.
A few pence for a catch-all domain name that just forwards to my "real" email, and I catch companies out like this all the time.
Best bit is when you start getting the "I know your password" scams with random emails and you can see people's customer database is compromised - because even in that case, you can just change the email assigned to that account (if you still want to use it!) and carry on regardless.
If I do HaveIBeenPwned.com on my domain, there are all kinds of addresses that have become public... but they are all easily traced back to source because only one source ever had each of them.
Like anything else when your credentials are compromised - stop using that service, null-route the email address given to them, change the account email and password (even if you never use them again, you don't want anyone else doing so either), and carry on with life.
I honestly do not understand anyone using a single credential (email address) across every service they ever use.
P.S. Once had a firm spam me on the email address that I'd given to their competitor. Turned out - and I literally had the CEO talking to me at that point - that a new employee of theirs had stolen the entire contact list from their old company in order to boost his sales... informed both companies and the data protection office and let them resolve it.
Got space for 6 cameras?
Then don't give me shit about having no room for SD cards or headphone sockets.
Yes, same.
There are only a few games that have ever really impressed me, and that scene is one of them. I remember being annoyed at the enemy appearing and shooting because I wanted to just look down and look around at it. The sights, wind noise, the "depth" of the bridge, it all worked perfectly.
I can only imagine what's possible nowadays with modern graphics hardware, a VR headset an story-tellers / scene-setters like that. But without something like Half-Life 3 most of us will never buy the equipment and so never know.
I no longer chase top-end hardware for games. I'm just constantly disappointed in the breaking of the mood with silly races, grinding, collect-this-stuff and XBox controls popping up over everything. None of them tell a story any more. HL/HL2 did. I'd go back and replay it constantly but there's a bit in HL2 that always crashes my machines... where you're being bombarded inside a town as you try to enter a building? That always breaks the mood and I struggle to continue through to the non-ending after that.
There aren't many moments in gaming that I truly remember. Some of them are quite odd (e.g. I loved Trine when I first saw it). But HL and HL2 and even the little HL2 teaser for HDR they put out... I remember those. And Quake. Most other things are just play-it, complete-it, never-touch-it.
So impossible that you were worried about other nation's getting there first?
And neither you - nor those other nations, nor anyone else - has bothered to go back, not even once, not even for a fleeting visit like originally in 50 years.
Not much over 50 years before Apollo, planes didn't exist. Now, 50 years after, we still haven't been back to the Moon even once.
Because it's expensive, risky, wasteful and unsustainable even with current technology. And the Moon is only ~400,000 km away. Mars is 54,600,000 km away.
Even getting there is ONE HUNDRED TIMES more difficult than the thing we did once, 50 years ago, and haven't even tried to replicate ever since.
Fucking Slashdot - that's -89.2 C and -153 C
And the difficulty and expense of all those things you mention is orders of magnitude greater than living in the Antarctic, which nobody does. Even the ISS doesn't have proper permanent residents, and that's only a day away if there's anything majorly wrong.
Heat:
Antarctica lowest: â'89.2 ÂC
Mars lowest: â'153 ÂC
Heating something from -153 to room temperature is the same energy as boiling it twice over. And you're doing that all day, every day, constantly and hoping the insulation saves you some power.
Power isn't free either, you need a whole bunch of equipment with a limited lifespan in a very harsh environment (see above) producing an AWFUL lot of power just to keep the temperature up and the lights on.
Water:
Collect it from where? How do you get more when you start having kids and living there? Nobody cares about recycling what you have but the processes are not 100% efficient... you'll lose water every time you use some. You'll need regular water sent to you by Earth or someone, or a way to generate it en-masse that we don't really have yet.
Food:
Now that you have limited water stocks, you need more water. Lots more water. More water to sustain the food year-round than you drink as pure-water yourself.
And that food doesn't grow out of nothing. It requires energy. From the soil, fertilizers, the sunlight, etc. It gets an awful lot of energy on Earth. It gets NOTHING on Mars except what you bring with you. E=mc^2. Though I'm slightly misusing it, you need an awful lot of solar power to make anything approaching a physical thing you can eat from the raw materials around you (which you will use up and need to be replenished from off-world sources unless you're literally synthesising food from pure energy, which you're not going to be for a few centuries yet). Watch/Read The Martian - terrible movie/book, precisely because you only need look at the calculations done in it to realise the amount of stuff you need for even one human to live any length of time.
Plants give out O2. Presuming you have them. You'd need about 700 potted plants to generate enough O2 and, more importantly, consume the CO2 that you're exhaling and choking yourself with. Per person. For anything from 5-10 people, you would need an entire garden centre or thereabouts. 24/7. Lit up, growing, thriving, fertilised, sustainable, no disease, etc.
Small groups may be able to survive for limited amounts of time presuming they have a reliable supply of very expensive and heavy equipment coming from Earth all the time.
You can no more "live on Mars" than you can "live on the Antarctic", or the bottom of the ocean... you need a lot of equipment and a ton of support and hope like hell that nothing goes wrong, and do it for short trips, with people willing to risk their lives and accept an awful lot of compromise.
NOT "Hey, let's all move there and start a family."
So, he's exactly 100% correct.
Allow me to clue you in here:
Musk has money to burn.
He has some (admittedly) noble aspirations.
He thinks that if he just burns all his money away to achieve them, that everyone else will join in. (P.S. That's not the case).
So he has a number of unprofitable adventures - that literally only make any money at all because of a) hype, b) people buying things being sold way under the cost of production, c) because it's a "designer" brand.
He can afford to throw all his money away on electric cars, space launches etc. and OBVIOUSLY everyone will jump on and say "Here, just launch this for me"... of course they will. He's basically giving it away.
Is he changing the industry? Not really. Is he improving the planet? Not at all. Is he showing viability and profitability anywhere that wasn't already obvious? No. He can't even make the batteries for the cars any cheaper even when he builds them himself en-masse. Literally, all he's doing is producing the same kit as everyone else could, in some silly ways, cutting some dangerous corners in places, and people are taking advantage to get something that from anywhere that wasn't just throwing money away would cost a lot more.
This he sees as a success. Depending on how you look at it, it's sort-of charity but not quite. It's charity to people who can afford space launches, $30,000 vehicles and digging tunnels through mountains.
Musk's tech is the same as everyone else's. Sidelined by "playboy" ideas like vertical-landing and rocket re-use (actually more expensive and dangerous than just ditching the thing), "sorta-self-driving-but-we-can't-say-that", running a power station from batteries, and publicity stunts like launching a car into space, etc.
When Musk runs out of money, there's nothing left. This is why he can state that he won't patent any of his innovations - there really aren't any to patent. The batteries are standard batteries, the cars are nothing that Ford couldn't knock out of the sales graphs ten-fold within a year (but why would they, they'd make almost no money from them at all, like Tesla). It's more "billionaire playboy building toy rockets because it's cool" than science, or even business.
He's a liability sponge for self-driving and space launches (and has had some spectacular failures, the upright-landing thing goes wrong quite a lot they just don't show you), and the vacuum-train idea and the tunnel-boring. Let him dig it, pay for the basic costs, who cares if his company goes bankrupt doing it, now you have 99% of a tunnel dug for you for basically less-than-cost.
Of course the big places back him and encourage him. But in terms of actual innovation, profitability, etc. he's not doing anything of interest at all.
But if you nod at him and play his ego, he just might build that tunnel that you honestly could never have afforded to do so, basically for free or at cost, and take all the responsibility if it goes wrong. Of course people glad-hand him in that respect!
Keep your mouths shut, boys, if he fucks up, we sue him, if he does it we get a free tunnel!
To sustain enough steam to power the world you would need, not unsurprisingly, the entire world's current supply of oil, gas, nuclear fission, solar, wind, hydro, etc. Because... that's pretty much what we use it to do (I'm excluding all losses here, for simplicity).
One you achieve fusion, you can literally power the entire world from 867 tonnes of hydrogen per year. That's maybe a shipping container full of hydrogen. Something we can pull out of the ocean.
For reference, we would need to burn 12 billion tonnes of oil, 10.4 billion tonnes of gas or even 7000 tonnes of uranium to do the same.
Pretty much the only thing more powerful is complete utilisation of E=mc^2 - merging antimatter and matter and capturing the blast. You'd only need 3 tonnes of antimatter to power the world in that instance.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...
Fusion, if it can be made to work, could power the entire world from one power station. Of course, that's not what would happen - we'd just end up USING UP all that energy and every country would have half a dozen of them. We'd end up synthesising rare materials and doing all the things we can't currently do because of the sheer amount of energy they require, rather than actually just settle on current usage coming from one place.
But it literally is an order of magnitude more energy than the nuclear reactors we have now, which are orders of magnitude more energy than even coal and oil, which are orders of magnitude more energy than anything else.
And it looks like we could viably do it inside the next century or so.
With that amount of energy, you could easily obliterate the planet, or fire things into space like they were paper planes.
Because dickheads write security policies.
"Let's have a piece of software, written by a third party, which runs as an elevated user and is capable of intercepting every file access, replacing content, scanning and modifying all memory for every user, even root/SYSTEM-owned processes, which inserts itself into every file, I/O and process hook, which starts as one of the first things on boot, and tells us whether or not other processes should be blindly trusted, by checking against a list of hashes of 'known-bad' things, which constantly updates automatically from an Internet server with proprietary-format instructions (that we can't dig into) from a third-party probably in Russia or the US, and do this to 'improve security'. Oh, and maybe even let it intercept and decide the veracity of every network packet on all network interfaces. Yeah, right. No problem there."
Or we could make an OS where such things aren't even possible for antivirus, let alone normal processes, and thus secure ourselves that way.
Sigh.
It's to do with the bonds between the parts of the nucleus, and the conversion of mass to energy.
If you take a bunch of 1 proton (Hydrogen) atoms which have
one or two extra neutrons (Deuterium, Triterium) and smash them together you will form an atom with more protons (Helium) and no neutrons, and get a bunch of "spare" neutrons which are either a) obliterated or b) ejected.
E=mc^2. A neutron worth of mass converted to energy is an awful lot.
In fission, you do something different. You take U235, fire another neutron at it, and it splits into two lighter elements, a bunch more neutrons get ejected (which keep the chain reaction going) and some of those get obliterated by the forces involved.
E=mc^2 again.
It's not about "you changed two things between two identical states and got free energy by doing so". It's "you used two different way of smashing things together, which results in one of the neutrons involved being obliterated and changed from mass to energy, and give you a bunch of waste products that you can't just recombine to get what you started with because some of it is now energy.
Fusion is also harder because you have MUCH tinier things that you need to smash together, and they don't want to do it naturally, whereas with fission the U235 becomes U236 quite easily, which is inherently unstable and will explode of its own accord very quickly anyway.
It's about "binding energy" of the start and end products. The binding energy (literally the energy used in the bonds that hold the thing together) of what you get out HAS TO BE LESS than the binding energy of what you put in. That's true for both fission of big atoms and fusion of tiny ones, but almost nothing in-between.
Which is why it's REALLY HARD to make the things in the middle which only really occur in stars because they have so much energy being given out that they can end up literally forging elements that wouldn't exist in any smaller reaction, just by chance.
Honestly, guys... a two second Google.
The one run by a guy who used to make bits for laser printers?
Yeah, I wouldn't hold much hope.
He may be way more qualified than I could ever be, but it just sounds like a PhD with an idea to me. There are literally millions of those kinds of people round the globe, and he hasn't really shown anything special or different.
Hell, his Wiki article still harps on about some amazing micromirror thing that would revolutionise the telecoms industry which he seems to have just... done nothing about.
Would trust this guy to come up with a new type of laser printer. Wouldn't expect him to somehow solve fusion in a way that nobody else in the world could.
But, hey, shiny website.
And the combined population of Europe is 741m (we passed 330m in 1916), pretty much has no border whatsoever (you could class the UK Channel as one of the only real "borders" as you know them... everywhere else you can literally just walk or drive between countries, unchallenged, at 70mph without stopping) and literally only two countries come anywhere close to having your gun ownership, yet NOT ONE OF THEM is within two orders of magnitude of your police-killing rates. Your point is?
Europe is certainly not all "European white" (hey, nice blaming the other races, well done! But European was the scene of some of the largest racial tensions in world history, if you don't remember that), is one of the most diverse continents, and is literally still splitting itself into pieces over immigration and other problems.
Lecture me when you can make a non-racist, non-bollocks statement about why your police are shooting and killing thousands more people each year than any other police force in the entire world (even when you combine an entire CONTINENT of police forces) - including places like South Africa.
They singularly failed to do anything, despite a lot of hot air, about the Retro Computers Limited scandal.
£250k of investment, about 10 prototype units to show for it, and IndieGoGo promised / threatened lawsuits and all kinds and did literally NOTHING about it. They now just close queries from backers of it, and don't issue public statements on it.
If you want to fix yourself, IGG, fix that campaign and go through with your promises. Or you should have shut up and said "You're on your own" to backers from the very start, and at least reply in that respect when they query.
I've never used the platform, but I've used Kickstarter and a few others and they've always delivered and responded for me. I certainly wouldn't touch them now.
The way to judge a company is not by products, prices, or anything else. The only thing that matters is how they deal with established or previous customers. IGG suck in that respect, despite making a lot of noise to the contrary they literally did nothing about someone walking off with £250k when they were threatening them with lawsuits if they didn't deliver. And the guy is still around, still active, still running other companies... it's not like he did a runner to Barbados, like some of the scam Kickstarter-esque things.
Switzerland and Finland have almost as high gun-ownership, no problem.
And, again, if the problem is that even the police are too scared of everyone having weapons, maybe it's time to stop being the most heavily-armed-citizens country by introducing some fecking gun control.
And you might also want to ask "Why are police at risk of people shooting them, when they just charge in and start shooting innocent people for no good reason and then get away with it?"