It's about GBP30-40 for a 100Ah 12V car lead-acid battery on a random site. These are mass-produced, cheap and easily available. Granted that they are heavy and large, but... scaling up... that's 1.2KWh alone. We'd only need ten car batteries to match it. That's GBP300-400.
Why, then does it cost the equivalent of nearly $3,500 (GBP2200) for the same here?
Sure, we allow leeway for different voltages (necessary for high-current loads, etc.), different technologies, deep-cycle, etc. but... that's a five-to-seven-fold increase over what we're using now for quite basic solar, wind, etc. power storage and can be obtained from any garage. And 10 car batteries aren't prohibitively large, expensive, difficult to handle, etc.
With 10 year warranty and 2KW peaks? That's way within range of such a pack. Hell, stick a decent split charger / inverter on the end, one designed for home use, and it still comes nowhere near the price of this home battery.
Is my maths wrong? Have I missed something? Quite what are we trying to sell here apart from an overpriced battery and some electronics on either end of it?
If he was twelve, XP was released before he was born.
In IT terms "before you were born" is old. Very old. Ancient. Dead. Buried. Gone.
I touched my last XP install two years ago when I migrated a school using it from XP to 8 (and all their servers a similar jump).
The prime argument? It was a school, and the OS they were using to teach ICT to the kids was OLDER than the kids. All of them. And, as such, they did not know how to operate it because they were all used to Vista, 7 and 8 at home. We were teaching them BACKWARDS skills to do things on OLDER software than the ICT skills they already had when they entered the school.
What percentage it's on is neither here nor there. Still WinZIP is on millions of computers. But it's old. And versions of WinZIP from the XP era are ancient. I bet I could find a ton of computers with Quicktime and Realplayer on them still. They're old. They're ancient.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in the EU. Your problems in the US are your problems.
And Windows XP is not "secure". It's like saying that a door you have laying in the shed is "secure" just because you're not using it so nobody would bother to break into it.
You have to consider local, internal attacks (especially if you're dealing with government, NHS, police, etc.) as well as anything from the outside. And you can't isolate XP enough to be secure and work in a networked fashion.
XP is dead. It's lifespan is over. Hardware support for it is dropping fast. I abandoned it in my last workplace because we had major difficulty getting drivers for things as simple as SATA controllers for it, not to mention wireless and network interfaces. Beyond that, 64-bit XP is niche and 32-bit XP prevents a lot of things working. Even for home use, a lot of games nowadays do not work on 32-bit-only systems. XP-64 also brings it's own share of driver problems as there are EVEN LESS XP-64 drivers than XP drivers.
Sure, you can virtualise it, but then you're not running XP at all, really. And still the problem is "It's on your network" if you want to do anything vaguely useful with it. And that provides an attack vector both to and from that machine if it's unsupported and compromisable.
Give it up. I held out until two years ago and that was FAR TOO LONG to hold out on XP for. The alternates really don't make users suffer at all after the initial acclimatisation.
Move on. It's not Windows - it's like someone running Slackware 7 in the modern day, on a 2.2 kernel. Sure, you can do it, but you're setting yourself up for a lot of hurt and hassle just because of the age of the tools and hardware you need to use.
If you have ANY significant number of XP machines, it's time to pay the pittance that an entirely new machine would cost (I'm getting business-class machines for GBP150 - $250? - with Windows 7/8 on them). If you have one or two machines, sure it's not particularly cost-effective but I guarantee you that it will hurt your wallet more when it goes wrong unexpectedly (virus, hardware replacement, data compromise, etc.).
And Windows 10 is expected to be free, for the most part.
If you have a "network", especially a business one, of any description, you are negligent in sticking on XP now. I would not want the most basic of business data processed on XP. I don't deal in multi-million dollar networks, I don't do high-end gear with clouds and servers coming out of my ears. I do small schools. But, for any business that includes a network or server of any size, I would be doing them a disservice to suggest that that DON'T move off XP. Not just failing to mention the possibility, but failing to actively DISCOURAGE further use of their network with XP clients.
You can't secure XP. You can isolate it, but you can't secure it. And there's no real thing as a limited user in XP because it's basically a cinch to demonstrate privilege escalation using any number of pieces of bog-standard software on XP (that you CAN'T patch or upgrade because the XP releases of that software are no longer updated!).
Give it up, really. And you don't even have to pay Microsoft a penny.
There's just a slight difference and you've not chosen an analogous situation.
It's more like telling users that they'll just have to get used to feeling ill every time they look through your new holographic windscreen, no matter how much it makes them hurl. "You'll get used to it", as they have to pull over and shut their eyes for ten minutes before they can resume driving,
There's only one game on the planet that makes me feel ill when I play it (Duke Nukem 3D), something to do with the way the perspective moves as you rotate. So I don't "suffer" with anything like this at all.
Learning to drive, however, is an entirely different matter. If a VR headset makes you feel ill and you have to "battle through it" to enjoy it, the market will collapse overnight because everyone will buy one, stop using it, then tell all their friends not to bother.
Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?
Because, I know I wouldn't. Not without hashes of pre-infected data that I could trust, on some untouched backup device, to compare against. And then the restoration, comparison and cleanup operation is actually worse than just restoring to pre-infection backups.
You have to think of this. These people put a virus on your system that locked your files away. And you're "trusting" them to not only restore those files but to do so without introducing further infection vectors in the process. What's to say that their decrypt / encrypt routine isn't just a smokescreen to infect all your files with something else en-route? Or that they've not just done it to delay you realising that they now have that document you had with all your passwords in it...
If you're victim to ransomware, there are two options:
- You have no backups, the data wasn't important enough for a GBP50 device and you pressing the button once a month, so you've not lost anything of major value by not paying the ransom. - You have virtually-full, verified backups just over there anyway and would have to perform all kinds of integrity checks to ensure the ransomed data is clean.
The option of "pay ransom" is really a sign that you've failed yourself (and your customers, if you're a business). You can't stop data exposure, but to have to pay to get your data back, that's just stupidity on your part.
As such, blocking the infection vector is infinitely more important than anything else, and then taking a good backup on a regular basis is second on the list. Anything else is very much bottom of the list.
What scares me most about ransomware is not the encryption, or the ransom, or the difficulty of decryption (once that data is compromised, it's gone, it's as simple as that). It's purely that it means a system-level restore of your PC / network, and that you had a hole somewhere whereby it could wreak that kind of havoc.
Actually, products like crisps (potato chips in the US) are probably worse than even that. It's the metabolisation and fermentation of the food in your teeth that produces the acids the decay them.
And bits of a starchy product like potato stuck in/on your teeth hang around a lot longer and in lot greater quantities than anything you might swig from a can (which washes over your teeth briefly, is swallowed, then stimulates saliva production, all within a few seconds).
You know what's worse than all this stuff? How you eat/drink. If you swash the drink around your mouth, you're elongating the exposure greatly. If you have stuff in/on your teeth (even invisible) then you're doing even more that's bad for your teeth.
Sorry, but by the grand scheme of things, a swig of Coke at lunch isn't doing anything. And virtually every human that's ever lived, ever, has had dental caries at some point - to some extent. It's almost a uniquely human thing, because of certain oral bacteria.
If you cared about dental health, you wouldn't eat this stuff. You don't need government banishment to stop doing that. Or even stop your children doing that. Few people, however, ever go down that route. And if you do, banning crisps (chips) is going to do a lot more for your teeth than anything to do with sugar in drinks, flouride in the water, etc.
I should think that something like an earthquake - a regular, powerful, but maybe overall-small contribution, to movement that's visible in frequency data from a range of devices in a geographical area (i.e. averaging out the noise from all devices to leave behind that which is only common to them all) would show up.
I might be vastly wrong here, but even a few thousand devices reporting a set of FFT data of a certain frequency range (which range would take experimentation but I guess existing research would be able to point the way quite quickly), averaged out with nearby neighbours, and then compared geographically should be able to avoid any random noise and provide enough info to know something is up. In the same way that astrophotography often uses image-stacking - take 1000 blurry photographs, center them, overlay them, average them out (so they each only contribute 1000th of the signal for each pixel) and you can get some pin-sharp detail of what's actually there in the images.
A 1000 people running the app in Silicon Valley should be enough to average out "in your pocket bounces", "car vibration", etc. to provide just the background movement that's apparent in all of them.
What are the chances that you could get people to sign up for some kind of app, SETI@Home-like, that frequency-analyses the accelerometer in a phone tied with the GPS-location without any extra fancy hardware?
Done en-masse, FFT'ing to a graph of an interesting frequency range, talking back to a cloud server, surely you could spot a pattern even through the noise of every single movement of every phone in order to detect a consistent, regional variation in a certain, shared, frequency range?
Surely, if you just have enough people signed up to the app, you can not only detect an earthquake (whether you can detect it early enough to do anything is still an open question, really - predicting earthquakes is little more than voodoo, and it's only physical movement of the earth itself that we can actually detect and report on!) but you could also use the app to alert those same people as it happens?
How much of that is pure mechanical failure, and how much of that is the driver failing to maintain the vehicle properly and regularly?
Mechanical failure is lost in the noise. And, short of brake system failing at high speed and the handbrake being unable to bring you to a stop in time (which is possible even with a reasonable braking distance), or possibly a serious steering fault, quite what mechanical failure is going to cause you to hit something if you were driving with proper bounds - at the correct speed, distance, and care?
Pure mechanical failure of a critical system causing an accident is really quite rare indeed. Even the Toyota "unintended acceleration" stuff turned out to be mostly user-error.
Do you even understand what a Peltier does? It sucks at power generation, absolutely sucks, even if it's possible.
Because primarily it's not a generator - that's just an inefficient side-effect - it's a heat pump. And what you're suggesting is to heat the hot end of a Peltier, thereby doing what? Generating a pittance of electricity. You'll also need to cool the cold end of else it's just a block of metal. It's the temperature difference that matters. And there's no such thing as a free lunch in energy terms.
However, batteries do suck. But carving out valleys to be dams and reservoirs also sucks.
The efficiencies - again - of a small in-house reservoir are so poor as to be worthless. How much power do you think you're going to get by pumping even mains-pressure water through a pipe? I'll tell you... you can power an FM radio, because there's an actual commercial product that does this on your shower hose, and I'm not aware of ANYTHING more powerful that uses the same generation method. And anything you've pumped to the loft and dropped down won't be that pressured. And what do you do with the water once it's dropped? You wasted it, that's what. Because pumping it between tanks forever is going to require more maintenance than a loft tank, and those have gone out of fashion for all kinds of reasons, not least that a lot of them can't be classed as drinking water.
The efficiencies we're talking about here are pittances. By comparison, a decent, expensive, high-tech battery is actually quite a commercial piece of hardware, if they can pull it off. If batteries were so inefficient, you wouldn't use one in your car. 12V 400Ah of power is not to be sniffed at and can least you YEARS and YEARS with an ancient lead-acid technology (I've never had to change - or maintain - a car battery in my life yet). That's why all the home wind- and solar-generation plants use such things, they're one of the best things we've got on that scale. The next step up is flooding some poor bugger's village to make a new reservoir and destroying the natural habitats.
And the other 89+ countries all colluded, I suppose?
Everything is a poison in sufficient amounts. Everything. Even water. Pretending any substance can be zero-issue is the problem. They all have doses at which adverse effects will appear in one, some, most or all people. Stay below a correct, proven, recommended dose and you minimise the problems. But still someone will have problems with it.
In the same way that we can't even make fucking bread (the staple of centuries, if not millennia) any more without someone dying or getting ill from it somewhere, an artificial sweetener will always have "that one guy" that can't have it. Rather than ban the substance because of that, just stop that guy having it, and set a dose to minimise the number of guys it affects.
That's what the UK do. That's what the FDA do. That's what all the other countries do too. Based on how many people react badly to the substance in experiments. This isn't politics of one agency in one country, this is globally-proven science and statistics.
"Aspartame has been found to be safe for human consumption by more than ninety countries worldwide, with FDA officials describing aspartame as "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety as "clear cut""
So.... no. Probably not. But judging by the comments on here, you're not alone.
Have sugar. If you don't want sugar, but you want your drink to taste sweet, you can have natural sugars. Otherwise, you're fucked and eating synthetic stuff no matter what?
Almost all of those substances - in moderation - are food-safe and no more dangerous than eating sugar, or any other natural food. Some people might collapse and die from a single exposure, others it will make ill, others it will upset them a bit, but the vast majority will just eat it and get on with life.
Seasoned programmers that "know their stuff" that have been told to keep their un-maintained junk out of the kernel before now? And in no polite terms?
"Worked beautifully" resulting in many unbootable (or, worse, variably bootable) systems over the years. It's far from perfect (I'm not expecting perfect, but it's far from it).
Though I don't doubt that there are entire swathes of people happy with it, that there is so much opposition is not only indicative that it's far-from-perfect, but that many people may be avoiding using it altogether?
I'm by no means a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to new stuff but systemd still appears a backward step and even the DISCUSSION of systemd generating such heat is indicative of underlying problems that aren't being addressed (even if those problems are entirely political, which I doubt).
And I agree that there's little competition but things like upstart were in fact the middle-ground. Systemd has a huge headstart, but also keeps hitting political brick-walls in its race to be default and little is done to appease or even acknowledge the criticisms
"We know better" is not the basis of any argument for either side. But "We're never going to change either" is just head-banging nonsense. I don't think anyone is opposed to change on the SysVInit side (the very existence of upstart and a variety of other projects), they just don't think this is the right change. However, the systemd crowd are very much in the "We know best, so you need to get onboard" arena.
And when you're dealing with critical areas like even being able to boot a kernel, you need to dial back to the users and say "What do you need?", not "This is all you'll ever be given, deal with it"
Systemd is one of those thing that people know will end in disaster. Sure, it works at the moment. But a personality will jump into it, or a bug will catch up with their design, or something else. And it will all come crashing down.
What bugs me about systemd is not the idea behind systemd. It's the implementation. Using cgroups and other kernel-provided features, it's able to provide functionality that we don't have elsewhere. But rather than break-down that functionality and make each part replaceable, and use "old" methods to do some things while they are replaced with "new" methods.
It's the all-or-nothing nature of systemd that I hate. There's no reason it can't be done in some other way. There's no reason that, even at a base level, you can't write scripts that do the same as it does - for all functions, but also for parts of the functions. As such, it's not modular, not changeable, it's just a lump of code that you accept having complete control of your machine or not. And I don't.
Honestly, I'm waiting for the crash-and-burn moment at which someone steps up, gives us the same features, using predictable, modular code or even scripts, and we can put in the bits we like and leave out the bits we don't like and replace any bit and NOBODY will know or care that we've done that.
The biggest edits I ever did on Wikipedia, many years ago now, were to the articles about ZX Spectrum games.
I spent hours loading up games in emulators, capturing screenshots, writing out information, etc. Most of the articles for those games existed already, I just did things like link the developers, publishers, etc. categorised them, added screenshots where they were missing.
By a year later, every screenshot I'd done had been removed. Not because of copyright - but because when I'd first done them, I'd tagged them as per the required tags for copyright (e.g. fair usage, etc.). I'd spent forever putting all the tags on after being told for one article. The next month, my images were removed because a new tag had been introduced and I hadn't updated the images with it. So I updated the tags. Repeat ad infinitum for nearly a year. Every time, warnings about tags, copyright-tag bots spamming my talk page, new tags popping out of nowhere and serving no new purpose but those same bots stripping any images that did not have them.
In the end, I gave up. I stopped editing. I stopped categorising. I stopped screenshotting. All my screenshots (despite being perfectly fine for a year while I was tagging them) disappeared within a month. Most of those articles never got even a title screenshot back and are now either plain-text or the entire article is history.
And every "new" game article I added was removed for being "non-notable", when tiny little indie game articles stayed up for years, and the article were about huge, mainstream, industry-changing games.
Sorry, but my time and effort was wasted, not by fans of the games, readers of the articles, or even the article curators. Just by random paranoid spamming bots and people who - at first - I presumed were editors and moderators but actually were most likely just random people who wanted to criticize and break the articles for their own stats(?), I don't know.
All that happened is that the articles turned to dust and rotted over the years while the talk pages filled up with arguments.
You wanted to compete with Facebook. Which you took to mean that I should be shoved onto it forcibly even though I have a fully-functioning social network with all my details, photos and friends plugged in anyway. You thought I should be badgered into submission until I moved all that content over, and have to go via roundabout routes to opt out of this stuff - on a GMail account I'd have since the first days of invite-only accounts.
And you didn't listen or care at the time. If you're that forcible with getting the information out of me, imagine how forcible you'll be when I try to get that information on me back.
Wouldn't touch it with a bargepole (despite being quite Google-centric in my services otherwise) just because of the "YOU MUST SIGN UP NOW" attitude.
If you'd just done what you did with Google Mail, slowly adding in features (e.g. Google Talk, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc.) quietly that I can choose to use as I see fit, and just stumble across them as I need, and can just use them without being required to fill out EVERY DAMN BOX every time, then it would have taken off much nicer. And if I don't want to use them... well, they're still there any time I do.
Fact is, my Google Account is still the same one and STILL does not have a Google+ profile. Not even an image. Because, sorry, it doesn't work that way. I choose to use the service, you don't choose who must use it. When you tried to force me to fill out and use that part of my Google profile, I did everything I could NOT to. And look who won.
Okay, why does my "bullshit detector" go off. Not on the article, but I thought I'd pop onto Wikipedia and find out when Oculus Rift was first started as a project.
There's no mention. They mention the huge buyout in 2014, but no mention of the start of it, even under the "History" section.
And only one of the citations is from before that - an article in 2012. Now, it's not a deep secret, I can google and find stuff from that kind of era discussing it, but why OMIT this information in the History section of your own product's page?
Maybe it's because, 3 years on from the kickstarter, and millions and millions of dollars later, there's still no commercial product?
They heated cinnabar ore. You get mercury when you do that. These people had metal, mined, and could build vast structures that weigh more than any skyscraper did for millennia after them.
You don't need a supernatural explanation that they found a liquid metal (a liquid mirror, in effect) fucking intriguing and so prized it as some kind of treasure to bury with their kings.
That people in these ancient eras had brains seemed to be frowned upon, as if we're the only humans who could be allowed to do that. Ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, etc. civilisations all had astounding knowledge and abilities. Just because they were never able to fully capitalise on them and then we suffered a few thousand years of poxy ignorance doesn't mean they weren't geniuses. (Just so happens that several of those millennia were dominated by religious shit, Crusades, etc.).
Antikythera (extremes of "clockwork", gearing and mathematical technology), pyramids, battery technology, steam-powered engines, railways, they had a shit-ton of expertise, but the problem was that the insights were few and far between and hard to do, and secondary to surviving for the most part, so unfortunately they never were able to be joined together in the way we could do now.
Fuck your aliens. Pay your respects to thousands of years of education, science, inquisitiveness, some of the greatest minds who ever lived, single individuals who knew all of established science for their time, amazing insights, and artisans capable of creating their off-the-wall ideas using some of the most difficult craftsmanships in existence.
The problem is that they know all their own libraries still make them money. People are still making from the White Album.
As that anchor is dragged forward, those artists and albums at the back stop making money for them. And then they realise that as that anchor is inexorably drawn forward from that point on, they lose more money every year because it's likely the new artists aren't making as much as the old back catalogues (maybe individual examples, but not overall).
And then they realise that, in 50 years time, when all they have to monetise is the junk that they've been churning out recently, they are dead in the water and the industry will struggle to sustain itself. They're not saving themselves for today, but for their retirement, when they're basing their business on people buying Britney Spears' back catalogue etc.
That said, any law that has to be revised the number of times that the copyright ones have should really be scrapped or made indefinite. If NOBODY in a certain industry (music industry, Disney, etc.) has ever seen their copyright expire, how on earth can we say that we need to legislate to extend that protection continually - and multiple times - without making the case that it should be indefinite or not?
I'm not saying that's a GOOD solution, but someone needs to review the time and money spent messing about extending laws to cover timeframes - including overruling laws retroactively - and either fix a date in stone or make it indefinite. Pretending that it will eventually end up in the public domain while that never being legally possible is just outright scumbaggery.
If the software is running on the user's computer, at their express request, to do something - at the user's express request, then I can't see how you could rule any other way.
If we were talking about an online-only service that "proxies" the web for you and removes ads, then you may have more of a case, however.
And spyware that does it against or without user's consent (replacing other's adverts with your own, eh, Lenovo?) then that's a huge other matter entirely.
But it's like ruling that if the user WANTS to look at a plain-text version of a particular webpage then that's up to them. So long as the viewer is the one choosing to change the content and knows that, why would you ever think differently.
The alternative just doesn't bear thinking about. Websites DEMANDING that nothing interferes in the process of displaying their page as they intended. Unskippable ads, etc. like on DVD's. DRM for the web, effectively. No thanks.
Erm... is it just me that immediately thinks of DVB-T here? That's exactly what happened.
In the UK we were pushed to upgrade to "digital" (DVB-T). Within a few years, DVB-T2 - an incompatible standard that required hardware upgrades - was actually required to support HDTV channels, and even the "extra" channels that couldn't fit on standard DVB.
Just being a standard doesn't stop obsoletion. Wireless shows you that. Within days of actually being ratified as a standard, the next wireless standard is in the works and people start pushing our pre-N or pre-AC products.
If anything, being "standard"is something that happens after the event, not before, and when provides basis for obsoletion. "You mean you've only got a HTML-4 browser? Our website requires HTML-5. Why? Because."
This is the cost of change, evolution and rapid development. Things get left behind, even if they were good products/services. It's not even necessarily deliberate. Who the hell is going to want to risk bricking your old devices by pushing a firmware update to a device they no longer sell, running on a chip that's no longer produced, with firmware that no longer has active development, to give you features that the old hardware can't use anyway (e.g. pushing HD or new codecs into the YouTube apps?). Nobody.
I don't know if you've noticed but today's generation just ignores ads. I work in schools - the pupils do not see anywhere near as many ads as I did when I was a child. TV ads are dead - they are background noise. We've trained children to ignore all ads in games and online. Streaming services mean that ads have to be forced and - inevitably - the kids find a way to download without ads anyway.
I bet you could hum the tune to several hundreds ads if you went through one of those websites that shows you old ads from your country. The kids today? Probably only the extreme ones.
The more you force ads, the more you force people to ignore them if they can't bypass them. It's counter-productive.
Honestly, I think it's more to do with legacy code. Who has the code to some 10 year old early "smart" TV that ran on a custom chip that's not non-standard and unavailable, and so who's going to do the development and testing to push newer formats, HD, etc. down to that TV's firmware.
In my house alone, I have YouTube apps on several phones, a tablet, a cable box, an older cable box, a DVD player, a Blu-Ray player, a cheap DVB-S box, the original Wii, etc. To update all of those to newer formats, HD quality, etc. may not even be technically possible (which just generates more exceptions and differences in the codebase), plus any licensing, plus the risk of breaking the device, plus liaising with all the manufacturer's (most of whom just won't care as they're not selling that model any more), etc. It's just an enormous upheaval for zero gain.
And it's not just YouTube. BBC iPlayer suffers the same fate - all the above devices have BBC iPlayer apps on them too and some of those no longer work because it would need some cheap Chinese manufacturer to bother to develop, test and push a new firmware for a device they no longer sell (or, even if they do, represents a tiny portion of their sales in only a particular country). Just the risk of bricking something isn't worth the hassle of trying to update it.
We are certainly breeding a throw-away culture of technology because of this, yes, but that's not "enforced" so much as inevitable. A £20 DVD player with network connectivity and an iPlayer/YouTube app on it - if the app on that stops working? Who cares?
Just the development time alone to push out even the tiniest of working updates for devices like that is enormous. You might even find that the original development team, or even company, doesn't exist any more. Will consumers notice? Not really. They have ten devices that can do the same and they won't be turning on the DVD player to watch YouTube when they can ChromeCast it from their phone or whatever nowadays.
It's obsolescence but not necessarily deliberate and malicious obsolescence. Just necessity.
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It's about GBP30-40 for a 100Ah 12V car lead-acid battery on a random site. These are mass-produced, cheap and easily available. Granted that they are heavy and large, but... scaling up... that's 1.2KWh alone. We'd only need ten car batteries to match it. That's GBP300-400.
Why, then does it cost the equivalent of nearly $3,500 (GBP2200) for the same here?
Sure, we allow leeway for different voltages (necessary for high-current loads, etc.), different technologies, deep-cycle, etc. but... that's a five-to-seven-fold increase over what we're using now for quite basic solar, wind, etc. power storage and can be obtained from any garage. And 10 car batteries aren't prohibitively large, expensive, difficult to handle, etc.
With 10 year warranty and 2KW peaks? That's way within range of such a pack. Hell, stick a decent split charger / inverter on the end, one designed for home use, and it still comes nowhere near the price of this home battery.
Is my maths wrong? Have I missed something? Quite what are we trying to sell here apart from an overpriced battery and some electronics on either end of it?
If he was twelve, XP was released before he was born.
In IT terms "before you were born" is old. Very old. Ancient. Dead. Buried. Gone.
I touched my last XP install two years ago when I migrated a school using it from XP to 8 (and all their servers a similar jump).
The prime argument? It was a school, and the OS they were using to teach ICT to the kids was OLDER than the kids. All of them. And, as such, they did not know how to operate it because they were all used to Vista, 7 and 8 at home. We were teaching them BACKWARDS skills to do things on OLDER software than the ICT skills they already had when they entered the school.
What percentage it's on is neither here nor there. Still WinZIP is on millions of computers. But it's old. And versions of WinZIP from the XP era are ancient. I bet I could find a ton of computers with Quicktime and Realplayer on them still. They're old. They're ancient.
And, like XP, they are obsolete.
Sorry, but what tosh.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in the EU. Your problems in the US are your problems.
And Windows XP is not "secure". It's like saying that a door you have laying in the shed is "secure" just because you're not using it so nobody would bother to break into it.
You have to consider local, internal attacks (especially if you're dealing with government, NHS, police, etc.) as well as anything from the outside. And you can't isolate XP enough to be secure and work in a networked fashion.
XP is dead. It's lifespan is over. Hardware support for it is dropping fast. I abandoned it in my last workplace because we had major difficulty getting drivers for things as simple as SATA controllers for it, not to mention wireless and network interfaces. Beyond that, 64-bit XP is niche and 32-bit XP prevents a lot of things working. Even for home use, a lot of games nowadays do not work on 32-bit-only systems. XP-64 also brings it's own share of driver problems as there are EVEN LESS XP-64 drivers than XP drivers.
Sure, you can virtualise it, but then you're not running XP at all, really. And still the problem is "It's on your network" if you want to do anything vaguely useful with it. And that provides an attack vector both to and from that machine if it's unsupported and compromisable.
Give it up. I held out until two years ago and that was FAR TOO LONG to hold out on XP for. The alternates really don't make users suffer at all after the initial acclimatisation.
Move on. It's not Windows - it's like someone running Slackware 7 in the modern day, on a 2.2 kernel. Sure, you can do it, but you're setting yourself up for a lot of hurt and hassle just because of the age of the tools and hardware you need to use.
If you have ANY significant number of XP machines, it's time to pay the pittance that an entirely new machine would cost (I'm getting business-class machines for GBP150 - $250? - with Windows 7/8 on them). If you have one or two machines, sure it's not particularly cost-effective but I guarantee you that it will hurt your wallet more when it goes wrong unexpectedly (virus, hardware replacement, data compromise, etc.).
And Windows 10 is expected to be free, for the most part.
If you have a "network", especially a business one, of any description, you are negligent in sticking on XP now. I would not want the most basic of business data processed on XP. I don't deal in multi-million dollar networks, I don't do high-end gear with clouds and servers coming out of my ears. I do small schools. But, for any business that includes a network or server of any size, I would be doing them a disservice to suggest that that DON'T move off XP. Not just failing to mention the possibility, but failing to actively DISCOURAGE further use of their network with XP clients.
You can't secure XP. You can isolate it, but you can't secure it. And there's no real thing as a limited user in XP because it's basically a cinch to demonstrate privilege escalation using any number of pieces of bog-standard software on XP (that you CAN'T patch or upgrade because the XP releases of that software are no longer updated!).
Give it up, really. And you don't even have to pay Microsoft a penny.
There's just a slight difference and you've not chosen an analogous situation.
It's more like telling users that they'll just have to get used to feeling ill every time they look through your new holographic windscreen, no matter how much it makes them hurl. "You'll get used to it", as they have to pull over and shut their eyes for ten minutes before they can resume driving,
There's only one game on the planet that makes me feel ill when I play it (Duke Nukem 3D), something to do with the way the perspective moves as you rotate. So I don't "suffer" with anything like this at all.
Learning to drive, however, is an entirely different matter. If a VR headset makes you feel ill and you have to "battle through it" to enjoy it, the market will collapse overnight because everyone will buy one, stop using it, then tell all their friends not to bother.
The guy who posted junk about MMR vaccinations causing autism was also fired.
Should we believe them too, just to be contrary to expectations?
Anyone with a brain:
Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?
Because, I know I wouldn't. Not without hashes of pre-infected data that I could trust, on some untouched backup device, to compare against. And then the restoration, comparison and cleanup operation is actually worse than just restoring to pre-infection backups.
You have to think of this. These people put a virus on your system that locked your files away. And you're "trusting" them to not only restore those files but to do so without introducing further infection vectors in the process. What's to say that their decrypt / encrypt routine isn't just a smokescreen to infect all your files with something else en-route? Or that they've not just done it to delay you realising that they now have that document you had with all your passwords in it...
If you're victim to ransomware, there are two options:
- You have no backups, the data wasn't important enough for a GBP50 device and you pressing the button once a month, so you've not lost anything of major value by not paying the ransom.
- You have virtually-full, verified backups just over there anyway and would have to perform all kinds of integrity checks to ensure the ransomed data is clean.
The option of "pay ransom" is really a sign that you've failed yourself (and your customers, if you're a business). You can't stop data exposure, but to have to pay to get your data back, that's just stupidity on your part.
As such, blocking the infection vector is infinitely more important than anything else, and then taking a good backup on a regular basis is second on the list. Anything else is very much bottom of the list.
What scares me most about ransomware is not the encryption, or the ransom, or the difficulty of decryption (once that data is compromised, it's gone, it's as simple as that). It's purely that it means a system-level restore of your PC / network, and that you had a hole somewhere whereby it could wreak that kind of havoc.
Actually, products like crisps (potato chips in the US) are probably worse than even that. It's the metabolisation and fermentation of the food in your teeth that produces the acids the decay them.
And bits of a starchy product like potato stuck in/on your teeth hang around a lot longer and in lot greater quantities than anything you might swig from a can (which washes over your teeth briefly, is swallowed, then stimulates saliva production, all within a few seconds).
You know what's worse than all this stuff? How you eat/drink. If you swash the drink around your mouth, you're elongating the exposure greatly. If you have stuff in/on your teeth (even invisible) then you're doing even more that's bad for your teeth.
Sorry, but by the grand scheme of things, a swig of Coke at lunch isn't doing anything. And virtually every human that's ever lived, ever, has had dental caries at some point - to some extent. It's almost a uniquely human thing, because of certain oral bacteria.
If you cared about dental health, you wouldn't eat this stuff. You don't need government banishment to stop doing that. Or even stop your children doing that. Few people, however, ever go down that route. And if you do, banning crisps (chips) is going to do a lot more for your teeth than anything to do with sugar in drinks, flouride in the water, etc.
[Citation required]
Don't conflate "some European countries" with "the whole of Europe including the UK", for example.
Use a real browser.
One that forces you to click-to-play any plugin (option in Chrome, for instance).
It's probably the Twitch one that's playing for you, on that page.
I should think that something like an earthquake - a regular, powerful, but maybe overall-small contribution, to movement that's visible in frequency data from a range of devices in a geographical area (i.e. averaging out the noise from all devices to leave behind that which is only common to them all) would show up.
I might be vastly wrong here, but even a few thousand devices reporting a set of FFT data of a certain frequency range (which range would take experimentation but I guess existing research would be able to point the way quite quickly), averaged out with nearby neighbours, and then compared geographically should be able to avoid any random noise and provide enough info to know something is up. In the same way that astrophotography often uses image-stacking - take 1000 blurry photographs, center them, overlay them, average them out (so they each only contribute 1000th of the signal for each pixel) and you can get some pin-sharp detail of what's actually there in the images.
A 1000 people running the app in Silicon Valley should be enough to average out "in your pocket bounces", "car vibration", etc. to provide just the background movement that's apparent in all of them.
What are the chances that you could get people to sign up for some kind of app, SETI@Home-like, that frequency-analyses the accelerometer in a phone tied with the GPS-location without any extra fancy hardware?
Done en-masse, FFT'ing to a graph of an interesting frequency range, talking back to a cloud server, surely you could spot a pattern even through the noise of every single movement of every phone in order to detect a consistent, regional variation in a certain, shared, frequency range?
Surely, if you just have enough people signed up to the app, you can not only detect an earthquake (whether you can detect it early enough to do anything is still an open question, really - predicting earthquakes is little more than voodoo, and it's only physical movement of the earth itself that we can actually detect and report on!) but you could also use the app to alert those same people as it happens?
How much of that is pure mechanical failure, and how much of that is the driver failing to maintain the vehicle properly and regularly?
Mechanical failure is lost in the noise. And, short of brake system failing at high speed and the handbrake being unable to bring you to a stop in time (which is possible even with a reasonable braking distance), or possibly a serious steering fault, quite what mechanical failure is going to cause you to hit something if you were driving with proper bounds - at the correct speed, distance, and care?
Pure mechanical failure of a critical system causing an accident is really quite rare indeed. Even the Toyota "unintended acceleration" stuff turned out to be mostly user-error.
Do you even understand what a Peltier does? It sucks at power generation, absolutely sucks, even if it's possible.
Because primarily it's not a generator - that's just an inefficient side-effect - it's a heat pump. And what you're suggesting is to heat the hot end of a Peltier, thereby doing what? Generating a pittance of electricity. You'll also need to cool the cold end of else it's just a block of metal. It's the temperature difference that matters. And there's no such thing as a free lunch in energy terms.
However, batteries do suck. But carving out valleys to be dams and reservoirs also sucks.
The efficiencies - again - of a small in-house reservoir are so poor as to be worthless. How much power do you think you're going to get by pumping even mains-pressure water through a pipe? I'll tell you... you can power an FM radio, because there's an actual commercial product that does this on your shower hose, and I'm not aware of ANYTHING more powerful that uses the same generation method. And anything you've pumped to the loft and dropped down won't be that pressured. And what do you do with the water once it's dropped? You wasted it, that's what. Because pumping it between tanks forever is going to require more maintenance than a loft tank, and those have gone out of fashion for all kinds of reasons, not least that a lot of them can't be classed as drinking water.
The efficiencies we're talking about here are pittances. By comparison, a decent, expensive, high-tech battery is actually quite a commercial piece of hardware, if they can pull it off. If batteries were so inefficient, you wouldn't use one in your car. 12V 400Ah of power is not to be sniffed at and can least you YEARS and YEARS with an ancient lead-acid technology (I've never had to change - or maintain - a car battery in my life yet). That's why all the home wind- and solar-generation plants use such things, they're one of the best things we've got on that scale. The next step up is flooding some poor bugger's village to make a new reservoir and destroying the natural habitats.
And the other 89+ countries all colluded, I suppose?
Everything is a poison in sufficient amounts. Everything. Even water. Pretending any substance can be zero-issue is the problem. They all have doses at which adverse effects will appear in one, some, most or all people. Stay below a correct, proven, recommended dose and you minimise the problems. But still someone will have problems with it.
In the same way that we can't even make fucking bread (the staple of centuries, if not millennia) any more without someone dying or getting ill from it somewhere, an artificial sweetener will always have "that one guy" that can't have it. Rather than ban the substance because of that, just stop that guy having it, and set a dose to minimise the number of guys it affects.
That's what the UK do. That's what the FDA do. That's what all the other countries do too. Based on how many people react badly to the substance in experiments. This isn't politics of one agency in one country, this is globally-proven science and statistics.
"Aspartame has been found to be safe for human consumption by more than ninety countries worldwide, with FDA officials describing aspartame as "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety as "clear cut""
So.... no. Probably not. But judging by the comments on here, you're not alone.
Have sugar. If you don't want sugar, but you want your drink to taste sweet, you can have natural sugars. Otherwise, you're fucked and eating synthetic stuff no matter what?
Almost all of those substances - in moderation - are food-safe and no more dangerous than eating sugar, or any other natural food. Some people might collapse and die from a single exposure, others it will make ill, others it will upset them a bit, but the vast majority will just eat it and get on with life.
If it worries you, go back to eating sugar.
Seasoned programmers that "know their stuff" that have been told to keep their un-maintained junk out of the kernel before now? And in no polite terms?
"Worked beautifully" resulting in many unbootable (or, worse, variably bootable) systems over the years. It's far from perfect (I'm not expecting perfect, but it's far from it).
Though I don't doubt that there are entire swathes of people happy with it, that there is so much opposition is not only indicative that it's far-from-perfect, but that many people may be avoiding using it altogether?
I'm by no means a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to new stuff but systemd still appears a backward step and even the DISCUSSION of systemd generating such heat is indicative of underlying problems that aren't being addressed (even if those problems are entirely political, which I doubt).
And I agree that there's little competition but things like upstart were in fact the middle-ground. Systemd has a huge headstart, but also keeps hitting political brick-walls in its race to be default and little is done to appease or even acknowledge the criticisms
"We know better" is not the basis of any argument for either side. But "We're never going to change either" is just head-banging nonsense. I don't think anyone is opposed to change on the SysVInit side (the very existence of upstart and a variety of other projects), they just don't think this is the right change. However, the systemd crowd are very much in the "We know best, so you need to get onboard" arena.
And when you're dealing with critical areas like even being able to boot a kernel, you need to dial back to the users and say "What do you need?", not "This is all you'll ever be given, deal with it"
Systemd is one of those thing that people know will end in disaster. Sure, it works at the moment. But a personality will jump into it, or a bug will catch up with their design, or something else. And it will all come crashing down.
What bugs me about systemd is not the idea behind systemd. It's the implementation. Using cgroups and other kernel-provided features, it's able to provide functionality that we don't have elsewhere. But rather than break-down that functionality and make each part replaceable, and use "old" methods to do some things while they are replaced with "new" methods.
It's the all-or-nothing nature of systemd that I hate. There's no reason it can't be done in some other way. There's no reason that, even at a base level, you can't write scripts that do the same as it does - for all functions, but also for parts of the functions. As such, it's not modular, not changeable, it's just a lump of code that you accept having complete control of your machine or not. And I don't.
Honestly, I'm waiting for the crash-and-burn moment at which someone steps up, gives us the same features, using predictable, modular code or even scripts, and we can put in the bits we like and leave out the bits we don't like and replace any bit and NOBODY will know or care that we've done that.
The biggest edits I ever did on Wikipedia, many years ago now, were to the articles about ZX Spectrum games.
I spent hours loading up games in emulators, capturing screenshots, writing out information, etc. Most of the articles for those games existed already, I just did things like link the developers, publishers, etc. categorised them, added screenshots where they were missing.
By a year later, every screenshot I'd done had been removed. Not because of copyright - but because when I'd first done them, I'd tagged them as per the required tags for copyright (e.g. fair usage, etc.). I'd spent forever putting all the tags on after being told for one article. The next month, my images were removed because a new tag had been introduced and I hadn't updated the images with it. So I updated the tags. Repeat ad infinitum for nearly a year. Every time, warnings about tags, copyright-tag bots spamming my talk page, new tags popping out of nowhere and serving no new purpose but those same bots stripping any images that did not have them.
In the end, I gave up. I stopped editing. I stopped categorising. I stopped screenshotting. All my screenshots (despite being perfectly fine for a year while I was tagging them) disappeared within a month. Most of those articles never got even a title screenshot back and are now either plain-text or the entire article is history.
And every "new" game article I added was removed for being "non-notable", when tiny little indie game articles stayed up for years, and the article were about huge, mainstream, industry-changing games.
Sorry, but my time and effort was wasted, not by fans of the games, readers of the articles, or even the article curators. Just by random paranoid spamming bots and people who - at first - I presumed were editors and moderators but actually were most likely just random people who wanted to criticize and break the articles for their own stats(?), I don't know.
All that happened is that the articles turned to dust and rotted over the years while the talk pages filled up with arguments.
You wanted to compete with Facebook. Which you took to mean that I should be shoved onto it forcibly even though I have a fully-functioning social network with all my details, photos and friends plugged in anyway. You thought I should be badgered into submission until I moved all that content over, and have to go via roundabout routes to opt out of this stuff - on a GMail account I'd have since the first days of invite-only accounts.
And you didn't listen or care at the time. If you're that forcible with getting the information out of me, imagine how forcible you'll be when I try to get that information on me back.
Wouldn't touch it with a bargepole (despite being quite Google-centric in my services otherwise) just because of the "YOU MUST SIGN UP NOW" attitude.
If you'd just done what you did with Google Mail, slowly adding in features (e.g. Google Talk, Google Drive, Google Calendar, etc.) quietly that I can choose to use as I see fit, and just stumble across them as I need, and can just use them without being required to fill out EVERY DAMN BOX every time, then it would have taken off much nicer. And if I don't want to use them... well, they're still there any time I do.
Fact is, my Google Account is still the same one and STILL does not have a Google+ profile. Not even an image. Because, sorry, it doesn't work that way. I choose to use the service, you don't choose who must use it. When you tried to force me to fill out and use that part of my Google profile, I did everything I could NOT to. And look who won.
Okay, why does my "bullshit detector" go off. Not on the article, but I thought I'd pop onto Wikipedia and find out when Oculus Rift was first started as a project.
There's no mention. They mention the huge buyout in 2014, but no mention of the start of it, even under the "History" section.
And only one of the citations is from before that - an article in 2012. Now, it's not a deep secret, I can google and find stuff from that kind of era discussing it, but why OMIT this information in the History section of your own product's page?
Maybe it's because, 3 years on from the kickstarter, and millions and millions of dollars later, there's still no commercial product?
Oh, fuck off.
They heated cinnabar ore. You get mercury when you do that. These people had metal, mined, and could build vast structures that weigh more than any skyscraper did for millennia after them.
You don't need a supernatural explanation that they found a liquid metal (a liquid mirror, in effect) fucking intriguing and so prized it as some kind of treasure to bury with their kings.
That people in these ancient eras had brains seemed to be frowned upon, as if we're the only humans who could be allowed to do that. Ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, etc. civilisations all had astounding knowledge and abilities. Just because they were never able to fully capitalise on them and then we suffered a few thousand years of poxy ignorance doesn't mean they weren't geniuses. (Just so happens that several of those millennia were dominated by religious shit, Crusades, etc.).
Antikythera (extremes of "clockwork", gearing and mathematical technology), pyramids, battery technology, steam-powered engines, railways, they had a shit-ton of expertise, but the problem was that the insights were few and far between and hard to do, and secondary to surviving for the most part, so unfortunately they never were able to be joined together in the way we could do now.
Fuck your aliens. Pay your respects to thousands of years of education, science, inquisitiveness, some of the greatest minds who ever lived, single individuals who knew all of established science for their time, amazing insights, and artisans capable of creating their off-the-wall ideas using some of the most difficult craftsmanships in existence.
The problem is that they know all their own libraries still make them money. People are still making from the White Album.
As that anchor is dragged forward, those artists and albums at the back stop making money for them. And then they realise that as that anchor is inexorably drawn forward from that point on, they lose more money every year because it's likely the new artists aren't making as much as the old back catalogues (maybe individual examples, but not overall).
And then they realise that, in 50 years time, when all they have to monetise is the junk that they've been churning out recently, they are dead in the water and the industry will struggle to sustain itself. They're not saving themselves for today, but for their retirement, when they're basing their business on people buying Britney Spears' back catalogue etc.
That said, any law that has to be revised the number of times that the copyright ones have should really be scrapped or made indefinite. If NOBODY in a certain industry (music industry, Disney, etc.) has ever seen their copyright expire, how on earth can we say that we need to legislate to extend that protection continually - and multiple times - without making the case that it should be indefinite or not?
I'm not saying that's a GOOD solution, but someone needs to review the time and money spent messing about extending laws to cover timeframes - including overruling laws retroactively - and either fix a date in stone or make it indefinite. Pretending that it will eventually end up in the public domain while that never being legally possible is just outright scumbaggery.
If the software is running on the user's computer, at their express request, to do something - at the user's express request, then I can't see how you could rule any other way.
If we were talking about an online-only service that "proxies" the web for you and removes ads, then you may have more of a case, however.
And spyware that does it against or without user's consent (replacing other's adverts with your own, eh, Lenovo?) then that's a huge other matter entirely.
But it's like ruling that if the user WANTS to look at a plain-text version of a particular webpage then that's up to them. So long as the viewer is the one choosing to change the content and knows that, why would you ever think differently.
The alternative just doesn't bear thinking about. Websites DEMANDING that nothing interferes in the process of displaying their page as they intended. Unskippable ads, etc. like on DVD's. DRM for the web, effectively. No thanks.
Erm... is it just me that immediately thinks of DVB-T here? That's exactly what happened.
In the UK we were pushed to upgrade to "digital" (DVB-T). Within a few years, DVB-T2 - an incompatible standard that required hardware upgrades - was actually required to support HDTV channels, and even the "extra" channels that couldn't fit on standard DVB.
Just being a standard doesn't stop obsoletion. Wireless shows you that. Within days of actually being ratified as a standard, the next wireless standard is in the works and people start pushing our pre-N or pre-AC products.
If anything, being "standard"is something that happens after the event, not before, and when provides basis for obsoletion. "You mean you've only got a HTML-4 browser? Our website requires HTML-5. Why? Because."
This is the cost of change, evolution and rapid development. Things get left behind, even if they were good products/services. It's not even necessarily deliberate. Who the hell is going to want to risk bricking your old devices by pushing a firmware update to a device they no longer sell, running on a chip that's no longer produced, with firmware that no longer has active development, to give you features that the old hardware can't use anyway (e.g. pushing HD or new codecs into the YouTube apps?). Nobody.
I don't know if you've noticed but today's generation just ignores ads. I work in schools - the pupils do not see anywhere near as many ads as I did when I was a child. TV ads are dead - they are background noise. We've trained children to ignore all ads in games and online. Streaming services mean that ads have to be forced and - inevitably - the kids find a way to download without ads anyway.
I bet you could hum the tune to several hundreds ads if you went through one of those websites that shows you old ads from your country. The kids today? Probably only the extreme ones.
The more you force ads, the more you force people to ignore them if they can't bypass them. It's counter-productive.
Honestly, I think it's more to do with legacy code. Who has the code to some 10 year old early "smart" TV that ran on a custom chip that's not non-standard and unavailable, and so who's going to do the development and testing to push newer formats, HD, etc. down to that TV's firmware.
In my house alone, I have YouTube apps on several phones, a tablet, a cable box, an older cable box, a DVD player, a Blu-Ray player, a cheap DVB-S box, the original Wii, etc. To update all of those to newer formats, HD quality, etc. may not even be technically possible (which just generates more exceptions and differences in the codebase), plus any licensing, plus the risk of breaking the device, plus liaising with all the manufacturer's (most of whom just won't care as they're not selling that model any more), etc. It's just an enormous upheaval for zero gain.
And it's not just YouTube. BBC iPlayer suffers the same fate - all the above devices have BBC iPlayer apps on them too and some of those no longer work because it would need some cheap Chinese manufacturer to bother to develop, test and push a new firmware for a device they no longer sell (or, even if they do, represents a tiny portion of their sales in only a particular country). Just the risk of bricking something isn't worth the hassle of trying to update it.
We are certainly breeding a throw-away culture of technology because of this, yes, but that's not "enforced" so much as inevitable. A £20 DVD player with network connectivity and an iPlayer/YouTube app on it - if the app on that stops working? Who cares?
Just the development time alone to push out even the tiniest of working updates for devices like that is enormous. You might even find that the original development team, or even company, doesn't exist any more. Will consumers notice? Not really. They have ten devices that can do the same and they won't be turning on the DVD player to watch YouTube when they can ChromeCast it from their phone or whatever nowadays.
It's obsolescence but not necessarily deliberate and malicious obsolescence. Just necessity.