The "War on Terror" is symbolic language for the war against al Qaida, just as the "war against fascism" was symbolic language for the fight against Germany and Italy in WW2. Supposedly smart people should be able to understand symbolism, but there seems to be little evidence for it on Slashdot since I keep reading the same nonsense over and over again.
You don't have to be terrified to take actions against terrorists. Just making the judgment that it is prudent to prevent mass slaughter of your fellow citizens is enough. Or maybe you could explain why it is a good idea to let your fellow citizens be killed by the thousands and do nothing?
Be very careful giving government the power to do anything for any justification. In the history of the world, orders of magnitude more atrocities have been commited by those in power when there have been no effective checks on that power. Terrorists may have managed to kill several thousand people in the world trade centers, but it took a fascist state to bring about the Holocaust.
In short, government without restrictions is far more dangerous than all the terrorists in the world combined. This should be amply evidenced by their shameless use of the existence of terrorists to expand their own power, and reduce all of our freedoms.
Question is - why is it necessary for concrete to be reinforced? Obviously, the Romans didn't have steel or iron rebar. They formed and poured their structures without any rebar, and they've lasted a couple thousand years. It seems more than obvious that our architects and engineers can learn a few things from the Romans.
You'll notice a distinct lack of concrete roofs on roman structures. That is because: even if they were built with them (unlikely), they have long since collapsed. Concrete has very little tensile strength. In order to get tensile strength, you have to add rebar. Were a pretty fussy breed, and for some reason we like roofs. Additionally, making a floor span out of reinforced concrete is a hell of a lot cheaper than almost any alternative. The Romans used wood...
it should also be noted that the Romans didn't build things terribly tall. a dozen or so stories was about their limit. It goes back to lack of rebar. Concrete without rebar doesn't stand up to a lateral load very well.
Where this stuff really shines is in a salt water environment. The concrete we have today doesn't stand up to salt water punishment well at all. We don't have *any* good formulations for this application. Rebar or not, concrete in salt water has to be replaced pretty often. The roman concrete is immensely valuable if for no other use than bridges.
This is a perfect example of a "company" that cant bring a viable product to market, trying to extract money from anyone they can in lieu of having any actual skill.
The primary patent holder in this case has admitted that he has virtually no programming skills whatsoever, and has used third party packages to attempt to provide a software / hardware solution. He is a psychologist. They had two contracts in 2 and a half years, and bungled one of them so badly as to virtually guarantee the death of the company.
This is exactly why the patent office should (and I thought does) require a working device before allowing a patent...
Around here, if you want a five 9s guarantee, your only option is VOIP.
Basically you are out of options then, as you sre as hel lwon't be getting 99.999% uptime from VOIP. From POTS it's possible, and actually happening in many places.
Why not? I use skype at home, and have not had a noticable outage in 5 years, even when we lost power, I was still able to use skype (once I got the generator started). Its not unreasonable to believe that enterprise level reliability would be better than my residential service.
How the hell is VoIP going to be reliable, if your upstream provider regularly fails?You think their uptime and service reliability will be better with internet service?
There are more than a dozen ISPs in our area, buts only one provider left that will do enterprise level POTS. If we were to go VOIP, there would be many different vendors to choose from...
Not only that, but we actually already have redundant ISPs, so fail over would be a complete non-issue. POTS is effectively dying. We should let it die already.
Agreed. I've done some asterisk based installs for small companies, and I always tell them VoIP is great inside your network, that you control, but analog or PRI POTS is where it's at for upstream. Unless you want your phone to be as 'reliable' as your internet. In some cases it can make sense, like a satellite office. But once you get to 12-15 lines, a PRI tends to be price competitive anyhow.
Before you start extolling the virtues of POTS, keep in mind that everything is not always flowers and sunshine. We have 20 line POTS to the building I'm in, and the up-time is atrocious. The patchboard alone is a nightmare no one wants to touch. We had an old PBX go bad last year, and managed to blottobox all the digital phones on the phone network. cost us $10,000 to replace all the damaged equipment. On top of that, we regularly suffer multi-hour outages from our upstream provider, and they refuse to fix the problem. No one else around us does POTS anymore, its all VOIP, and someone sold the VIPs at our company that VOIP is the devil and we will have no end of up-time failures... So now, we are stuck with POTS with horrible customer service and 2 full days worth of unplanned outage every year, and no one wants to pay the expense of upgrading anything. We should have made the transition to full VOIP when we had to cough up the money anyway.
Around here, if you want a five 9s guarantee, your only option is VOIP.
10GBASE-T, or IEEE 802.3an-2006, is a standard released in 2006 to provide 10 Gbit/s connections over unshielded or shielded twisted pair cables, over distances up to 100 metres (330 ft).[25] Category 6a is required to reach the full distance of 100 metres (330 ft) and category 6 will reach a distance of 55 metres (180 ft).
ok ok so for legacy installations you might only reach 180ft.
But what is in the ground isn't cat6. It isn't even cat 5, its cat3... You might get lucky and have a run that'll handle 10 Gbit, but more likely you'll only get 10 Mbit out of it. Still really good compared to ISDN though.
I'll bet it has something to do with the fact that doctors like to take Fridays off. So by extension if they are doing surgery on a Friday (or god help you a weekend), whatever the issue is it must be life threatening, and most likely far more severe than a surgery that can wait until Monday: Hence more likely to get you killed, no matter the skill level of the surgeons or their team.
All of the SBCs with ARM SoC's I've looked at, like RRi and BeagleBone have only a single USB channel that everything goes through. I found that it was impossible to reliably transfer audio into the device while monitoring levels over a WIFI adapter that necessarily hangs off the same USB channel. Since the audio runs in isochronous mode the USB controller just drops frames when things get tight. Maybe it would work better with a low latency kernel but I also found that the preemptive and low latency kernels are buggy on the BeagleBone I was trying and probably all ARM platforms. For my app, an audio recorder, I had to switch to a PicoITX format Atom. It's way overkill, expensive, sucks power, and gets very hot but it has four separate USB channels and preemptive/low-latency is debugged on x86 so it actually works.
I'm not sure, but I thought I read somewhere that the Beaglebone Black separated the ethernet from the USB onto different access ports, thus freeing more resources for both. I could be wrong though, I've been reading far too many technical documents lately... Eyes getting kind of blurry...
The cool part about the Raspberry Pi is that it runs Linux. Its ability to interface with non computing hardware could be better.
The cool part about the Arduino is its analog and digital I/O interfaces. It has standard connectors for that purpose, beaten into useful form via a lot of people over the years, and there's even a good sized industry providing parts that plug into them. I can wander to my local Microcenter and get all sorts of Arduino parts nowadays.
The combination of the two, running Linux but with the Arduino interfaces, can cost more than both chips combined and still be worthwhile. That's what the UDOO is trying to do. If your goal is to have a generic system that can do all sorts of hacking, this is a possibility for such a device. Maybe the price will even come down over time to have less of a premium.
Or you could skip all of that and get a Beaglebone Black. If you want the GPIOs and a powerful processor, get a Beaglebone. The only downside I have found so far is that it only does 720P, not 1080P, but I'm using it for embedded stuff which means a headless system anyways. With 50+ digital IO, and 7 analog inputs, you'll be hard pressed to get anything even remotely close for the price.
It depends who did the murdering, and who got murdered. If the perp murdered a cop, then yes they are well justified in chasing and catching this person, as the altercation will likely occur when and where the perp is apprehended anyway. If the police did the murdering, well then, that's a different matter altogether now isn't it.
I'm pretty sure you can't just "make up" corpses with gunshot wounds.
I'm pretty sure you can. Making corpses with gunshot wounds requires only a non-corpse that you don't care about, and a gun. Police are regularly in the presence of great quantities of both, often together.
A temp controlled beer fermenting setup isn't the direction I need. I'm looking to turn on/off fans and a/c unit (s) based on temp and humidityusing relays, indoor (two sources, hot & cold rooms) and outdoor air sources (hot & cold depending on season or time of day) to regulate one room air quality for my bedroom, I'm disabled and the current a/c unit doesn't shut off when temp reached, rest of house is too hot or cold, running a/c in winter, etc. would like to turn fans on/off to pull cold air into room via ducting, push warm air out, control fans/ a/c / lights through relays w temp & humidity sensors in all rooms and exterior. Additional lamp control via an electrical relay would be a plus.
I've been running linux for about 15 years on desktop and servers, so I can put together the logic if I see example code, but I'm not a programmer. Any help would be deeply appreciated.
Unfortunately, no such project currently exists. A small group of us is working on something similar. It is not targeted at the enthusiast, but at HVAC professionals.
In my experience, companies that do not have very good products spend an awful lot of time trying to sell "solutions". Looks a lot like whats happening here.
The best smartphone OS for the enterprise is still the BB by FAR. I'd list iOS as #2 because of their limited hardware selection and OS updates.
Bzzzt, wrong.
The best smartphone OS for the enterprise is whatever the user shows up with because the corporation doesn't have to shell out several hundreds of dollars, and in most cases, $50+ per month for every user. If your company has 300k employees, phone plans alone will run you
$180M / year. Off loading that expense to your employees is not trivial. Now add the cost of a new BB for each one of them every two years (or however long they last on average), and you're looking at another $100M a year. That is not small change to any organization, and not having to pay it is worth a lot of wrangling on the back end.
They did in fact create a system that puts out more instantaneous energy per unit weight, but that is not the improvement that super capacitors need. They have improved gravimetric power density. The two measures that need improvement to make super capacitors more useful are gravimetric energy density (how much energy can it store in a given weight), and volumetric energy density. How much energy can it store in a given volume. Without significant improvements in those two areas, super capacitors cannot make significant inroads against batteries.
It should also be noted that super capacitors already have better power density than chemical batteries by a wide margin, and are more than sufficient to replace I.C. engines and gasoline in that respect.
It's not about economies of scale. Popular vehicle models sell hundreds of thousands of units a year. It's just that they mark them up high because they can get away with it.
a few hundred thousand units per year is not very many in the tech world. Apple Sells 100 million iPhones per year. You also need to remember, these kinds of gadgets aren't going into the high volume vehicles like the corollas and civics, they're going into the relatively low volume luxury car and SUV markets. The Entire luxury SUV market for all manufacturers combined sold less vehicles than the Toyota corolla alone last year. Over an entire model run, you're only talking 50,000 units. That's a lot of R+D cost to be spreading on such a small production run. Standardization would allow production runs across multiple makes and models the way car stereo manufacturers do. That is why an Alpine DVD in dash system can run about $500 while the equivalent system from Mercedes costs $5k. The alpine can be installed in just about any car, while the Mercedes version is inextricably tied to the Mercedes SUV.
F2 still works on my uefi laptop. Don't know about if it still works with fast boot as I nuked my mswindows as soon as I got it and installed windows (X windows, thank you) on it instead with gnu-licious linux of the debian flavor.
The thing that will shift that is not your mom, or even your mom times 1 million. The thing that will shift that is the move away from those devices, to Android. But Microsoft will still see incredible income from Windows during that shift.
That is somewhat true. My employer buys many thousands of machines every year. All of them in the last year have come with "windows 8" licenses, even though we exercise our corporate option to "downgrade" to win 7 at no charge. All of those count towards M$ win 8 sales accounting, even though they were in reality win 7 licenses. If you were to find out how many of those win 8 licenses are in fact really running win 8 instead of win 7, you will find that the real number is only a few percent of the total M$ is reporting. If M$ makes win 7 unavailable, then companies like mine will seriously investigate a change to a linux variant. If were going to have to retrain our workforce to deal with a radically new OS anyway, you can damn well bet its going be something cheaper than windows. The VPs have been talking about a shift away from M$ for years now. This could be the final nudge that gets the ball rolling.
Exactly. It may be a fine movie, but I don't want any portion of my ticket price to be funding anti-gay hate speech, period.
Tolerance goes both ways. It is far too easy to claim the high road and seek to prevent those with different viewpoints from being heard. It is another thing entirely to stand and defend a persons right to freedom of speech when you don't like their message. If you can't acknowledge his right to speak his mind, then you are no better than he is.
I'm actually surprised this didn't get flagged as it looks like a bomb.
It does? What part? It just looks like a pile of electronics to me. Bombs have certain very specific characteristics: This has none of those characteristics. You don't happen to work for the TSA or anything do you?
It still can be extreme conditions, based on where you leave the car parked. You're expecting a cheap high capacity big-box-store-grade hard drive to operate correctly after being: Parked in the sun all afternoon in Arizona: that's probably +140F. Or parked overnight in an Alaska winter: that's probably -40F. Or parked for years on the Gulf Coast at near 100% humidity. Then you expect it to keep operating while the car's heating and A/C rapidly change those conditions.
That's a tall order. These drives already barely work in a climate controlled household environment.
Car based system don't use hard drives. Yes, hard drives fail easily under stressful environments, that's why no one uses them outside of desktop PCs, servers and other relatively immovable objects. Even laptops are using SSDs more and more for reliability reasons. Automotive system (like almost all non PC applications) have been using flash storage for decades. Remember, that the vast majority of storage a PC needs is entirely unnecessary for an embedded system. It is very rare to find an embedded system that requires more than a few hundred megs of storage.
to put it in perspective for you, the space shuttle had over 200,000 moving parts all under constant computer monitoring and control, and the main systems all fit onto a few dozens of 64KB flash roms. Even with a DVD/bluray decoder, a car based computer platform just doesn't require that much storage. Software doesn't require huge amounts of storage, content does.
Take a consumer hard drive, put it in a deep freeze and let it chill to -20C. Now take it out and plug it in your PC.
Is it gonna work? No? Well I guess the same hard drive won't work in a car that's been parked overnight in the winter.
And that's just the first test your hardware has to pass before it can be installed in a car. Next up, vibration testing...
That is why automotive systems don't have hard drives... They pretty much all use flash storage, and have for a while now. Keep in mind, a typical car system doesn't need more than about a couple hundred meg of total storage, and even that is probably far more than most use.
That isn't the worst thing It is using the laptop starting from that cold that matters. Though frankly even exposing the laptop to those changes is very bad.
Its a lot less grueling that it used to be. The vast majority of the problems a laptop would have with temperature extremes comes from mechanical stress on moving parts, and chemical stress on the battery. A car mounted computer has no battery problems, and modern systems can use Flash storage instead of mechanical hard drives to store data, thus eliminating the other trouble spot.
The other argument you will hear people make is about overheating. This is a complete non-issue, as car hardware doesn't need to be super powerful. A low power ARM based system will have enough horsepower for pretty much everything a car owner will want/need, and these come in such low power packages that cooling is a non-issue, even without active cooling (I have a board on my desk right now that is capable of playing blue rays at 1080P and doesn't even have a fan. It uses less than 5 watts all told.) Even if you have system that needs so much compute-power that it has to have active cooling, 5 years down the road, that level of computing will likely no longer require active cooling...
Slashdot Mirror
The "War on Terror" is symbolic language for the war against al Qaida, just as the "war against fascism" was symbolic language for the fight against Germany and Italy in WW2. Supposedly smart people should be able to understand symbolism, but there seems to be little evidence for it on Slashdot since I keep reading the same nonsense over and over again.
You don't have to be terrified to take actions against terrorists. Just making the judgment that it is prudent to prevent mass slaughter of your fellow citizens is enough. Or maybe you could explain why it is a good idea to let your fellow citizens be killed by the thousands and do nothing?
Be very careful giving government the power to do anything for any justification. In the history of the world, orders of magnitude more atrocities have been commited by those in power when there have been no effective checks on that power. Terrorists may have managed to kill several thousand people in the world trade centers, but it took a fascist state to bring about the Holocaust.
In short, government without restrictions is far more dangerous than all the terrorists in the world combined. This should be amply evidenced by their shameless use of the existence of terrorists to expand their own power, and reduce all of our freedoms.
-=Geoskd
Undecipherable my ass.
He's from a school of design, give him a little slack for not understanding how computers work...
Question is - why is it necessary for concrete to be reinforced? Obviously, the Romans didn't have steel or iron rebar. They formed and poured their structures without any rebar, and they've lasted a couple thousand years. It seems more than obvious that our architects and engineers can learn a few things from the Romans.
You'll notice a distinct lack of concrete roofs on roman structures. That is because: even if they were built with them (unlikely), they have long since collapsed. Concrete has very little tensile strength. In order to get tensile strength, you have to add rebar. Were a pretty fussy breed, and for some reason we like roofs. Additionally, making a floor span out of reinforced concrete is a hell of a lot cheaper than almost any alternative. The Romans used wood...
it should also be noted that the Romans didn't build things terribly tall. a dozen or so stories was about their limit. It goes back to lack of rebar. Concrete without rebar doesn't stand up to a lateral load very well.
Where this stuff really shines is in a salt water environment. The concrete we have today doesn't stand up to salt water punishment well at all. We don't have *any* good formulations for this application. Rebar or not, concrete in salt water has to be replaced pretty often. The roman concrete is immensely valuable if for no other use than bridges.
This is a perfect example of a "company" that cant bring a viable product to market, trying to extract money from anyone they can in lieu of having any actual skill.
The primary patent holder in this case has admitted that he has virtually no programming skills whatsoever, and has used third party packages to attempt to provide a software / hardware solution. He is a psychologist. They had two contracts in 2 and a half years, and bungled one of them so badly as to virtually guarantee the death of the company.
This is exactly why the patent office should (and I thought does) require a working device before allowing a patent...
Around here, if you want a five 9s guarantee, your only option is VOIP.
Basically you are out of options then, as you sre as hel lwon't be getting 99.999% uptime from VOIP. From POTS it's possible, and actually happening in many places.
Why not? I use skype at home, and have not had a noticable outage in 5 years, even when we lost power, I was still able to use skype (once I got the generator started). Its not unreasonable to believe that enterprise level reliability would be better than my residential service.
How the hell is VoIP going to be reliable, if your upstream provider regularly fails?You think their uptime and service reliability will be better with internet service?
There are more than a dozen ISPs in our area, buts only one provider left that will do enterprise level POTS. If we were to go VOIP, there would be many different vendors to choose from...
Not only that, but we actually already have redundant ISPs, so fail over would be a complete non-issue. POTS is effectively dying. We should let it die already.
Agreed. I've done some asterisk based installs for small companies, and I always tell them VoIP is great inside your network, that you control, but analog or PRI POTS is where it's at for upstream. Unless you want your phone to be as 'reliable' as your internet. In some cases it can make sense, like a satellite office. But once you get to 12-15 lines, a PRI tends to be price competitive anyhow.
Before you start extolling the virtues of POTS, keep in mind that everything is not always flowers and sunshine. We have 20 line POTS to the building I'm in, and the up-time is atrocious. The patchboard alone is a nightmare no one wants to touch. We had an old PBX go bad last year, and managed to blottobox all the digital phones on the phone network. cost us $10,000 to replace all the damaged equipment. On top of that, we regularly suffer multi-hour outages from our upstream provider, and they refuse to fix the problem. No one else around us does POTS anymore, its all VOIP, and someone sold the VIPs at our company that VOIP is the devil and we will have no end of up-time failures... So now, we are stuck with POTS with horrible customer service and 2 full days worth of unplanned outage every year, and no one wants to pay the expense of upgrading anything. We should have made the transition to full VOIP when we had to cough up the money anyway.
Around here, if you want a five 9s guarantee, your only option is VOIP.
Don't you mean 330 ft runs?
10GBASE-T, or IEEE 802.3an-2006, is a standard released in 2006 to provide 10 Gbit/s connections over unshielded or shielded twisted pair cables, over distances up to 100 metres (330 ft).[25] Category 6a is required to reach the full distance of 100 metres (330 ft) and category 6 will reach a distance of 55 metres (180 ft).
ok ok so for legacy installations you might only reach 180ft.
But what is in the ground isn't cat6. It isn't even cat 5, its cat3... You might get lucky and have a run that'll handle 10 Gbit, but more likely you'll only get 10 Mbit out of it. Still really good compared to ISDN though.
I'll bet it has something to do with the fact that doctors like to take Fridays off. So by extension if they are doing surgery on a Friday (or god help you a weekend), whatever the issue is it must be life threatening, and most likely far more severe than a surgery that can wait until Monday: Hence more likely to get you killed, no matter the skill level of the surgeons or their team.
All of the SBCs with ARM SoC's I've looked at, like RRi and BeagleBone have only a single USB channel that everything goes through. I found that it was impossible to reliably transfer audio into the device while monitoring levels over a WIFI adapter that necessarily hangs off the same USB channel. Since the audio runs in isochronous mode the USB controller just drops frames when things get tight. Maybe it would work better with a low latency kernel but I also found that the preemptive and low latency kernels are buggy on the BeagleBone I was trying and probably all ARM platforms. For my app, an audio recorder, I had to switch to a PicoITX format Atom. It's way overkill, expensive, sucks power, and gets very hot but it has four separate USB channels and preemptive/low-latency is debugged on x86 so it actually works.
I'm not sure, but I thought I read somewhere that the Beaglebone Black separated the ethernet from the USB onto different access ports, thus freeing more resources for both. I could be wrong though, I've been reading far too many technical documents lately... Eyes getting kind of blurry...
The cool part about the Raspberry Pi is that it runs Linux. Its ability to interface with non computing hardware could be better.
The cool part about the Arduino is its analog and digital I/O interfaces. It has standard connectors for that purpose, beaten into useful form via a lot of people over the years, and there's even a good sized industry providing parts that plug into them. I can wander to my local Microcenter and get all sorts of Arduino parts nowadays.
The combination of the two, running Linux but with the Arduino interfaces, can cost more than both chips combined and still be worthwhile. That's what the UDOO is trying to do. If your goal is to have a generic system that can do all sorts of hacking, this is a possibility for such a device. Maybe the price will even come down over time to have less of a premium.
Or you could skip all of that and get a Beaglebone Black. If you want the GPIOs and a powerful processor, get a Beaglebone. The only downside I have found so far is that it only does 720P, not 1080P, but I'm using it for embedded stuff which means a headless system anyways. With 50+ digital IO, and 7 analog inputs, you'll be hard pressed to get anything even remotely close for the price.
-=Geoskd
A fatal shooting isn't "deadly violence" enough?
It depends who did the murdering, and who got murdered. If the perp murdered a cop, then yes they are well justified in chasing and catching this person, as the altercation will likely occur when and where the perp is apprehended anyway. If the police did the murdering, well then, that's a different matter altogether now isn't it.
I'm pretty sure you can't just "make up" corpses with gunshot wounds.
I'm pretty sure you can. Making corpses with gunshot wounds requires only a non-corpse that you don't care about, and a gun. Police are regularly in the presence of great quantities of both, often together.
Can anyone point to a project that does esentially the same as this: Controlling the Humidity with an Embedded Linux System
A temp controlled beer fermenting setup isn't the direction I need. I'm looking to turn on/off fans and a/c unit (s) based on temp and humidityusing relays, indoor (two sources, hot & cold rooms) and outdoor air sources (hot & cold depending on season or time of day) to regulate one room air quality for my bedroom, I'm disabled and the current a/c unit doesn't shut off when temp reached, rest of house is too hot or cold, running a/c in winter, etc. would like to turn fans on/off to pull cold air into room via ducting, push warm air out, control fans/ a/c / lights through relays w temp & humidity sensors in all rooms and exterior. Additional lamp control via an electrical relay would be a plus.
I've been running linux for about 15 years on desktop and servers, so I can put together the logic if I see example code, but I'm not a programmer. Any help would be deeply appreciated.
Unfortunately, no such project currently exists. A small group of us is working on something similar. It is not targeted at the enthusiast, but at HVAC professionals.
In my experience, companies that do not have very good products spend an awful lot of time trying to sell "solutions". Looks a lot like whats happening here.
The best smartphone OS for the enterprise is still the BB by FAR. I'd list iOS as #2 because of their limited hardware selection and OS updates.
Bzzzt, wrong.
The best smartphone OS for the enterprise is whatever the user shows up with because the corporation doesn't have to shell out several hundreds of dollars, and in most cases, $50+ per month for every user. If your company has 300k employees, phone plans alone will run you $180M / year. Off loading that expense to your employees is not trivial. Now add the cost of a new BB for each one of them every two years (or however long they last on average), and you're looking at another $100M a year. That is not small change to any organization, and not having to pay it is worth a lot of wrangling on the back end.
They did in fact create a system that puts out more instantaneous energy per unit weight, but that is not the improvement that super capacitors need. They have improved gravimetric power density. The two measures that need improvement to make super capacitors more useful are gravimetric energy density (how much energy can it store in a given weight), and volumetric energy density. How much energy can it store in a given volume. Without significant improvements in those two areas, super capacitors cannot make significant inroads against batteries.
It should also be noted that super capacitors already have better power density than chemical batteries by a wide margin, and are more than sufficient to replace I.C. engines and gasoline in that respect.
It's not about economies of scale. Popular vehicle models sell hundreds of thousands of units a year. It's just that they mark them up high because they can get away with it.
a few hundred thousand units per year is not very many in the tech world. Apple Sells 100 million iPhones per year. You also need to remember, these kinds of gadgets aren't going into the high volume vehicles like the corollas and civics, they're going into the relatively low volume luxury car and SUV markets. The Entire luxury SUV market for all manufacturers combined sold less vehicles than the Toyota corolla alone last year. Over an entire model run, you're only talking 50,000 units. That's a lot of R+D cost to be spreading on such a small production run. Standardization would allow production runs across multiple makes and models the way car stereo manufacturers do. That is why an Alpine DVD in dash system can run about $500 while the equivalent system from Mercedes costs $5k. The alpine can be installed in just about any car, while the Mercedes version is inextricably tied to the Mercedes SUV.
F2 still works on my uefi laptop. Don't know about if it still works with fast boot as I nuked my mswindows as soon as I got it and installed windows (X windows, thank you) on it instead with gnu-licious linux of the debian flavor.
I hate to pick nits, but that's X window, no S.
The thing that will shift that is not your mom, or even your mom times 1 million. The thing that will shift that is the move away from those devices, to Android. But Microsoft will still see incredible income from Windows during that shift.
That is somewhat true. My employer buys many thousands of machines every year. All of them in the last year have come with "windows 8" licenses, even though we exercise our corporate option to "downgrade" to win 7 at no charge. All of those count towards M$ win 8 sales accounting, even though they were in reality win 7 licenses. If you were to find out how many of those win 8 licenses are in fact really running win 8 instead of win 7, you will find that the real number is only a few percent of the total M$ is reporting. If M$ makes win 7 unavailable, then companies like mine will seriously investigate a change to a linux variant. If were going to have to retrain our workforce to deal with a radically new OS anyway, you can damn well bet its going be something cheaper than windows. The VPs have been talking about a shift away from M$ for years now. This could be the final nudge that gets the ball rolling.
Exactly. It may be a fine movie, but I don't want any portion of my ticket price to be funding anti-gay hate speech, period.
Tolerance goes both ways. It is far too easy to claim the high road and seek to prevent those with different viewpoints from being heard. It is another thing entirely to stand and defend a persons right to freedom of speech when you don't like their message. If you can't acknowledge his right to speak his mind, then you are no better than he is.
I'm actually surprised this didn't get flagged as it looks like a bomb.
It does? What part? It just looks like a pile of electronics to me. Bombs have certain very specific characteristics: This has none of those characteristics. You don't happen to work for the TSA or anything do you?
It still can be extreme conditions, based on where you leave the car parked. You're expecting a cheap high capacity big-box-store-grade hard drive to operate correctly after being: Parked in the sun all afternoon in Arizona: that's probably +140F. Or parked overnight in an Alaska winter: that's probably -40F. Or parked for years on the Gulf Coast at near 100% humidity. Then you expect it to keep operating while the car's heating and A/C rapidly change those conditions.
That's a tall order. These drives already barely work in a climate controlled household environment.
Car based system don't use hard drives. Yes, hard drives fail easily under stressful environments, that's why no one uses them outside of desktop PCs, servers and other relatively immovable objects. Even laptops are using SSDs more and more for reliability reasons. Automotive system (like almost all non PC applications) have been using flash storage for decades. Remember, that the vast majority of storage a PC needs is entirely unnecessary for an embedded system. It is very rare to find an embedded system that requires more than a few hundred megs of storage.
to put it in perspective for you, the space shuttle had over 200,000 moving parts all under constant computer monitoring and control, and the main systems all fit onto a few dozens of 64KB flash roms. Even with a DVD/bluray decoder, a car based computer platform just doesn't require that much storage. Software doesn't require huge amounts of storage, content does.
Take a consumer hard drive, put it in a deep freeze and let it chill to -20C. Now take it out and plug it in your PC.
Is it gonna work? No? Well I guess the same hard drive won't work in a car that's been parked overnight in the winter.
And that's just the first test your hardware has to pass before it can be installed in a car. Next up, vibration testing...
That is why automotive systems don't have hard drives... They pretty much all use flash storage, and have for a while now. Keep in mind, a typical car system doesn't need more than about a couple hundred meg of total storage, and even that is probably far more than most use.
That isn't the worst thing It is using the laptop starting from that cold that matters. Though frankly even exposing the laptop to those changes is very bad.
Its a lot less grueling that it used to be. The vast majority of the problems a laptop would have with temperature extremes comes from mechanical stress on moving parts, and chemical stress on the battery. A car mounted computer has no battery problems, and modern systems can use Flash storage instead of mechanical hard drives to store data, thus eliminating the other trouble spot.
The other argument you will hear people make is about overheating. This is a complete non-issue, as car hardware doesn't need to be super powerful. A low power ARM based system will have enough horsepower for pretty much everything a car owner will want/need, and these come in such low power packages that cooling is a non-issue, even without active cooling (I have a board on my desk right now that is capable of playing blue rays at 1080P and doesn't even have a fan. It uses less than 5 watts all told.) Even if you have system that needs so much compute-power that it has to have active cooling, 5 years down the road, that level of computing will likely no longer require active cooling...