What we don't need is fees _after_ we use a service. I'm fine with data caps, but there needs to be a popup where you confirm the charges for the additional data, and each additional charge, not afterwards when you get slammed with a $300 bill.
There's an oligopoly of wireless companies and they all primarily use a model where you get billed _afterwards_ for as much as they can trick you into using. And you always pay far more for "overages" than the same service cost if paid upfront. And of course they decline to mention the taxes and fees when advertising wireless service, just to make the actual bill even larger than advertised.
Obviously, a model where most people use inexpensive phones they purchased upfront and use pre-paid services is much better. Especially one where you could choose from competing pre-paid service cards to refill your phone at a shop somewhere and still have the same phone number and phone. (does it work this way in the rest of the world? I thought it sorta did)
Maybe. I don't see how that's going to work. Sony may have to change their policy if they are confronted with the technical reality that no one has a decent looking VR game that can run on the original PS4.
As for VR being a gimmick - sure. A nasty chicken and egg problem. VR games have the potential to be incredible but since the hardware is so expensive very few people have bought headsets. That in turn means that there's not enough market to make a 50 million dollar game with heavy VR support. Also, the current hardware for headsets still isn't high enough resolution for a lot of uses, which means that new headsets need to be released with the paltry money from the current set. This will probably happen, but if the headsets are any higher resolution you'll need video cards that are unaffordable right now (something like 2x Pascal Titan Xs is what you need) which creates another chicken/egg problem...
I thought what triggered this stopgap upgrade was VR, not 4k. Best case scenario, the more powerful console offers moar pretties for everyone.
- For people with 1080p screens, they get 60 fps and a few more effects on the same games that will also run on the older console. - For people with 4k screens, they get a marginal 30 fps but near 4k rendering on the same games that will also run on the older console. - For people with VR headsets, they can play the same game in VR at 1080p 60fps but with more of a feeling that they are actually present in the game world.
Win/win/win. Well, game developers who have to maintain 2 optimized engine branches, one for each console, lose...(since you'd want to use a game architecture that is the same for both versions except that low level implementation files differ)
So, why didn't Microsoft give discounts on the OS cost to PC manufacturers that install a TPU chip that only allows the machine to boot from digitally signed OSes? (which ofc Windows would be the only one).
Why isn't this story published in 2006? It does seem like an obvious tactic, why did they never get around to doing it?
_Although_ I suppose I don't see how Microsoft would benefit. If Lenovo ships a laptop with Windows on it, that means Lenovo paid the per deployment license fee, however much it costs to large OEMs. Which means that Microsoft has it's money, why would they care if the end user uninstalled the OS they paid for and ran Linux or dual booted?
Unfortunately, I think you might be right. Although, if this is true, why do 720p and 1080p encodes of a video look so similar? The 720p version is frequently only barely perceptibly of lower resolution, especially in motion. Is there not some standard algorithm to fix this blurring problem?
I know that in video games and in desktop use, what you are talking about is true. But I've seen at least one video game (Rainbow Six Siege) that has a great algorithm for repairing the damage. You can't really tell the difference between 1080p and full 4k rendering when it's in use...
I develop embedded systems from Windows. (maybe I'm biased, but I feel that since Windows requires the least hassle to do most tasks it's superior to Linux as a desktop OS. I think Linux is a reasonably good OS for an embedded system, however, and I sometimes use it for that but I develop most of the code from Windows)
I'm sitting in front of a 4k monitor right now and this is just not the case. I still have a side monitor, although I do often leave it turned off. Yes, technically there are enough pixels, but in practice most apps won't handle it as well as they handle separate monitors.
If you notice, one of the resolutions is a subset of the UHD 4k. The other one is only slightly sharper and it should be possible to downsample to UHD 4k with no loss of quality.
Not that most people would be able to tell the difference between a 1080p bluray and a 4k bluray...
No. The President has the power to pardon at any point in the process. As long as it's Federal charges, of course. This is one gotcha - technically he might have broken state laws in the state he was in. If the authorities were really determined to nail him, they might attack along those lines.
He's not a credible economist if thousands of other credible economists, basically all of them, disagree with him.
Your rant defies the laws of physics, as I said. Your examples are stupid. It's bleedingly obvious to anyone but you that (1) even if there are a few different road routes, they are all saturated, so you just have an oligopoly at best. Ditto the cabling problem.
You're not a nerd, you're an idiot. Get off slashdot.
Actually, a stream limit is the same thing as a bandwidth limit. Netflix is fine with bandwidth limits. It is not fine with data CAPS. There's a big difference. By analogy, if Netflix were doing the same thing, they would impose a limit on the total amount of Netflix you are allowed to stream in a given month. As long as you stay under the stream limit, you can watch every stream 24/7x30 per their rules...
Uh...is road building a natural monopoly? Your source isn't credible. It's clear and obvious that the very laws of physics create situations where a single firm can occupy the only feasible way to accomplish a task.
Umm...what if every plan they sell, despite it being a wired service that costs $60-$100 a month, has a data cap...
ISPs have a de facto monopoly. Even if in theory another company could rip up everyone's yard and install a new set of wires, it almost never happens (and usually the local government wouldn't give a permit in any case).
Maybe I shouldn't have said "end of service life". What I meant was, around 150k-200k, the probability of needing an engine rebuild or transmission replacement rises sharply. The fact that your Toyota Echo hasn't needed either is no evidence whatsoever of the average case.
In principle, with a flywheel made of carbon nanotubes and electromagnetic bearings, you can get high energy density. That's just in theory. Yes, it's a bad idea in cars - the shifts in acceleration and the angular momentum of the rotating mass mean it's a bad plan. Also, yeah, when flywheels fail they explode, and the pieces for 100k rpm high energy density ones are like shrapnel from a bomb.
It might work out for stationary energy storage, where you can bury the flywheels underground or in concrete vaults. But not cars.
With actual existing flywheels you can buy now, their cost efficiency is shit and their energy per mass is shit. The advantage is that if they use electromagnetic bearings and a vacuum chamber, there are no physical parts in contact. So their service life is almost forever - the parts that will fail are the electronics, which you can install outside the flywheel container and replace. You can weld shut the flywheel cannister so the vacuum doesn't leak, either.
This is their one advantage - you can charge and discharge and charge and discharge all damn day and they won't experience any wear. It's used for power factor correction by the power companies for this reason.
You know the battery lasts maybe 150k miles*, right? How much driving do you plan to do every year? Battery replacement is about $150 a kwh.
* For lithium cobalt batteries, which is what these use, you can do ~1000 cycles at 80% depth of discharge. So multiple range by 0.8 and assume you can do that about 1000 times.
Actually, tires themselves will fail on their own at around 5-10 years or so. Nitrogen filling may slow down the rate of decay. The tread inside separates.
Yeah, but how often do you voluntarily get in the car for 410/70 = 6 hour + trips? If your employment requires it or you have relatives you want to visit that are that far away, fine. Most Americans, that isn't the case.
Totally agree. Actual Americans might drive ultra long distance once a year. I haven't personally done it for a decade. I just take a plane, but even if I did it once a year, that means that I have to extend a 2 day cross country trip just a few hours on chargers. Not a significant factor.
Out of curiosity, why do you think there will be a 2017-2018 collapse, specifically? I'm not disagreeing that certain factors may be unsustainable, but the housing bubble in certain areas is driven by a supply shortage due to corrupt local governments. (aka, the liberal and captive governments of LA or Toronto will tie up any future projects in endless environmental reviews and community meetings)
Not that simple. The battery itself is a consumable. If the battery has 200 miles of range, and you discharge it 50% on average, it might last 1500 cycles. (this is very specific to the battery in question)
So the battery is expended at 150k miles. Tesla reports $190 per kWh pre gigafactory, GM reports $145. Taking the lower number, the actual cost of the battery is $6380. Assume Tesla/GM charges only a negligible markup for the good press, the replacement battery is $7000. So 5 cents a mile is the battery consumption.
Huh, not nearly as bad as when I did this calculation previously. If gas is $3 a gallon and you get 35 mpg, gas is 8.5 cents a mile.
You aren't saving much. Admittedly, with a gas car at 150k miles, the car is nearing the end of it's service life. You can drive them longer but expensive repairs are going to hit you eventually. Like an automatic transmission repair, which can be 4-5k, and an electric car doesn't have such a transmission. (but it uses power regulation circuitry that is also expensive to repair and also wears out...)
So an exact answer will depend on actual battery life numbers and actual dollar for dollar prices. You aren't going to save much if any if you buy a new electric car, however.
Look, kid, I got a master's degree in a related field. I have a vague idea of what's possible. It is true that there are ways to make the world better with genetic engineering. However, nature is a mess of stuff that was never intended to be purposefully edited and the problems are virtually endless and essentially intractable. It's nearly impossible to make a drug that won't kill some of the people you give it to, and genetic edits are even harder because they are various hijacked viruses that cause endless problems.
WIth something like machine intelligence or nanotechnology, you're talking about systems that are fully artificial and vastly more predictable. Also, nobody (or very few due to accidents) has to die to advance the field. Thus it advances thousands of times faster than biological engineering.
Now, there are uses for genetic engineering. Specifically, in editing bacteria or other very small, very rapidly replicating creatures to make something useful for humans. Also in other purposes related to food and medicine production. But this is always going to be limited by the limits of biology.
Slashdot Mirror
...So? It's been generally this way for 50 years. The fact that you have a recent and inadequate counter example doesn't mean you're right.
What we don't need is fees _after_ we use a service. I'm fine with data caps, but there needs to be a popup where you confirm the charges for the additional data, and each additional charge, not afterwards when you get slammed with a $300 bill.
There's an oligopoly of wireless companies and they all primarily use a model where you get billed _afterwards_ for as much as they can trick you into using. And you always pay far more for "overages" than the same service cost if paid upfront. And of course they decline to mention the taxes and fees when advertising wireless service, just to make the actual bill even larger than advertised.
Obviously, a model where most people use inexpensive phones they purchased upfront and use pre-paid services is much better. Especially one where you could choose from competing pre-paid service cards to refill your phone at a shop somewhere and still have the same phone number and phone. (does it work this way in the rest of the world? I thought it sorta did)
Maybe. I don't see how that's going to work. Sony may have to change their policy if they are confronted with the technical reality that no one has a decent looking VR game that can run on the original PS4.
As for VR being a gimmick - sure. A nasty chicken and egg problem. VR games have the potential to be incredible but since the hardware is so expensive very few people have bought headsets. That in turn means that there's not enough market to make a 50 million dollar game with heavy VR support. Also, the current hardware for headsets still isn't high enough resolution for a lot of uses, which means that new headsets need to be released with the paltry money from the current set. This will probably happen, but if the headsets are any higher resolution you'll need video cards that are unaffordable right now (something like 2x Pascal Titan Xs is what you need) which creates another chicken/egg problem...
I thought what triggered this stopgap upgrade was VR, not 4k. Best case scenario, the more powerful console offers moar pretties for everyone.
- For people with 1080p screens, they get 60 fps and a few more effects on the same games that will also run on the older console.
- For people with 4k screens, they get a marginal 30 fps but near 4k rendering on the same games that will also run on the older console.
- For people with VR headsets, they can play the same game in VR at 1080p 60fps but with more of a feeling that they are actually present in the game world.
Win/win/win. Well, game developers who have to maintain 2 optimized engine branches, one for each console, lose...(since you'd want to use a game architecture that is the same for both versions except that low level implementation files differ)
So, why didn't Microsoft give discounts on the OS cost to PC manufacturers that install a TPU chip that only allows the machine to boot from digitally signed OSes? (which ofc Windows would be the only one).
Why isn't this story published in 2006? It does seem like an obvious tactic, why did they never get around to doing it?
_Although_ I suppose I don't see how Microsoft would benefit. If Lenovo ships a laptop with Windows on it, that means Lenovo paid the per deployment license fee, however much it costs to large OEMs. Which means that Microsoft has it's money, why would they care if the end user uninstalled the OS they paid for and ran Linux or dual booted?
Unfortunately, I think you might be right. Although, if this is true, why do 720p and 1080p encodes of a video look so similar? The 720p version is frequently only barely perceptibly of lower resolution, especially in motion. Is there not some standard algorithm to fix this blurring problem?
I know that in video games and in desktop use, what you are talking about is true. But I've seen at least one video game (Rainbow Six Siege) that has a great algorithm for repairing the damage. You can't really tell the difference between 1080p and full 4k rendering when it's in use...
I develop embedded systems from Windows. (maybe I'm biased, but I feel that since Windows requires the least hassle to do most tasks it's superior to Linux as a desktop OS. I think Linux is a reasonably good OS for an embedded system, however, and I sometimes use it for that but I develop most of the code from Windows)
I'm sitting in front of a 4k monitor right now and this is just not the case. I still have a side monitor, although I do often leave it turned off. Yes, technically there are enough pixels, but in practice most apps won't handle it as well as they handle separate monitors.
If you notice, one of the resolutions is a subset of the UHD 4k. The other one is only slightly sharper and it should be possible to downsample to UHD 4k with no loss of quality.
Not that most people would be able to tell the difference between a 1080p bluray and a 4k bluray...
No. The President has the power to pardon at any point in the process. As long as it's Federal charges, of course. This is one gotcha - technically he might have broken state laws in the state he was in. If the authorities were really determined to nail him, they might attack along those lines.
He's not a credible economist if thousands of other credible economists, basically all of them, disagree with him.
Your rant defies the laws of physics, as I said. Your examples are stupid. It's bleedingly obvious to anyone but you that (1) even if there are a few different road routes, they are all saturated, so you just have an oligopoly at best. Ditto the cabling problem.
You're not a nerd, you're an idiot. Get off slashdot.
Actually, a stream limit is the same thing as a bandwidth limit. Netflix is fine with bandwidth limits. It is not fine with data CAPS. There's a big difference. By analogy, if Netflix were doing the same thing, they would impose a limit on the total amount of Netflix you are allowed to stream in a given month. As long as you stay under the stream limit, you can watch every stream 24/7x30 per their rules...
Uh...is road building a natural monopoly? Your source isn't credible. It's clear and obvious that the very laws of physics create situations where a single firm can occupy the only feasible way to accomplish a task.
Umm...what if every plan they sell, despite it being a wired service that costs $60-$100 a month, has a data cap...
ISPs have a de facto monopoly. Even if in theory another company could rip up everyone's yard and install a new set of wires, it almost never happens (and usually the local government wouldn't give a permit in any case).
Maybe I shouldn't have said "end of service life". What I meant was, around 150k-200k, the probability of needing an engine rebuild or transmission replacement rises sharply. The fact that your Toyota Echo hasn't needed either is no evidence whatsoever of the average case.
In principle, with a flywheel made of carbon nanotubes and electromagnetic bearings, you can get high energy density. That's just in theory. Yes, it's a bad idea in cars - the shifts in acceleration and the angular momentum of the rotating mass mean it's a bad plan. Also, yeah, when flywheels fail they explode, and the pieces for 100k rpm high energy density ones are like shrapnel from a bomb.
It might work out for stationary energy storage, where you can bury the flywheels underground or in concrete vaults. But not cars.
With actual existing flywheels you can buy now, their cost efficiency is shit and their energy per mass is shit. The advantage is that if they use electromagnetic bearings and a vacuum chamber, there are no physical parts in contact. So their service life is almost forever - the parts that will fail are the electronics, which you can install outside the flywheel container and replace. You can weld shut the flywheel cannister so the vacuum doesn't leak, either.
This is their one advantage - you can charge and discharge and charge and discharge all damn day and they won't experience any wear. It's used for power factor correction by the power companies for this reason.
You know the battery lasts maybe 150k miles*, right? How much driving do you plan to do every year? Battery replacement is about $150 a kwh.
* For lithium cobalt batteries, which is what these use, you can do ~1000 cycles at 80% depth of discharge. So multiple range by 0.8 and assume you can do that about 1000 times.
Actually, tires themselves will fail on their own at around 5-10 years or so. Nitrogen filling may slow down the rate of decay. The tread inside separates.
This is a fixable problem.
Yeah, but how often do you voluntarily get in the car for 410/70 = 6 hour + trips? If your employment requires it or you have relatives you want to visit that are that far away, fine. Most Americans, that isn't the case.
Totally agree. Actual Americans might drive ultra long distance once a year. I haven't personally done it for a decade. I just take a plane, but even if I did it once a year, that means that I have to extend a 2 day cross country trip just a few hours on chargers. Not a significant factor.
Out of curiosity, why do you think there will be a 2017-2018 collapse, specifically? I'm not disagreeing that certain factors may be unsustainable, but the housing bubble in certain areas is driven by a supply shortage due to corrupt local governments. (aka, the liberal and captive governments of LA or Toronto will tie up any future projects in endless environmental reviews and community meetings)
Not that simple. The battery itself is a consumable. If the battery has 200 miles of range, and you discharge it 50% on average, it might last 1500 cycles. (this is very specific to the battery in question)
So the battery is expended at 150k miles. Tesla reports $190 per kWh pre gigafactory, GM reports $145. Taking the lower number, the actual cost of the battery is $6380. Assume Tesla/GM charges only a negligible markup for the good press, the replacement battery is $7000. So 5 cents a mile is the battery consumption.
Huh, not nearly as bad as when I did this calculation previously. If gas is $3 a gallon and you get 35 mpg, gas is 8.5 cents a mile.
You aren't saving much. Admittedly, with a gas car at 150k miles, the car is nearing the end of it's service life. You can drive them longer but expensive repairs are going to hit you eventually. Like an automatic transmission repair, which can be 4-5k, and an electric car doesn't have such a transmission. (but it uses power regulation circuitry that is also expensive to repair and also wears out...)
So an exact answer will depend on actual battery life numbers and actual dollar for dollar prices. You aren't going to save much if any if you buy a new electric car, however.
The G4 has a locked bootloader. There still is a readily available hack that lets you remove the ads, however.
Look, kid, I got a master's degree in a related field. I have a vague idea of what's possible. It is true that there are ways to make the world better with genetic engineering. However, nature is a mess of stuff that was never intended to be purposefully edited and the problems are virtually endless and essentially intractable. It's nearly impossible to make a drug that won't kill some of the people you give it to, and genetic edits are even harder because they are various hijacked viruses that cause endless problems.
WIth something like machine intelligence or nanotechnology, you're talking about systems that are fully artificial and vastly more predictable. Also, nobody (or very few due to accidents) has to die to advance the field. Thus it advances thousands of times faster than biological engineering.
Now, there are uses for genetic engineering. Specifically, in editing bacteria or other very small, very rapidly replicating creatures to make something useful for humans. Also in other purposes related to food and medicine production. But this is always going to be limited by the limits of biology.