For varying values of "easy", sure. It's still not easy enough to be practical for use as a mass market smartphone screen. Possible, but not practical.
Sort of, but I'm pretty sure you can't switch between networks mid-call. Certainly not in Canada, because none of the carriers here support call handoffs while roaming. Calls drop when you switch networks.
Google's phone seems to be very much a data-only cloud solution where everything runs through Google Hangouts. I believe the idea is to be completely network-independent by doing everything over IP, such that they can do stuff like seamless handoffs without needing support from the carrier.
Meanwhile, a story at BostInno points out that Google's not the only one with a network-hopping hybrid approach to phone calls.
Scratch Wireless, which is the one the link talks about, isn't quite the same thing. Google Fi is about combining multiple cellular networks, while Scratch Wireless only uses a single cellular network. Both let you seamlessly roam between cellular and wifi.
But you can also get on a larger rocket (like the Falcon 9 you mentioned) as a secondary payload pretty cheaply, so there's no cost advantage in the "I only want to launch a small payload" category. There's also, for that matter, no guarantees that these guys would be able to get your payload into orbit any faster than established players, especially by the time some of the new launch infrastructure under construction comes online.
I'm not a "US people", so your entire premise falls apart. The US considers felonies to be more serious crimes, and in some states there are three-strikes law that result in an automatic life sentence if convicted of three felonies. Committing one is a big deal, if only because there are big consequences... It illustrates, if nothing else, how stupid it is to intentionally commit one for some really dumb protest idea.
Or more like let's lock up a federal employee for a variety of crimes (one of them a felony), including flying an unregistered aircraft without a pilots license, and violating protected airspace.
Tesla is charging what they expect batteries to cost by the time replacements are needed, but if memory serves, lithium ion batteries in bulk quantities are still available for $250-300ish, which is still far lower than the $1000 that the site is basing their math on.
It's a Netflix series, but in a TV format, and it'll likely air on TV in the few territories where Netflix doesn't yet operate. Netflix's original content is a lot more similar to cable (like AMC or HBO) than it is to network television, but it's still hour-long episodic content.
These are not low-budget productions. They've got a budget of $200 million for the Marvel Netflix stuff, which comprises four shows and a miniseries over roughly three years, or around 60 episodes. That's higher than most non-network shows, like Breaking Bad or Mad Men or The Walking Dead. Not quite Game of Thrones level, but these are still not small budgets... especially considering the limited set building and VFX compared to a show like GoT.
The downside of tape backup is that it's often not practical to restore from. Whenever we've had an incident where somebody messed up, it was decided that it would be less effort to spend multiple person-days rebuilding the data than it would be to restore from backup.
Yeah, it'll help in a catastrophic failure scenario, but sometimes I wish the IT guys would just turn on shadow copies or something, because tapes aren't helping with the "Oh shit, somebody accidentally deleted half the QA server, and it'd take a week to get the tape back from the archive facility, but we can rebuild it by hand in two or three days."
Meanwhile, if we'd had some sort of snapshot-based backup, it would have taken a few minutes at most.
Amazon buys them by the truckload and ends up paying a tiny fraction of that. It turns out that when you order BDXL discs in bulk quantities, the costs go way down.
Unless you buy them in massive bulk, like Amazon did, and then they become cheaper than all other alternatives. And swapping isn't a problem when you're massively automated.
Because it's marketed as being very slow, with response times measured in hours? It's a very cheap offline storage solution that uses BD-R discs and robots.
If one of your consumer drives fail, you've got a new one in seconds without any physical activity, because the massive cost savings allows you to keep lots of spare drives on-site as hot or cold spares. Any company that has zero spare drives and must wait for an RMA to get their RAID array back in operation is doing it wrong.
Enterprises still use lots of tape backups. It's still much cheaper and more durable when it comes to backup up servers and physically shipping the data to IronMountain or the like. Iron Mountain's advertising trumpets that 94% of Fortune 1000 companies use their service, so that's a pretty clear indication that tape is alive and well.
Battery University is years out of date. They're citing a cost for Li-ion of $1,000/kWh when in reality prices have dropped to as little as a quarter of that. Tesla, for their part, is currently charging $141/kWh for replacement batteries, no doubt on the assumption that their GigaFactory will get prices that low by the time Tesla batteries need replacing.
Some utilities do that, run the meter backwards. Others measure what you use and what you take out of the grid and put back in separately, bill you for what you used from the grid, and pay you a much smaller amount per kWh for what you put back in.
The problem is that many utilities pay far less per kWh than they charge you. As a result, you're generating most of your power when you don't need it (during the day when you're at work), getting almost nothing for it, and then you're consuming most of your power when you're not generating it, paying full price for it.
The result? You end up saving very little.
It starts to make sense to have batteries to let you use the power you generated, giving you a much greater return. The only issue here is the cost of the batteries... which Tesla is trying to drive down as much as they can.
Amazon wants automated deliveries with minimal human intervention. The FAA's exemptions still require that the drones be operated by a human, with a pilots license, and only within visual line of site of the pilot.
Looks like Amazon is going to have to keep testing their drones in Canada, where they can test what they actually want to do.
XP and later are the NT series too. Win2K was the first version of NT that saw any significant consumer use. It was originally intended to replace both NT4 and 98 (unifying the two streams like XP eventually did), but they later changed their mind and released 98SE and ME. Still, 2K was far more consumer-friendly than NT4 was, and lots of technically oriented users like myself followed the upgrade path of 98 -> 2K -> XP.
Slashdot Mirror
For varying values of "easy", sure. It's still not easy enough to be practical for use as a mass market smartphone screen. Possible, but not practical.
Just like how AT&T eventually succeeded in buying T-Mobile, right?
Wheeler is 69 years old. I would imagine his next post will be retirement. That may play a factor in his willingness to rock the boat.
Sort of, but I'm pretty sure you can't switch between networks mid-call. Certainly not in Canada, because none of the carriers here support call handoffs while roaming. Calls drop when you switch networks.
Google's phone seems to be very much a data-only cloud solution where everything runs through Google Hangouts. I believe the idea is to be completely network-independent by doing everything over IP, such that they can do stuff like seamless handoffs without needing support from the carrier.
Meanwhile, a story at BostInno points out that Google's not the only one with a network-hopping hybrid approach to phone calls.
Scratch Wireless, which is the one the link talks about, isn't quite the same thing. Google Fi is about combining multiple cellular networks, while Scratch Wireless only uses a single cellular network. Both let you seamlessly roam between cellular and wifi.
But you can also get on a larger rocket (like the Falcon 9 you mentioned) as a secondary payload pretty cheaply, so there's no cost advantage in the "I only want to launch a small payload" category. There's also, for that matter, no guarantees that these guys would be able to get your payload into orbit any faster than established players, especially by the time some of the new launch infrastructure under construction comes online.
I'm not a "US people", so your entire premise falls apart. The US considers felonies to be more serious crimes, and in some states there are three-strikes law that result in an automatic life sentence if convicted of three felonies. Committing one is a big deal, if only because there are big consequences... It illustrates, if nothing else, how stupid it is to intentionally commit one for some really dumb protest idea.
Or more like let's lock up a federal employee for a variety of crimes (one of them a felony), including flying an unregistered aircraft without a pilots license, and violating protected airspace.
Tesla is charging what they expect batteries to cost by the time replacements are needed, but if memory serves, lithium ion batteries in bulk quantities are still available for $250-300ish, which is still far lower than the $1000 that the site is basing their math on.
Because the tapes are held off-site.
There's plenty of room in their Beauharnois datacenter just outside of Montreal here in Canada, we'd be happy to have more of OVH's business here :)
It's a Netflix series, but in a TV format, and it'll likely air on TV in the few territories where Netflix doesn't yet operate. Netflix's original content is a lot more similar to cable (like AMC or HBO) than it is to network television, but it's still hour-long episodic content.
These are not low-budget productions. They've got a budget of $200 million for the Marvel Netflix stuff, which comprises four shows and a miniseries over roughly three years, or around 60 episodes. That's higher than most non-network shows, like Breaking Bad or Mad Men or The Walking Dead. Not quite Game of Thrones level, but these are still not small budgets... especially considering the limited set building and VFX compared to a show like GoT.
The downside of tape backup is that it's often not practical to restore from. Whenever we've had an incident where somebody messed up, it was decided that it would be less effort to spend multiple person-days rebuilding the data than it would be to restore from backup.
Yeah, it'll help in a catastrophic failure scenario, but sometimes I wish the IT guys would just turn on shadow copies or something, because tapes aren't helping with the "Oh shit, somebody accidentally deleted half the QA server, and it'd take a week to get the tape back from the archive facility, but we can rebuild it by hand in two or three days."
Meanwhile, if we'd had some sort of snapshot-based backup, it would have taken a few minutes at most.
Amazon buys them by the truckload and ends up paying a tiny fraction of that. It turns out that when you order BDXL discs in bulk quantities, the costs go way down.
Depends on what type of disc you're using. A 5TB drive would require as few as ~39 discs.
Unless you buy them in massive bulk, like Amazon did, and then they become cheaper than all other alternatives. And swapping isn't a problem when you're massively automated.
Because it's marketed as being very slow, with response times measured in hours? It's a very cheap offline storage solution that uses BD-R discs and robots.
If one of your consumer drives fail, you've got a new one in seconds without any physical activity, because the massive cost savings allows you to keep lots of spare drives on-site as hot or cold spares. Any company that has zero spare drives and must wait for an RMA to get their RAID array back in operation is doing it wrong.
Enterprises still use lots of tape backups. It's still much cheaper and more durable when it comes to backup up servers and physically shipping the data to IronMountain or the like. Iron Mountain's advertising trumpets that 94% of Fortune 1000 companies use their service, so that's a pretty clear indication that tape is alive and well.
Battery University is years out of date. They're citing a cost for Li-ion of $1,000/kWh when in reality prices have dropped to as little as a quarter of that. Tesla, for their part, is currently charging $141/kWh for replacement batteries, no doubt on the assumption that their GigaFactory will get prices that low by the time Tesla batteries need replacing.
Some utilities do that, run the meter backwards. Others measure what you use and what you take out of the grid and put back in separately, bill you for what you used from the grid, and pay you a much smaller amount per kWh for what you put back in.
The problem is that many utilities pay far less per kWh than they charge you. As a result, you're generating most of your power when you don't need it (during the day when you're at work), getting almost nothing for it, and then you're consuming most of your power when you're not generating it, paying full price for it.
The result? You end up saving very little.
It starts to make sense to have batteries to let you use the power you generated, giving you a much greater return. The only issue here is the cost of the batteries... which Tesla is trying to drive down as much as they can.
Amazon wants automated deliveries with minimal human intervention. The FAA's exemptions still require that the drones be operated by a human, with a pilots license, and only within visual line of site of the pilot.
Looks like Amazon is going to have to keep testing their drones in Canada, where they can test what they actually want to do.
XP and later are the NT series too. Win2K was the first version of NT that saw any significant consumer use. It was originally intended to replace both NT4 and 98 (unifying the two streams like XP eventually did), but they later changed their mind and released 98SE and ME. Still, 2K was far more consumer-friendly than NT4 was, and lots of technically oriented users like myself followed the upgrade path of 98 -> 2K -> XP.