If you need it fast, you can put it on an aircraft. If you need it cheap, you can put it on a container ship. Is there really a market for something that is a bit faster than a container ship with a bit more capacity than an aircraft?
Modern technology isn't going to make an airship move at speeds similar to an aircraft, and most people don't have any interest in taking four times as long to get where they want to go.
Can Tesla just import the power? We (Quebec) exports dozens of TWh per year at prices substantially below 7 US cents per kilowatt hour. Is there any reason why Tesla can't just make a deal with Hydro Quebec to import power to the Eastern interconnect and pay the US utilities for transport?
The charging port on the semi has four times as many sockets as the existing supercharger port. Based on the assumption that the vehicle has an 800 kWh battery (this seems to be the general consensus), charging it to 400 miles (80%) in 30 minutes with 90% charging efficiency with would require roughly 1.4 megawatts.
Considering the quadrupled connector, this would be roughly the equivalent of pulling 350 kW through a current supercharger. Coincidentally, the next generation superchargers are planned to put out 350 kW.
So, it all seems reasonable to me. We're not talking about a large number of charging stations here, we're talking about a very limited number that are located either at fleet motor pools and waystations on trucking routes. Grid connections aren't really a problem, lots of commercial buildings draw far more power than that.
Everybody seems to have forgotten that they announced at the launch event 400 miles in 30 minutes via new megachargers. Itâ(TM)s hardly a mystery when they already told us how fast it charges.
You can now buy an Echo in Canada, although it's technically a pre-order as they don't ship until December 5th. Still English-only, though.
Also, you can't exactly address Siri in multiple languages: you can only address it in the one language you select, but you can select between different languages. Small difference, but if you're an English-speaker, it means you'll have selected English, and you won't be able to address it in any other language without going into the settings and manually changing it... which will also erase Siri's voice learning data.
The problem is, I've been waiting for Siri to get better for years now. Siri launched 6 years ago as a part of iOS, 7 years if you include the pre-Apple version. Wolfram Alpha launched a few years before that, so there have been general knowledge resources that Apple could have licensed from day one to provide useful answers to random general questions. But here we are, six years later, and Siri still can't give general knowledge answers that Wolfram Alpha could give nearly a decade ago.
Siri is very limited in that it has very poor integration with other services. Alexa's big advantage is its massive library of integrations (which they call "skills").
Siri seems to have very little integrations available (possibly because the Siri API is limited to a very small subset of app types), and is often unable to give verbal results, answering my questions by presenting some information on screen rather than reading it out. It just pulls a chunk of text from Wikipedia and throws it up on screen. Siri is also rarely able to answer general knowledge questions that all the competing agents answer correctly. I'd really like if Siri interfaced with Wolfram Alpha, because it produces information far more often than Siri does.
For example, I asked several assistants "When is hurricane season in Florida?" and received these results:
Wolfram Alpha: "June 1st to November 30th" Siri: "Sorry, I don't have specific information about that." and gave me a link to weather.com. Google: "2017 Atlantic hurricane season began on Thursday, June 1 and ends on Thursday, November 30". Alexa: It spoke the list of months rather than giving a range.
Siri is very primitive compared to the competing virtual assistants. Don't get me wrong, I use Siri all the time, but mostly for things like starting timers or asking basic information. Both in terms of information retrieval capabilities and in terms of integrations with other services, Alexa is way ahead.
The problem with the HomePod is that there are already good speakers with virtual assistants built in. The Echo may not have ideal sound quality, but Sonos also makes speakers with Alexa and Google built-in. As such, simply having good sound quality won't be enough for the HomePod to compete. Siri needs to get a *lot* better if they're going to have any chance.
Errm, Qualcomm is double the size of Broadcom (both in terms of revenue and number of employees). How the heck is a $13 billion revenue company (Broadcom) with only $4 billion in cash reserves going to buy a company for $100 billion?
I'm defining "relatively minimal refurbishment" in comparison to the space shuttle, which cost $1.5 billion per launch when calculated by dividing the cost of the program by the number of launches. A significant portion of that was the cost of the 25,000 workers that handled shuttle operations.
The LEM wasn't an orbital-class booster (as far as Earth is concerned), and it wasn't re-used (it was essentially staging, since the descent stage was left behind).
Yeah, Amazon was the good guy, because they were the ones keeping eBook prices reasonable. After the publishers basically won the lawsuit (the settlement resulted in publishers picking their own prices), they regularly price their eBooks similarly to or sometimes even higher than hardcover physical editions.
Really? I've sometimes had to pay more for the eBook version than the hardcover version. The publishers are just being ridiculous these days.
Look, I don't expect an eBook to be super cheap or anything, but I do expect that it costs no more than any physical edition as a bare minimum. And that's just the bare minimum, I'd argue that roughly 2/3 of the cost of a paperback is around where it ought to be.
Tesla had nothing to do with PayPal. Musk founded X.com, which later merged with PayPal, which was then called Confinity. Musk then sold off his ownership in PayPal, and then a year later co-founded Tesla.
Tesla's current revenue is roughly similar to PayPal's ($7b vs $10b). If their Model 3 vehicle is successful, it will far outstrip PayPal. If it isn't successful, it won't.
The same is true of the QC35s (no latency when wired, and battery life doubles from 20h to 40h), but convenience is the thing: I'd rather just grab my headphones and sit on the couch than grab a 3.5mm extension cord and connect them to my DAC. Yeah, the sound quality is going to be a little better via the DAC, but I can barely hear the difference, and It's more convenient to not have any wires.
How does the dongle increase the torque? The non-flexible part of the dongle is smaller than any of the non-flexible parts of the 3.5mm plug on any of my headphones. Apple's dongles have a wire in the middle.
I'm using Bose QC35s. There seems to be a very slight difference between wired and wireless, but it's not big enough for me to care about, and a difference that small certainly doesn't downgrade wireless below "sounds fine".
My headphones are paired to 2-3 devices (2 that I use regularly, one that I use occasionally), and I've never had to re-pair them. Now, the headphones only support connecting to two devices simultaneously, so I do have to turn one of the devices off if I want the headphones to automatically connect to the third, but as I said, that's not something I do all that often.
Bluetooth audio is SBC at up to 384 Kbps. It's hardly "AM quality". I've compared the exact same headphones over bluetooth and wired, and while I can sort of tell that there's a very small difference, it's not a big enough difference for me to care about.
I mean, it seems to be working pretty fine for me. 90% of the time, when I click the control center bluetooth or wifi options, it's because I want to disconnect from whatever it's connected to at the moment, not turn the whole thing off. And it works fine for that, and leaves my watch still connected. If I need to actually kill wifi or bluetooth entirely, then I'd either just use the airplane button, or go into the settings, but I almost never fully disable those outside of airplane mode.
I'd agree that bluetooth audio latency is not good for use in real-time applications or as studio monitors, but in practice it's not nearly half a second. This chart is probably reasonably accurate:
Between my QC35s (purchased because I valued better noise cancelling over better sound quality, although today I'd have chosen the MDR-1000X) and Windows 10 PC, I've found that adding a -100ms delay to the audio renderer in MPC is enough to correct for the latency. I guess that either means that Windows is using AAC, or that Auris chart is significantly overestimating latency. This isn't a problem on my phone, because my phone automatically corrects for the latency for all video playback without me having to do anything.
With aptx low latency (which I don't believe either the QC35 or MDR-1000X support), it should essentially per perceptually zero latency, particularly because most displays add almost that much video latency anyhow. I'll admit that this is probably the most annoying thing about bluetooth, and I really wish the QC35s supported aptx low latency. If the Sony headphones did, I'd probably sell the QC35 and replace them today.
Since the "off-ish" thing only affects the quick settings in the control center, you can still turn bluetooth and wifi all the way off the same way you always could before: turn it off in the settings app.
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If you need it fast, you can put it on an aircraft. If you need it cheap, you can put it on a container ship. Is there really a market for something that is a bit faster than a container ship with a bit more capacity than an aircraft?
Modern technology isn't going to make an airship move at speeds similar to an aircraft, and most people don't have any interest in taking four times as long to get where they want to go.
Can Tesla just import the power? We (Quebec) exports dozens of TWh per year at prices substantially below 7 US cents per kilowatt hour. Is there any reason why Tesla can't just make a deal with Hydro Quebec to import power to the Eastern interconnect and pay the US utilities for transport?
The charging port on the semi has four times as many sockets as the existing supercharger port. Based on the assumption that the vehicle has an 800 kWh battery (this seems to be the general consensus), charging it to 400 miles (80%) in 30 minutes with 90% charging efficiency with would require roughly 1.4 megawatts.
Considering the quadrupled connector, this would be roughly the equivalent of pulling 350 kW through a current supercharger. Coincidentally, the next generation superchargers are planned to put out 350 kW.
So, it all seems reasonable to me. We're not talking about a large number of charging stations here, we're talking about a very limited number that are located either at fleet motor pools and waystations on trucking routes. Grid connections aren't really a problem, lots of commercial buildings draw far more power than that.
Everybody seems to have forgotten that they announced at the launch event 400 miles in 30 minutes via new megachargers. Itâ(TM)s hardly a mystery when they already told us how fast it charges.
You can now buy an Echo in Canada, although it's technically a pre-order as they don't ship until December 5th. Still English-only, though.
Also, you can't exactly address Siri in multiple languages: you can only address it in the one language you select, but you can select between different languages. Small difference, but if you're an English-speaker, it means you'll have selected English, and you won't be able to address it in any other language without going into the settings and manually changing it... which will also erase Siri's voice learning data.
The problem is, I've been waiting for Siri to get better for years now. Siri launched 6 years ago as a part of iOS, 7 years if you include the pre-Apple version. Wolfram Alpha launched a few years before that, so there have been general knowledge resources that Apple could have licensed from day one to provide useful answers to random general questions. But here we are, six years later, and Siri still can't give general knowledge answers that Wolfram Alpha could give nearly a decade ago.
Siri is very limited in that it has very poor integration with other services. Alexa's big advantage is its massive library of integrations (which they call "skills").
Siri seems to have very little integrations available (possibly because the Siri API is limited to a very small subset of app types), and is often unable to give verbal results, answering my questions by presenting some information on screen rather than reading it out. It just pulls a chunk of text from Wikipedia and throws it up on screen. Siri is also rarely able to answer general knowledge questions that all the competing agents answer correctly. I'd really like if Siri interfaced with Wolfram Alpha, because it produces information far more often than Siri does.
For example, I asked several assistants "When is hurricane season in Florida?" and received these results:
Wolfram Alpha: "June 1st to November 30th"
Siri: "Sorry, I don't have specific information about that." and gave me a link to weather.com.
Google: "2017 Atlantic hurricane season began on Thursday, June 1 and ends on Thursday, November 30".
Alexa: It spoke the list of months rather than giving a range.
Siri is very primitive compared to the competing virtual assistants. Don't get me wrong, I use Siri all the time, but mostly for things like starting timers or asking basic information. Both in terms of information retrieval capabilities and in terms of integrations with other services, Alexa is way ahead.
The problem with the HomePod is that there are already good speakers with virtual assistants built in. The Echo may not have ideal sound quality, but Sonos also makes speakers with Alexa and Google built-in. As such, simply having good sound quality won't be enough for the HomePod to compete. Siri needs to get a *lot* better if they're going to have any chance.
Errm, Qualcomm is double the size of Broadcom (both in terms of revenue and number of employees). How the heck is a $13 billion revenue company (Broadcom) with only $4 billion in cash reserves going to buy a company for $100 billion?
I'm defining "relatively minimal refurbishment" in comparison to the space shuttle, which cost $1.5 billion per launch when calculated by dividing the cost of the program by the number of launches. A significant portion of that was the cost of the 25,000 workers that handled shuttle operations.
The LEM wasn't an orbital-class booster (as far as Earth is concerned), and it wasn't re-used (it was essentially staging, since the descent stage was left behind).
NASA has never landed an orbital-class booster, or re-launched any spacecraft with relatively minimal refurbishment.
Yeah, Amazon was the good guy, because they were the ones keeping eBook prices reasonable. After the publishers basically won the lawsuit (the settlement resulted in publishers picking their own prices), they regularly price their eBooks similarly to or sometimes even higher than hardcover physical editions.
Really? I've sometimes had to pay more for the eBook version than the hardcover version. The publishers are just being ridiculous these days.
Look, I don't expect an eBook to be super cheap or anything, but I do expect that it costs no more than any physical edition as a bare minimum. And that's just the bare minimum, I'd argue that roughly 2/3 of the cost of a paperback is around where it ought to be.
Tesla had nothing to do with PayPal. Musk founded X.com, which later merged with PayPal, which was then called Confinity. Musk then sold off his ownership in PayPal, and then a year later co-founded Tesla.
Tesla's current revenue is roughly similar to PayPal's ($7b vs $10b). If their Model 3 vehicle is successful, it will far outstrip PayPal. If it isn't successful, it won't.
The same is true of the QC35s (no latency when wired, and battery life doubles from 20h to 40h), but convenience is the thing: I'd rather just grab my headphones and sit on the couch than grab a 3.5mm extension cord and connect them to my DAC. Yeah, the sound quality is going to be a little better via the DAC, but I can barely hear the difference, and It's more convenient to not have any wires.
How does the dongle increase the torque? The non-flexible part of the dongle is smaller than any of the non-flexible parts of the 3.5mm plug on any of my headphones. Apple's dongles have a wire in the middle.
I put my phone into my pocket such that it is right-side up when my hand comes out of the pocket. That means the top of the phone is pointing down.
That's also why Apple moved the headphone jack to the bottom of the phone years before they removed it, right next to the lightning port.
I'm using Bose QC35s. There seems to be a very slight difference between wired and wireless, but it's not big enough for me to care about, and a difference that small certainly doesn't downgrade wireless below "sounds fine".
My headphones are paired to 2-3 devices (2 that I use regularly, one that I use occasionally), and I've never had to re-pair them. Now, the headphones only support connecting to two devices simultaneously, so I do have to turn one of the devices off if I want the headphones to automatically connect to the third, but as I said, that's not something I do all that often.
Sorry, 328 Kbps.
Bluetooth audio is SBC at up to 384 Kbps. It's hardly "AM quality". I've compared the exact same headphones over bluetooth and wired, and while I can sort of tell that there's a very small difference, it's not a big enough difference for me to care about.
I mean, it seems to be working pretty fine for me. 90% of the time, when I click the control center bluetooth or wifi options, it's because I want to disconnect from whatever it's connected to at the moment, not turn the whole thing off. And it works fine for that, and leaves my watch still connected. If I need to actually kill wifi or bluetooth entirely, then I'd either just use the airplane button, or go into the settings, but I almost never fully disable those outside of airplane mode.
I'd agree that bluetooth audio latency is not good for use in real-time applications or as studio monitors, but in practice it's not nearly half a second. This chart is probably reasonably accurate:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/file...
Between my QC35s (purchased because I valued better noise cancelling over better sound quality, although today I'd have chosen the MDR-1000X) and Windows 10 PC, I've found that adding a -100ms delay to the audio renderer in MPC is enough to correct for the latency. I guess that either means that Windows is using AAC, or that Auris chart is significantly overestimating latency. This isn't a problem on my phone, because my phone automatically corrects for the latency for all video playback without me having to do anything.
With aptx low latency (which I don't believe either the QC35 or MDR-1000X support), it should essentially per perceptually zero latency, particularly because most displays add almost that much video latency anyhow. I'll admit that this is probably the most annoying thing about bluetooth, and I really wish the QC35s supported aptx low latency. If the Sony headphones did, I'd probably sell the QC35 and replace them today.
Since the "off-ish" thing only affects the quick settings in the control center, you can still turn bluetooth and wifi all the way off the same way you always could before: turn it off in the settings app.