...with the OS or the language platform anymore. Not enough long term profit in it. They want to be a sort of Cloud/HP/Apple. They want to be a smartphone/tablet and internet based business services vendor and that's it. There's apparently just not enough profit in the OS or supporting application developers.
Why don't they just admit it so we can all move on? Linux awaits.
You say this like its a bad thing? Its the way that the market is going, so is where the money is.
On premise installations are dropping. Why spend money on your own infrastructure when someone else can take all of that expensive maintenance and the capital costs off your books? Sure, there are regulatory issues to overcome at present, as well as privacy ones, but it is the future. In the connected world SaaS just makes sense if your business model allows it.
Home PCs, as we know them, are on the way out in favour of connected devices with cloud storage. Yes, not for the inhabitants of Slashdot, but we are the exception not the rule. There are probably more people whose primary computing experience these days is via a iDevice or an Android one than via a traditional PC.
Microsoft have a vision of the future, and its pretty good. They are trying to do what Apple did when the iMac came out and drive the market, remember the outrage at the lack of a floppy disk and only USB ports? Sadly the tech elite, you know, us here on Slashdot, time and again prove ourselves to be the least visionary, blinkered Luddites out there. So we'll scream and holler and protest about what's being taken away rather than looking to the future.
I know I'll get called it, because its the standard defence against unpopular views on here lately, but I'm not a shill. I've never owned a PC that ran Windows and my only experience with MS products away from work has been an XBox 360.
Your problem is, and always has been, one of support and the comfort factor. If you supply a Microsoft solution then the client has a warm fuzzy feeling because they know that, should you be unable to provide support, someone else will be able to.
If you go down the Open Source route this isn't quite as simple. Yes, you can find other places to provide support but without doubt they will recommend changes to fit in with their model. Windows is a safe option. This is especially true for small companies or ones with small IT needs and few internal staff. I know it doesn't fit with the OSS is wonderful view but its how people see things.
If they can't show the issues with it due to national security reasons would we be able to see a correctly amended version of the document? It seems odd to point out issues with a public document but not be able to point out what is wrong.
If the document is corrected how will we know if its a true and accurate portrayal of the state of affairs? It seems to me that information will be held back, for national security reasons, and as such the document is bound to be inaccurate even if not deliberately misleading.
The UK. Oh, wait we are subject to the same program the NSA is running and we have less oversight and resort to underlying law than the US.
GCHQ (UK equivalent of NSA) is monitoring 600m telephone events a day. That's pretty much every phone call in the country. Our politicians say its all above board and legal. We don't have a written constitution to refer to the best bet being the European Convention on Human Rights.
As a frequent Google products user (mail, phone, tablet, maps...) I wonder how good is for us to depend on a single company for every service required in an urban life style: Mobile devices, computers, cars, network connections... Whats next, Google schools? All of these reminds me of scifi distopic societies.
Given what you use I wouldn't worry, you've already given in and been absorbed into the hive mind.
Seriously. If this was anyone but Google/. would be up in arms about the breadth of control and influence they have over people's lives. Sadly there is a blindness where Google is concerned on here as on many other technical sites. Google have too much influence now. Its about time people stopped and thought about it.
DRM is all about artificially lowering the value of your product (to the user) in an attempt to make it more valuable. You think anyone in this bizarro world is using a brain?
That's an odd way to view DRM. DRM is about the publishers attempting to associate a cost with the duplication of a work. The cost of creation a copy of a digital work is negligible. The cost of creation of a copy of a physical work isn't, both in materials and time taken to create the duplicate.
Of course the key really is that there are people that believe that one they have bought something then they have a right to distribute that to others. This is ok in the case of a physical work. You pass it on and you don't have it anymore. With a digital work it doesn't work like that. The publishers, and authors/artists, fear that widespread digital duplication will deprive them of income. Hence they strive for a way to ensure that they don't lose out.
Sadly its impossible to have a reasonable approach or discussion around this because of the extremist end of the debate that believes that and form of trying to prevent distribution of unlicensed copies is evil. If you want to prevent DRM come up with a scheme that addresses everyone's needs rather than making glib throwaway pronouncements.
You speak of something you know nothing about. It's more complicated than that. Users who record home videos, publish them to Youtube, end up getting screwed because with huge financial burdens because once the number of views gets high enough there sent a HUGE destructive bill. You have to get a professional camera or be screwed if you publish ANYTHING. You can't just convert to another format either. Your still liable.
Isn't that the cost of doing business? If you publish to YouTube and get lots of hits aren't you getting associated revenue with those hits? Shouldn't you factor the fees into your costs? In fact shouldn't the owner of YouTube advise you of this and possibly just take the royalty payments out of your revenue to satisfy those needs and simplify the service for their users?
Google is doing this for one reason and one reason alone. To save Google money.
Anyway, if vp9 is good and used a lot (youtube should do this), then it will get hardware support. If it is similar to already supported codecs, then possibly a firmware or driver update will do the trick.
Unless Google are happy to play hardball and only encode in VP9, losing advertising revenue until the hardware support materialises, this isn't going to happen.
Take off the FOSS and Google rose tinted glasses for a moment and come into the real world. What would happen if Google played hardball? The other video sites would provide h265 support and be in a position to displace YouTube as the de-facto standard for video sharing. All that advertising revenue would follow.
You can bet that the device manufacturers wouldn't care and would assist in app production, especially if they could get a cut of the revenue.
Please consider why Google is continuing to develop VP9. Its not to be able to provide the FOSS community with a free, unencumbered, codec, its to reduce the costs of Android, Chrome, and YouTube to them.
Now, neither AMD or NVIDIA provide VP8 decompression - support, so obviously H/W - accelerated H.264 will be faster, but that's not the fault of the codec, it's the fault of the manufacturers.
That's an interesting spin on the situation. It's not the fault of the manufacturers. Its that h264 was designed by an industry body that included the manufacturers with the intention of creating a single common codec to use across different applications and devices. VP8 was designed by a single entity to reduce its costs without giving a damn for end user experience as they could offload that to the bad manufacturers for not supporting it in hardware.
From the q&a afterward, it is mentioned that average vp9 quality is within 1% of h.265, but it didn't sound like h.265 was anywhere near ready to roll out, with the only available option being a horrifically slow reference encoder. As for speed, they claim it is about 40% slower than vp8, which is twice as fast as h.264. As such, vp9 should handily outperform h.264 in software.
The open source and royalty free vp9/opus combination sounds like an very compelling option for the html5 video tag, and may become a de facto standard before h.265 is widely deployed. Hardware support for vp9 is also in the works, so if the codec lives up to the claims, there no longer appears to be any good reason to put up with the MPEG LA.
I'm assuming that the speed is speed of encoding rather than playback? This isn't something that many people are particularly worried about.
As your information is all taken from Google please take it with a huge pinch of salt. Google are bound to present a rosy view of VP9 in comparison with h265 given their investment in it.
Personally I'm not keen on this. I don't care if its royalty free and unencumbered by patents. I don't want a single entity in control of a standard and regardless of the open nature of this Google are still in control. If this were Apple* or releasing a patent free codec to the world would you be so welcoming?
* Don't be dismissive of this Apple/NeXT do have a decent record of open source software releases.
The big problem problem that new consoles are fighting for is: a reason to exist. Most games demo-ed so far look possible on the current generation of hardware. Crowd sources AI is an interesting twist, but possible on current consoles. Killer Instinct is an odd thing to revive, but it would play just as well on a PS3.
Suddenly Microsoft comes out with a console that: 1. Phones home every day. 2. Bans game lending. 3. Possibly cripples the used game market, or maybe not, nobody is really sure. 4. Requires Kinect to be always on, because that wasn't a disaapointment.
Their sales pitch of "You can play games that are basically last-gen games, but with fewer rights" has had shocking trouble resonating with consumers.
You missed does more than play games. It might not be important to the hardcore gamer, or even the semi-hardcore gamer, but in the long run it could make the difference.
True, but the email history isn't hanging around on a gmail or yahoo or hotmail server waiting to be read.
There isn't a PRISM interface to my computer like the one to Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, so they *really* need to get real warrant, checked by a real person. None of this 'click a checkbox to say its legal' business. Only then can they get my email history.
If they want to do business in the UK, or operate offices with the UK, it is. We have laws in place that require ISPs to keep communications logs for 12 months. No warrant is needed to access this data based on UK law either, just the say so from a senior official in the organisation making the request.
You are also assuming that PRISM is picking things up off the servers, from my reading of things, it doesn't. It can collect the data on-the-wire. So all that's necessary is that your mail passes a PRISM tap and your data is collected. Now the NSA might not be able to access that data without a warrant however GCHQ, based on the sharing of intelligence information provisions, can. So what is to stop them passing information of interest picked up in this way off to the US authorities? Its a neat end around on your privacy laws and what the majority of the outrage is about over here in the UK. Its not that the surveillance goes on but rather that the intelligence community appear to have found a way around oversight.
I already did, pop3, I found that my ISP provides an excellent email. I was quite surprised how much easier Thunderbird is, and pop3 may be old, but it doesn't leave your email on the cloud.
Secure the link with TLS, I asked the ISP if their SMTP connections are force secure, he assure me it is.
My government may not protect my privacy, my British politicians may not have my interests at heart, I may be classed as possible terrorist to be watched, but there is a way forward here.
And it even works better than before!
Your email still passes through the ISPs server so the meta-data about who you received mail from and when, and who you sent mail to and when, is still recorded in their logs. If GCHQ see something they count as suspicious then they can apply to the Home Secretary or Justice Secretary to allow interception of your email and its done.
If the PRISM stuff is to believed then it doesn't matter where your email is delivered it just has to pass a listening point and they have it. So well done for changing your mail setup but I don't think it'll make much difference.
Well, they've got to get their maps data from somewhere, which means they're in the data industry now. The fact that Apple were bidding for Waze suggests they're stuck with it unless they decide to partner up with someone like Google again.
Apple got their data from a number of different sources originally. One of these was TomTom which might explain the decent data quality in the UK. They were also reported to have been getting traffic data from Waze in some form already. Don't forget that Waze aren't a mapping company, they are a traffic company.
Apple aren't going to partner with Google because Google would have them over a barrel with respect to mapping on iOS. All they can do is iterate on the data that they've got, they were employing people to manage this in the different regions a while back, and look for other complimentary data sources. One problem with getting a new data source is merging it into the existing data and managing conflicts. I worked on GIS systems back in the early '90s and it wasn't trivial then with the small amount of data available. I can only imagine that its got worse as the data set sizes have increased.
This is a huge blow for Apple, who simply don't have Google's mapping resources and really need a way to bootstrap their maps improvement efforts. They don't have a web based map system to draw on, and as bad as Apple Maps is, the most pernickety users - the ones most likely to file correction reports - have moved back to the Google Maps app. Well, I know I have.
Other than some well publicised issues at launch time I've found that for me Apple Maps works at least as well as Google Maps. Maybe its down to where you are in the world.
At what point did you go back to Google Maps? Was it following the initial criticism and based on the reports of others or was it after you'd used it for a while?
"hard right racist fascists like the BNP" = right wing "a party like the national socialists" = left wing so you're arguing that neither left nor right oriented parties should ever get access to these tools when in power. May I add the center?
I think he's implying that extreme parties of either persuasion would use the laws to enforce their ideology. Any group that believes that they are right to the exclusion of all other viewpoints is a danger and should be feared in power.
This is an impressive achievement, and interesting even if they report a relatively low (300) number of charge cycles. Too bad the article doesn't mention some other parameters:
- The article mentions power density "after 300 charging cycles". Is that the limit, or does it actually last for more cycles, and how fast does it drop off?
I recently replaced the battery in my 2008 model Macbook Pro. It was the original battery and had done 450 charging cycles. The run time was down to about a third of the new battery I replaced it with. So from a computer use 300 cycles is a good measure.
If the battery capacity increases as well then its a double win. Power efficiency in chip design is beneficial for all sorts of reasons, not just battery life, so will continue to improve. Having increased battery life will impact the current devices. It should also make others more practical as a given capacity battery will take up less space.
You do realize that Amazon is paying $12.99 for new ebooks, and selling them at $9.99 right?
Nope. Amazon sells *some* eBooks for less than cost. With most eBooks they make some profit.
Please stop spreading the misinformation that Amazon sells all eBooks below cost.
Isn't Amazon using their volume sales overall to discount popular books below purchase price and effectively shutout competitors that need the profits from the popular books to fund their service anti-competitive too? Sure, in the short term the customer gets a good deal, but long term Amazon's price manipulation will favour them rather than the public. Or am I missing something?
I'm interested why you think that this is a zero sum game? That's its a choice between sending people to Mars or improving the situation on Earth. Why not do both?
Look at it this way. It's unlikely that you would get funding to develop technologies that would assist survival of an Earth bound planetary extinction event. Politically there are more pressing uses for the money. You would get them by default from the drive to establish a colony, or outpost, on Mars. Anything that assists living in a resource poor environment would have the potential to help the situation here on Earth.
Whoosh.... that was the sound of the point of the GP going over your head.
What is the difference between minified Javascript or badly named variables? I've had to maintain code before that was written by others where the variable names were apparently chosen at random. Each company I've worked at has had different naming conventions. You develop the ability to ignore the names and look at what is going on.
If you can't understand what is going on when you un-minify the code then the problem is yours, not the author of the code. At least that's been my understanding. Changes I made to wu-ftpd, UW imapd, and innfeed required me to improve my understanding of the methodology used by each of the teams developing them. As far as I know there is no requirement in the GPL for source code to be readable and well commented, who would judge that anyway. Why should Javascript be held to a higher, arbitrary, standard?
Slashdot Mirror
...with the OS or the language platform anymore. Not enough long term profit in it. They want to be a sort of Cloud/HP/Apple. They want to be a smartphone/tablet and internet based business services vendor and that's it. There's apparently just not enough profit in the OS or supporting application developers.
Why don't they just admit it so we can all move on? Linux awaits.
You say this like its a bad thing? Its the way that the market is going, so is where the money is.
On premise installations are dropping. Why spend money on your own infrastructure when someone else can take all of that expensive maintenance and the capital costs off your books? Sure, there are regulatory issues to overcome at present, as well as privacy ones, but it is the future. In the connected world SaaS just makes sense if your business model allows it.
Home PCs, as we know them, are on the way out in favour of connected devices with cloud storage. Yes, not for the inhabitants of Slashdot, but we are the exception not the rule. There are probably more people whose primary computing experience these days is via a iDevice or an Android one than via a traditional PC.
Microsoft have a vision of the future, and its pretty good. They are trying to do what Apple did when the iMac came out and drive the market, remember the outrage at the lack of a floppy disk and only USB ports? Sadly the tech elite, you know, us here on Slashdot, time and again prove ourselves to be the least visionary, blinkered Luddites out there. So we'll scream and holler and protest about what's being taken away rather than looking to the future.
I know I'll get called it, because its the standard defence against unpopular views on here lately, but I'm not a shill. I've never owned a PC that ran Windows and my only experience with MS products away from work has been an XBox 360.
Your problem is, and always has been, one of support and the comfort factor. If you supply a Microsoft solution then the client has a warm fuzzy feeling because they know that, should you be unable to provide support, someone else will be able to.
If you go down the Open Source route this isn't quite as simple. Yes, you can find other places to provide support but without doubt they will recommend changes to fit in with their model. Windows is a safe option. This is especially true for small companies or ones with small IT needs and few internal staff. I know it doesn't fit with the OSS is wonderful view but its how people see things.
If they can't show the issues with it due to national security reasons would we be able to see a correctly amended version of the document? It seems odd to point out issues with a public document but not be able to point out what is wrong.
If the document is corrected how will we know if its a true and accurate portrayal of the state of affairs? It seems to me that information will be held back, for national security reasons, and as such the document is bound to be inaccurate even if not deliberately misleading.
The UK. Oh, wait we are subject to the same program the NSA is running and we have less oversight and resort to underlying law than the US.
GCHQ (UK equivalent of NSA) is monitoring 600m telephone events a day. That's pretty much every phone call in the country. Our politicians say its all above board and legal. We don't have a written constitution to refer to the best bet being the European Convention on Human Rights.
As a frequent Google products user (mail, phone, tablet, maps...) I wonder how good is for us to depend on a single company for every service required in an urban life style: Mobile devices, computers, cars, network connections... Whats next, Google schools? All of these reminds me of scifi distopic societies.
Given what you use I wouldn't worry, you've already given in and been absorbed into the hive mind.
Seriously. If this was anyone but Google /. would be up in arms about the breadth of control and influence they have over people's lives. Sadly there is a blindness where Google is concerned on here as on many other technical sites. Google have too much influence now. Its about time people stopped and thought about it.
DRM is all about artificially lowering the value of your product (to the user) in an attempt to make it more valuable. You think anyone in this bizarro world is using a brain?
That's an odd way to view DRM. DRM is about the publishers attempting to associate a cost with the duplication of a work. The cost of creation a copy of a digital work is negligible. The cost of creation of a copy of a physical work isn't, both in materials and time taken to create the duplicate.
Of course the key really is that there are people that believe that one they have bought something then they have a right to distribute that to others. This is ok in the case of a physical work. You pass it on and you don't have it anymore. With a digital work it doesn't work like that. The publishers, and authors/artists, fear that widespread digital duplication will deprive them of income. Hence they strive for a way to ensure that they don't lose out.
Sadly its impossible to have a reasonable approach or discussion around this because of the extremist end of the debate that believes that and form of trying to prevent distribution of unlicensed copies is evil. If you want to prevent DRM come up with a scheme that addresses everyone's needs rather than making glib throwaway pronouncements.
You speak of something you know nothing about. It's more complicated than that. Users who record home videos, publish them to Youtube, end up getting screwed because with huge financial burdens because once the number of views gets high enough there sent a HUGE destructive bill. You have to get a professional camera or be screwed if you publish ANYTHING. You can't just convert to another format either. Your still liable.
Isn't that the cost of doing business? If you publish to YouTube and get lots of hits aren't you getting associated revenue with those hits? Shouldn't you factor the fees into your costs? In fact shouldn't the owner of YouTube advise you of this and possibly just take the royalty payments out of your revenue to satisfy those needs and simplify the service for their users?
Google is doing this for one reason and one reason alone. To save Google money.
Anyway, if vp9 is good and used a lot (youtube should do this), then it will get hardware support. If it is similar to already supported codecs, then possibly a firmware or driver update will do the trick.
Unless Google are happy to play hardball and only encode in VP9, losing advertising revenue until the hardware support materialises, this isn't going to happen.
Take off the FOSS and Google rose tinted glasses for a moment and come into the real world. What would happen if Google played hardball? The other video sites would provide h265 support and be in a position to displace YouTube as the de-facto standard for video sharing. All that advertising revenue would follow.
You can bet that the device manufacturers wouldn't care and would assist in app production, especially if they could get a cut of the revenue.
Please consider why Google is continuing to develop VP9. Its not to be able to provide the FOSS community with a free, unencumbered, codec, its to reduce the costs of Android, Chrome, and YouTube to them.
Now, neither AMD or NVIDIA provide VP8 decompression - support, so obviously H/W - accelerated H.264 will be faster, but that's not the fault of the codec, it's the fault of the manufacturers.
That's an interesting spin on the situation. It's not the fault of the manufacturers. Its that h264 was designed by an industry body that included the manufacturers with the intention of creating a single common codec to use across different applications and devices. VP8 was designed by a single entity to reduce its costs without giving a damn for end user experience as they could offload that to the bad manufacturers for not supporting it in hardware.
From the q&a afterward, it is mentioned that average vp9 quality is within 1% of h.265, but it didn't sound like h.265 was anywhere near ready to roll out, with the only available option being a horrifically slow reference encoder. As for speed, they claim it is about 40% slower than vp8, which is twice as fast as h.264. As such, vp9 should handily outperform h.264 in software.
The open source and royalty free vp9/opus combination sounds like an very compelling option for the html5 video tag, and may become a de facto standard before h.265 is widely deployed. Hardware support for vp9 is also in the works, so if the codec lives up to the claims, there no longer appears to be any good reason to put up with the MPEG LA.
I'm assuming that the speed is speed of encoding rather than playback? This isn't something that many people are particularly worried about.
As your information is all taken from Google please take it with a huge pinch of salt. Google are bound to present a rosy view of VP9 in comparison with h265 given their investment in it.
Personally I'm not keen on this. I don't care if its royalty free and unencumbered by patents. I don't want a single entity in control of a standard and regardless of the open nature of this Google are still in control. If this were Apple* or releasing a patent free codec to the world would you be so welcoming?
* Don't be dismissive of this Apple/NeXT do have a decent record of open source software releases.
The big problem problem that new consoles are fighting for is: a reason to exist. Most games demo-ed so far look possible on the current generation of hardware. Crowd sources AI is an interesting twist, but possible on current consoles. Killer Instinct is an odd thing to revive, but it would play just as well on a PS3.
Suddenly Microsoft comes out with a console that:
1. Phones home every day.
2. Bans game lending.
3. Possibly cripples the used game market, or maybe not, nobody is really sure.
4. Requires Kinect to be always on, because that wasn't a disaapointment.
Their sales pitch of "You can play games that are basically last-gen games, but with fewer rights" has had shocking trouble resonating with consumers.
You missed does more than play games. It might not be important to the hardcore gamer, or even the semi-hardcore gamer, but in the long run it could make the difference.
True, but the email history isn't hanging around on a gmail or yahoo or hotmail server waiting to be read.
There isn't a PRISM interface to my computer like the one to Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, so they *really* need to get real warrant, checked by a real person. None of this 'click a checkbox to say its legal' business. Only then can they get my email history.
If they want to do business in the UK, or operate offices with the UK, it is. We have laws in place that require ISPs to keep communications logs for 12 months. No warrant is needed to access this data based on UK law either, just the say so from a senior official in the organisation making the request.
You are also assuming that PRISM is picking things up off the servers, from my reading of things, it doesn't. It can collect the data on-the-wire. So all that's necessary is that your mail passes a PRISM tap and your data is collected. Now the NSA might not be able to access that data without a warrant however GCHQ, based on the sharing of intelligence information provisions, can. So what is to stop them passing information of interest picked up in this way off to the US authorities? Its a neat end around on your privacy laws and what the majority of the outrage is about over here in the UK. Its not that the surveillance goes on but rather that the intelligence community appear to have found a way around oversight.
I already did, pop3, I found that my ISP provides an excellent email. I was quite surprised how much easier Thunderbird is, and pop3 may be old, but it doesn't leave your email on the cloud.
Secure the link with TLS, I asked the ISP if their SMTP connections are force secure, he assure me it is.
My government may not protect my privacy, my British politicians may not have my interests at heart, I may be classed as possible terrorist to be watched, but there is a way forward here.
And it even works better than before!
Your email still passes through the ISPs server so the meta-data about who you received mail from and when, and who you sent mail to and when, is still recorded in their logs. If GCHQ see something they count as suspicious then they can apply to the Home Secretary or Justice Secretary to allow interception of your email and its done.
If the PRISM stuff is to believed then it doesn't matter where your email is delivered it just has to pass a listening point and they have it. So well done for changing your mail setup but I don't think it'll make much difference.
Instead of wasting so much money, I wish Google had investing in something much more worthwhile like offline navigation.
If they did that how would they track where you are?
Well, they've got to get their maps data from somewhere, which means they're in the data industry now. The fact that Apple were bidding for Waze suggests they're stuck with it unless they decide to partner up with someone like Google again.
Apple got their data from a number of different sources originally. One of these was TomTom which might explain the decent data quality in the UK. They were also reported to have been getting traffic data from Waze in some form already. Don't forget that Waze aren't a mapping company, they are a traffic company.
Apple aren't going to partner with Google because Google would have them over a barrel with respect to mapping on iOS. All they can do is iterate on the data that they've got, they were employing people to manage this in the different regions a while back, and look for other complimentary data sources. One problem with getting a new data source is merging it into the existing data and managing conflicts. I worked on GIS systems back in the early '90s and it wasn't trivial then with the small amount of data available. I can only imagine that its got worse as the data set sizes have increased.
This is a huge blow for Apple, who simply don't have Google's mapping resources and really need a way to bootstrap their maps improvement efforts. They don't have a web based map system to draw on, and as bad as Apple Maps is, the most pernickety users - the ones most likely to file correction reports - have moved back to the Google Maps app. Well, I know I have.
Other than some well publicised issues at launch time I've found that for me Apple Maps works at least as well as Google Maps. Maybe its down to where you are in the world.
At what point did you go back to Google Maps? Was it following the initial criticism and based on the reports of others or was it after you'd used it for a while?
"hard right racist fascists like the BNP" = right wing
"a party like the national socialists" = left wing
so you're arguing that neither left nor right oriented parties should ever get access to these tools when in power. May I add the center?
I think he's implying that extreme parties of either persuasion would use the laws to enforce their ideology. Any group that believes that they are right to the exclusion of all other viewpoints is a danger and should be feared in power.
This is an impressive achievement, and interesting even if they report a relatively low (300) number of charge cycles. Too bad the article doesn't mention some other parameters:
- The article mentions power density "after 300 charging cycles". Is that the limit, or does it actually last for more cycles, and how fast does it drop off?
I recently replaced the battery in my 2008 model Macbook Pro. It was the original battery and had done 450 charging cycles. The run time was down to about a third of the new battery I replaced it with. So from a computer use 300 cycles is a good measure.
If the battery capacity increases as well then its a double win. Power efficiency in chip design is beneficial for all sorts of reasons, not just battery life, so will continue to improve. Having increased battery life will impact the current devices. It should also make others more practical as a given capacity battery will take up less space.
I think the GGP is overly pessimistic.
You do realize that Amazon is paying $12.99 for new ebooks, and selling them at $9.99 right?
Nope. Amazon sells *some* eBooks for less than cost. With most eBooks they make some profit.
Please stop spreading the misinformation that Amazon sells all eBooks below cost.
Isn't Amazon using their volume sales overall to discount popular books below purchase price and effectively shutout competitors that need the profits from the popular books to fund their service anti-competitive too? Sure, in the short term the customer gets a good deal, but long term Amazon's price manipulation will favour them rather than the public. Or am I missing something?
So, has the farmer been sued by Monsanto yet for copyright infringement?
Doesn't India have other priorities? http://www.wateraid.org/uk/where-we-work/page/india
I'm interested why you think that this is a zero sum game? That's its a choice between sending people to Mars or improving the situation on Earth. Why not do both?
Look at it this way. It's unlikely that you would get funding to develop technologies that would assist survival of an Earth bound planetary extinction event. Politically there are more pressing uses for the money. You would get them by default from the drive to establish a colony, or outpost, on Mars. Anything that assists living in a resource poor environment would have the potential to help the situation here on Earth.
I have a new microwave, bought less than a month ago, that has two dials on it. One for power, the other for time.
Whoosh .... that was the sound of the point of the GP going over your head.
What is the difference between minified Javascript or badly named variables? I've had to maintain code before that was written by others where the variable names were apparently chosen at random. Each company I've worked at has had different naming conventions. You develop the ability to ignore the names and look at what is going on.
If you can't understand what is going on when you un-minify the code then the problem is yours, not the author of the code. At least that's been my understanding. Changes I made to wu-ftpd, UW imapd, and innfeed required me to improve my understanding of the methodology used by each of the teams developing them. As far as I know there is no requirement in the GPL for source code to be readable and well commented, who would judge that anyway. Why should Javascript be held to a higher, arbitrary, standard?