One of windows biggest issues if they have to change everything each generation as a sales tool.
Compare apples to apples. Either compare GUIs -- in which case many Linux GUIs make substantial changes with some frequency (e.g. Gnome Shell and Unity), though many don't -- or compare CLIs -- in which case the Windows CLI has seen a comparable amount of development since the days of DOS. (You could look at PowerShell on the Windows side, but (1) that's still only one big change in 25 years, and (2) PowerShell is actually pretty awesome.)
My impression is that's not uncommon for software where reliability is paramount; I first heard of it with respect to NASA. The argument was essentially the same as yours -- they do all their testing and validation on debug builds, and why would they fly something that they didn't test?
For most day-to-day software though, a rarely-encountered crashing bug (for instance) is probably more attractive than putting up with a significantly slower build.
From the changelog: "A new general optimization level, -Og, has been introduced. It addresses the need for fast compilation and a superior debugging experience while providing a reasonable level of runtime performance. Overall experience for development should be better than the default optimization level -O0."
This actually sounds really attractive to me... I'll have to try it out.
Thanks for the link. I've seen it before, but I didn't notice the footnote which leads to this post which gives the first actually convincing explanation I've seen (not that I've looked very hard) for the adequacy of 16/44.1. It's easy to find people who go "Nyquist's theorem! Your limit of hearing is 20Khz!" but that ignores the effects of the bit rate, and that poster did not.
That's my reasoning too. I've tried to ABX things, and at least with my equipment (I have decent headphones but not everything on the audio path is good) and I've sometimes been unable to discern a 128 kbps OGG from lossless. I'm under no illusion that it provides audible benefits over a
And yet, even though I already had by CD collection ripped to higher-bitrate MP3s, I re-ripped to FLAC a few years ago. Why?
(1) I wanted to re-rip anyway, as some CDs had ripping artifacts (clicks and pops) and I wanted to do a secure rip. (I bought dbpoweramp's ripper for this, and it worked quite well. No relation to the company except a pretty satisfied customer.)
(2) Archiving. Suppose in 10 years some other compression format comes along and supplants MP3. What then? Well, I'd either have to transcode MP3->FutureFormat and suffer bigger losses (perhaps the codecs interact particularly poorly and even though 256 kbps sounds good with both, but the transcode is bad) or do another re-rip anyway. And in that time span, my CDs would be more likely to be damaged, destroyed, etc.
(3) I want to add good metadata. I'm unhappy with the metadata that comes with most digital music purchases, for example; while in some sense it's more accurate than what I want, it behaves far worse with most players. For instance, I bought a collection of symphonies, and the Album Title of each is "Karajan Symphony Edition", the Artist is always "Herbert von Karajan" or something like that, and the track titles are always like "I. Moderato" -- but the actual composer of the symphony is nowhere present. That's a particularly bad case, but I would much rather have the Album Title be something like "Symphony No. 6", the Artist be "Bruckner, Anton", and then the actual album title and performers be in other metadata fields. So I am very slowly replacing all of the metadata in the tracks I've ripped. This interacts with the previous entry, because if I wanted to re-rip my collection in a different format I'd have to either re-do this work or automatically find correspondences between tracks. (Probably not too hard, but you never know.)
(4) Storage is cheap. My CD collection takes up less than 100 GB in FLAC. That's way too much for my portable player, but in another few years it probably won't be. In the mean time, doing transcoding from lossless to MP3 or OGG is easy, and doesn't suffer from any additional problems of problem (2), and metadata is preserved well. If all you have is a laptop and no external drive that could be a problem even there, but I'm a space hog anyway so I barely notice that 100 GB.
(5) There are no real drawbacks -- it's just a very small amount of extra storage cost (but not much; the collection of photos I've taken is three times the size of my music) and a token effort and a bit of CPU time to start an additional transcoding step to OGG for the portable player.
(6) Given (5), why not? Who knows, maybe I'll have biotic ears implanted in 30 years that will make even lossless CD quality sound like crap.:-)
Thus, the *correct* way to appraise say mp3 is with very good speakers in a treated listening room
No it isn't. At least most of the time it isn't, though that result would be interesting.
If I'm trying to decide whether to archive my CDs to MP3 or FLAC, I don't give a rat's ass what it sounds like with great monitors in a treated listening room, because that's not where I listen to music. If my speakers give a non-linear result that amplifies the distortions from compression, that's what matters; not what it sounds like in an ideal situation.
Which is another way of saying that Flash is ill suited for mobile devices, due to battery life and performance.
Just because Flash is ill-suited for mobile devices doesn't mean that not supporting flash is better-suited. After all, turning the thing on at all will drastically decrease your battery life, so should Jobs have said "well, we'll just not give you a power button and it will always be off'?
Here's that last quote again fixed: "Some writers and publishers prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in s -- hence "Dylan Thomas' poetry," "Etta James' singing," and "that business' main concern." Though easy to apply and economical, such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago.
my real name ends with an s and I am a friggin' expert at spelling my own name correctly in all its forms.
Apparently not.
Less tongue-in-cheek, both forms are acceptable, and the 's form seems moreso.
The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers states "to form the possessive of any singular proper noun, add an apostrophe and an s" and gives examples including "Dickens's reputation" and "Descartes's philosophy". There is no specific rule for proper names ending in an s.
A Writer's Reference by Diana Hacker says "If the noun is singular and ends in -s, add -`s" and gives the example of "Lois's sister spent last year in India." It follows up by saying "Exception: If pronunciation would be awkward with the added -'s, some writers use only the apostrophe. Either use is acceptable" and gives the example of "Sophocles' plays are among my favorites."
The Chicago Manual of Style says "The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s" and gives a examples of "the bass's stripes", "Jesusâ(TM)s adherents", "Kansas's legislature", and "Dickens's novels" among others. It later states "In a return to Chicagoâ(TM)s earlier practice, words and names ending in an unpronounced s form the possessive in the usual way (with the addition of an apostrophe and an s)", and then "In a departure from earlier practice, Chicago no longer recommends the traditional exception for proper classical names of two or more syllables that end in an eez sound. Such names form the possessive in the usual way (though when these forms are spoken, the additional s is generally not pronounced)"; in the latter case, giving examples such as "Euripidesâ(TM)s tragedies". Finally, the section ends by saying "Some writers and publishers prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in sâ"hence âoeDylan Thomasâ(TM) poetry,â âoeEtta Jamesâ(TM) singing,â and âoethat businessâ(TM) main concern.â Though easy to apply and economical, such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago."
Also "reverse tilt" please! That's being able to prop up the front of the keyboard. The only remotely normal keyboard (e.g. not one of those Kinesis things) that I know that has that built in is the MS Natural 4000. I've bought a few of those and they're good, but it'd be nice to have more options. The reverse tilt is basically a killer feature for me.
Well, maybe, just maybe, because the increase in traction doesn't improve the driving experience or the safety of the drive to the extent that "upgrading" would outweigh the inconvenience of locking nuts on the wheel? Because your incidence of having a flat tire is higher than your incidence of skidding due to loss of traction? Because I don't drive like a freaking maniac on the way to and from work and, thus, don't need "better traction"? I can think of a lot of reasons, most of which indicate that someone who would choose these tires likes to drive far too aggressively.
Of course you have to weigh those things too. My point is that from a practical perspective, locking the lug nuts are by no means a deal-breaker, and that there could be other benefits that outweigh that -- and if they do, then it makes sense to get the tires anyway. For instance, if you have frequent need for presentation software and don't have a Mac available, IMO PowerPoint is a clear frontrunner by leagues.
Oh wait... what I meant to say is "For instance, if you live in a place that gets a ton of snow, special tires that give you greater traction in the snow can be of great help." (I live in such a place, and (1) there have been a few times where I've struggled to get out of a parking space, and (2) it's sometime hard to determine what a safe speed is until you try to stop and... don't. I'm generally pretty good, but once or twice I've had that happen where I hit the brakes and the car keeps going forward. Fortunately never to any more devastating effect than running into the curb at a few miles an hour. Now, I actually don't get snow tires -- but's that because of the cost of the tires and the fact that I have no place to store the off-season ones. Just like the locking-lug-nut wheels wouldn't be good for everyone.)
If you're running VMS or a variant of unix or linux, please forward this message to everyone you know. Afterwards, delete a bunch of your own files at random.
What if the tires gave you better traction on the road in your common driving conditions than the alternatives? In such a case, why wouldn't you buy those tires? Do you have two cars but only one set of tires, and you move the tires back and forth depending on what car you want to drive?
(Just to clarify, I'm not arguing that MS Office is better than the alternatives for everyone or everything. But I do think it's better than the alternatives for some things, just like the alternatives are better than MS Office for others.)
Indeed - I find I very rarely use continuous shooting on my own cameras, and I don't think I've ever hit the buffer limits in a real-world situation...
With a 7D? I can believe that. I definitely have with my T2i though.
His numbers are a bit low; my T2i will shoot 5 or 6 RAW photos at full speed before getting delayed by the buffer (at which point it slows to about 2 seconds per shot even with a class 10 card), and I definitely consider that a consumer grade DSLR. But I feel like the sentiment of his post is pretty correct.
...so SD card speed becomes mostly irrelevant to user experience
I've got a T2i for hobby photography and have definitely hit the buffer limit on a number occasions. I virtually always shoot RAW for the increased flexibility in lossless postprocessing, so it doesn't take much; if I set it to continuous shooting and hold down the shutter release, I get six shots before it pauses to write, and that is with a class 10 "PNY professional" card. (I just tried it.)
The most recent time I've hit it was when I was taking component shots of some HDR panoramas that I've been too lazy to stitch together.:-) I set it to do automatic exposure bracketing, so I would shoot three shots in rapid succession, turn a bit, shoot three more, etc. Those took about twice as long to fill out if I didn't have to wait for SD writing speed, and because of that it also allowed more movement of things in the scene. (It's impossible to get around all movement, but it's good to try to minimize them.)
There was also one time I was shooting a rocket launch and turned the quality down to JPEG so I could get continuous shots and I think I may have filled the buffer even then. I shot a second launch with a film camera because that could actually take more rapid-fire photos.
Basically I guess what I'd say is that I don't need a fast card almost all the time, but it is occasionally very helpful.
OK, so before I begin, I should state a very big disclaimer that I actually haven't really used any e-readers (I'm too cheap). However, I have thought about what formats to use for typesetting technical textbook-like material, and played around with a couple toolchains a small amount. (I'm also very familiar with Latex.) It would be a useful thing for me to know, so take the following post with a hefty grain of "if you disagree back at me, feel free to give reasons why and I will certainly consider them."
My decision a while back was that I felt like what would be ideal would be to offer things in two formats: the first would be a print version in PDF formatted to work well on letter paper (e.g. use the full width for figures and tables where it's useful; put occasional information, cross references, figure captions, etc. in the margins; and push the text width a little wider that Latex gives you by default), and the second would be a reflowable version like HTML and/or EPUB.
The first problem is that the output quality isn't as good (see kindle and how it renders equations)
I sort of feel like this would likely be overruled by the increase in ease of reading the textual portions. I find reading full-page PDFs like I envision annoying enough on my 11.5" laptop screen (it's a convertible tablet so it is natural enough to hold in portrait mode), so I can't imagine trying to read the print version I'd envision on a screen that's much smaller like an iPad or Kindle.
And besides, you could always render equations (especially displayed ones) into images and include them, no?
This means that equations and figures in particular change location all the time meaning it is difficult to get a feel in the book where everything is. Familiarity with location is lost. For a novel this isn't an issue but for complex layout it because a hindrance rather than a virtue.
Here I mostly disagree, for two reasons.
First, I suspect that most people would be spending almost all of their time with your book or whatever with one format. So if the book looks different on two different devices... who really cares?
Second, it seems like most of the problem of that would go away if you have the ability to navigate to cross references easily. If the text says "See figure 1", it doesn't much matter that it moves around. I'm not sure that all platforms have something like this (in particular, does the Kindle?), but at least it seems like more general-purpose tablets are likely to.
I've been slightly interested in toolchains like this, and investigated a little bit AsciiDoc -> Docbook -> Latex -> PDF, but I didn't put a ton of time into it.
How does the flexibility of this approach differ from working right in Latex to when it comes to things like page layout (both margins and placement of floats and images and such), fonts, etc.?
I consider that statement to be one of those things that Politifact would rate "half true" or even "mostly false"; I think Musk overstates his case, and as a result I can't tell how much of a case he has. (At the moment, I don't find either side particularly credible.)
In particular, let's look at the portion where the battery died. Based on charging, this was (1) leave Milford, (2) arrive and spend the night at Groton, (3) do a tiny recharge in Norwich, (4) try to make it back to Milford.
Google maps says that the Milford->Groton distance is 60 miles. So in Milford, if you're trying to figure out how much you'll need to get to Groton and back, you only need 120. Now, Broder took a long-cut and increased that to 79 miles on the trip there, meaning that he'd really need 140 miles. (He was planning on taking a shorter path back, actually a bit less than my 60 miles: "I drove, slowly, to Stonington, Conn., for dinner and spent the night in Groton, a total distance of 79 miles. When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford." Musk's data says that, despite charging for less time than the original review said, he still stopped charging at 185 miles -- at least for someone used to gas driving (i.e. me) who doesn't have to worry about how the car takes into account heating and such in that range estimation, that's plenty of wiggle room. Nothing particularly dumb yet.
For some reason -- the four possibilities that come to mind are the range estimate ignoring the effects of cold weather + heater use, other causes of a very bad estimate on the part of the Tesla; a dumb mistake on the part of Broder, or deliberate malfeasance on the part of Broder -- the estimated range when leaving Milford was dramatically high. It's certainly possible that the cause of this was Broder's doing, but it seems equally likely to me that it was not, given that the Consumer Reports reviewer didn't exactly have a ton of leeway when they made it. And the Consumer Reports author (1) started from Milford with a larger charge, and (2) had warmer weather from what they say in their articles (which is admittedly very imprecise, but it was perhaps 15 or even 20 degrees difference). Anyway, if it was the car (very plausible), then there's no dumbness on Broder's part.
That leaves his behavior on the morning he left Groton. He took a detour to Norwich to get a trickle charge, which Musk's data shows he stopped at 28%. This is the one time that Broder left a charging station with a report that he had inadequate charge. How much this is "dumb" depends on your level of risk factor. Under a reasonable assumption, it was risky but reasonable to do. He felt that the Tesla was underreporting its available mileage. This is a reasonable assumption -- the batteries output less power when they're cold, and driving along was supposed to warm them up. That was the purpose of the conditioning. After all, this exact thing happened to the Consumer Reports reviewer, and is the reason I posted that link at the GP. ("The night before my voyage back to work, I had 88 miles left, according to the car's computation.... But while parked outside my house overnight, the temperature dipped and so did the indicated range, which now read only 58 miles. (Yes, a little range anxiety began to set in.)... According to Tesla, the car's computer takes into account the freezing temperature and readjusts the remaining range. The company also said that, upon restarting, the battery warms up and the computer once again updates the range.") Broder's or
Oops, my bad on the plaza thing [I assumed you had to take an exit off the freeway to go to a gas station that also had a charger].
It's on the NJ turnpike, so as is typical for toll roads (at least all around the north east out to Illinois) you don't have to exit and reenter.
This is because [ordinarily] you park, get a burger, then refuel and leave.... But, then again, if the charging stations were actually in individual parking spaces in the parking lot this might make sense.... However, having a charging cable in a parking slot might not be a good idea. Because, the parking lot is an area where children get in/out of cars. Letting them get near something that is potentially hazardous doesn't seem like a good idea. Upon further reflection, I would guess that the charger is in a special area near the gas pumps
There's no street view of the plaza itself so I can't check for certain, but that is exactly what I would expect. The thing is, because charging takes so long (relative to gas), the workflow is a lot closer to (1) park (2) charge (3) get a burger and hang out during the charge (4) leave. In other words, the appropriate place for the charger is exactly the same as the appropriate place for most people to park when eating -- the parking lot. The assembly line design you mention is exactly counter-productive to the goal of EV charging.
There is a shopping center parking lot nearby where I live that has EV charging stations. Where are they? In the parking lot as normal. And they're not quite the prime real estate for spots, but they're close.
You're overestimating the hazardous nature of the plugs too. The chance of an accident from a charging station I would speculate would be minuscule compared to the risk from all the cars driving around.:-)
But, if this were true, Tesla would know this and I don't think they'd mention it as an issue.
The Milford installation is "new". (Source.) Perhaps it hadn't been around for long enough for people to complain. Or perhaps the complaints didn't make their way up to Musk. Or perhaps it's somewhat of a common issue for EV owners, and none thought to report it. I still think that all of these explanations are way more plausible than Musk's pseudo-accusation of deliberate sabotage by driving around unnecessarily.
They could be combined/cross-checked to produce the most accurate result.
Yeah, but did Musk? IMO, for as transparent as he's pretending to be, he actually gives very little data about the data he's released. (As another example, he claims that the car was never out of power, even when being loaded onto the flatbed. But from some reports, the car has two battery sets -- the main battery, and a 12V. Presumably the graph Musk shows is of the main battery. Where's the data for the 12V? Are the charges combined together somehow on that chart? Is it gathered? Why doesn't Musk mention this omission if not? (I'm sure he knows about that.) There is a plausible explanation that the main batteries still had charge but the 12V died; if so, then it did need towed after all, making Musk's statement about the charge on the main batteries meaningless.)
Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm not actually on Broder's side on this really. Rather I don't find either side particularly credible at the moment.
Considering two other reporters from Consumer Reports and Motor Trends drove essentially the same route without any of the problems Broder had,...
Actually that's not entirely true. The drop in battery charge overnight that doomed Broder by his account happened to the Consumer Reports author as well, and that was in slightly warmer conditions.
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One of windows biggest issues if they have to change everything each generation as a sales tool.
Compare apples to apples. Either compare GUIs -- in which case many Linux GUIs make substantial changes with some frequency (e.g. Gnome Shell and Unity), though many don't -- or compare CLIs -- in which case the Windows CLI has seen a comparable amount of development since the days of DOS. (You could look at PowerShell on the Windows side, but (1) that's still only one big change in 25 years, and (2) PowerShell is actually pretty awesome.)
My impression is that's not uncommon for software where reliability is paramount; I first heard of it with respect to NASA. The argument was essentially the same as yours -- they do all their testing and validation on debug builds, and why would they fly something that they didn't test?
For most day-to-day software though, a rarely-encountered crashing bug (for instance) is probably more attractive than putting up with a significantly slower build.
From the changelog: "A new general optimization level, -Og, has been introduced. It addresses the need for fast compilation and a superior debugging experience while providing a reasonable level of runtime performance. Overall experience for development should be better than the default optimization level -O0."
This actually sounds really attractive to me... I'll have to try it out.
Thanks for the link. I've seen it before, but I didn't notice the footnote which leads to this post which gives the first actually convincing explanation I've seen (not that I've looked very hard) for the adequacy of 16/44.1. It's easy to find people who go "Nyquist's theorem! Your limit of hearing is 20Khz!" but that ignores the effects of the bit rate, and that poster did not.
That's my reasoning too. I've tried to ABX things, and at least with my equipment (I have decent headphones but not everything on the audio path is good) and I've sometimes been unable to discern a 128 kbps OGG from lossless. I'm under no illusion that it provides audible benefits over a
And yet, even though I already had by CD collection ripped to higher-bitrate MP3s, I re-ripped to FLAC a few years ago. Why?
(1) I wanted to re-rip anyway, as some CDs had ripping artifacts (clicks and pops) and I wanted to do a secure rip. (I bought dbpoweramp's ripper for this, and it worked quite well. No relation to the company except a pretty satisfied customer.)
(2) Archiving. Suppose in 10 years some other compression format comes along and supplants MP3. What then? Well, I'd either have to transcode MP3->FutureFormat and suffer bigger losses (perhaps the codecs interact particularly poorly and even though 256 kbps sounds good with both, but the transcode is bad) or do another re-rip anyway. And in that time span, my CDs would be more likely to be damaged, destroyed, etc.
(3) I want to add good metadata. I'm unhappy with the metadata that comes with most digital music purchases, for example; while in some sense it's more accurate than what I want, it behaves far worse with most players. For instance, I bought a collection of symphonies, and the Album Title of each is "Karajan Symphony Edition", the Artist is always "Herbert von Karajan" or something like that, and the track titles are always like "I. Moderato" -- but the actual composer of the symphony is nowhere present. That's a particularly bad case, but I would much rather have the Album Title be something like "Symphony No. 6", the Artist be "Bruckner, Anton", and then the actual album title and performers be in other metadata fields. So I am very slowly replacing all of the metadata in the tracks I've ripped. This interacts with the previous entry, because if I wanted to re-rip my collection in a different format I'd have to either re-do this work or automatically find correspondences between tracks. (Probably not too hard, but you never know.)
(4) Storage is cheap. My CD collection takes up less than 100 GB in FLAC. That's way too much for my portable player, but in another few years it probably won't be. In the mean time, doing transcoding from lossless to MP3 or OGG is easy, and doesn't suffer from any additional problems of problem (2), and metadata is preserved well. If all you have is a laptop and no external drive that could be a problem even there, but I'm a space hog anyway so I barely notice that 100 GB.
(5) There are no real drawbacks -- it's just a very small amount of extra storage cost (but not much; the collection of photos I've taken is three times the size of my music) and a token effort and a bit of CPU time to start an additional transcoding step to OGG for the portable player.
(6) Given (5), why not? Who knows, maybe I'll have biotic ears implanted in 30 years that will make even lossless CD quality sound like crap. :-)
Thus, the *correct* way to appraise say mp3 is with very good speakers in a treated listening room
No it isn't. At least most of the time it isn't, though that result would be interesting.
If I'm trying to decide whether to archive my CDs to MP3 or FLAC, I don't give a rat's ass what it sounds like with great monitors in a treated listening room, because that's not where I listen to music. If my speakers give a non-linear result that amplifies the distortions from compression, that's what matters; not what it sounds like in an ideal situation.
I think it's a complaint about (and I hesitate to link to it) this post which keeps showing up story after story.
Obviously. He was saying your sarcasm was unwarranted, considering all the failures.
And of course, early NASA never had any failures. None of their test rockets exploded, no spacecraft sunk after splashdown, no one died, no one was put in great peril, no unmanned missions were lost, and no missions led to in-flight repairs. NASA has historically had a spotless record, and it's only recently that there have been losses to missions.
I think you're right in that is what the parent was arguing, but that doesn't stop it from being an incredibly stupid argument.
Which is another way of saying that Flash is ill suited for mobile devices, due to battery life and performance.
Just because Flash is ill-suited for mobile devices doesn't mean that not supporting flash is better-suited. After all, turning the thing on at all will drastically decrease your battery life, so should Jobs have said "well, we'll just not give you a power button and it will always be off'?
Mmmm Unicode.
Here's that last quote again fixed: "Some writers and publishers prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in s -- hence "Dylan Thomas' poetry," "Etta James' singing," and "that business' main concern." Though easy to apply and economical, such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago.
my real name ends with an s and I am a friggin' expert at spelling my own name correctly in all its forms.
Apparently not.
Less tongue-in-cheek, both forms are acceptable, and the 's form seems moreso.
The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers states "to form the possessive of any singular proper noun, add an apostrophe and an s" and gives examples including "Dickens's reputation" and "Descartes's philosophy". There is no specific rule for proper names ending in an s.
A Writer's Reference by Diana Hacker says "If the noun is singular and ends in -s, add -`s" and gives the example of "Lois's sister spent last year in India." It follows up by saying "Exception: If pronunciation would be awkward with the added -'s, some writers use only the apostrophe. Either use is acceptable" and gives the example of "Sophocles' plays are among my favorites."
The Chicago Manual of Style says "The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s" and gives a examples of "the bass's stripes", "Jesusâ(TM)s adherents", "Kansas's legislature", and "Dickens's novels" among others. It later states "In a return to Chicagoâ(TM)s earlier practice, words and names ending in an unpronounced s form the possessive in the usual way (with the addition of an apostrophe and an s)", and then "In a departure from earlier practice, Chicago no longer recommends the traditional exception for proper classical names of two or more syllables that end in an eez sound. Such names form the possessive in the usual way (though when these forms are spoken, the additional s is generally not pronounced)"; in the latter case, giving examples such as "Euripidesâ(TM)s tragedies". Finally, the section ends by saying "Some writers and publishers prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in sâ"hence âoeDylan Thomasâ(TM) poetry,â âoeEtta Jamesâ(TM) singing,â and âoethat businessâ(TM) main concern.â Though easy to apply and economical, such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago."
Also "reverse tilt" please! That's being able to prop up the front of the keyboard. The only remotely normal keyboard (e.g. not one of those Kinesis things) that I know that has that built in is the MS Natural 4000. I've bought a few of those and they're good, but it'd be nice to have more options. The reverse tilt is basically a killer feature for me.
Well, maybe, just maybe, because the increase in traction doesn't improve the driving experience or the safety of the drive to the extent that "upgrading" would outweigh the inconvenience of locking nuts on the wheel? Because your incidence of having a flat tire is higher than your incidence of skidding due to loss of traction? Because I don't drive like a freaking maniac on the way to and from work and, thus, don't need "better traction"? I can think of a lot of reasons, most of which indicate that someone who would choose these tires likes to drive far too aggressively.
Of course you have to weigh those things too. My point is that from a practical perspective, locking the lug nuts are by no means a deal-breaker, and that there could be other benefits that outweigh that -- and if they do, then it makes sense to get the tires anyway. For instance, if you have frequent need for presentation software and don't have a Mac available, IMO PowerPoint is a clear frontrunner by leagues.
Oh wait... what I meant to say is "For instance, if you live in a place that gets a ton of snow, special tires that give you greater traction in the snow can be of great help." (I live in such a place, and (1) there have been a few times where I've struggled to get out of a parking space, and (2) it's sometime hard to determine what a safe speed is until you try to stop and... don't. I'm generally pretty good, but once or twice I've had that happen where I hit the brakes and the car keeps going forward. Fortunately never to any more devastating effect than running into the curb at a few miles an hour. Now, I actually don't get snow tires -- but's that because of the cost of the tires and the fact that I have no place to store the off-season ones. Just like the locking-lug-nut wheels wouldn't be good for everyone.)
YOU HAVE NOW RECEIVED THE UNIX VIRUS -
This virus works on the honor system:
If you're running VMS or a variant of unix or linux, please forward this
message to everyone you know. Afterwards, delete a bunch of your own files at random.
----
Ha ha you are now infected!
And I would choose to buy these tires why?
What if the tires gave you better traction on the road in your common driving conditions than the alternatives? In such a case, why wouldn't you buy those tires? Do you have two cars but only one set of tires, and you move the tires back and forth depending on what car you want to drive?
(Just to clarify, I'm not arguing that MS Office is better than the alternatives for everyone or everything. But I do think it's better than the alternatives for some things, just like the alternatives are better than MS Office for others.)
Yeah, because every bill that is introduced in the House passes.
They pass more frequently than when bills which are not introduced.
Indeed - I find I very rarely use continuous shooting on my own cameras, and I don't think I've ever hit the buffer limits in a real-world situation...
With a 7D? I can believe that. I definitely have with my T2i though.
His numbers are a bit low; my T2i will shoot 5 or 6 RAW photos at full speed before getting delayed by the buffer (at which point it slows to about 2 seconds per shot even with a class 10 card), and I definitely consider that a consumer grade DSLR. But I feel like the sentiment of his post is pretty correct.
...so SD card speed becomes mostly irrelevant to user experience
I've got a T2i for hobby photography and have definitely hit the buffer limit on a number occasions. I virtually always shoot RAW for the increased flexibility in lossless postprocessing, so it doesn't take much; if I set it to continuous shooting and hold down the shutter release, I get six shots before it pauses to write, and that is with a class 10 "PNY professional" card. (I just tried it.)
The most recent time I've hit it was when I was taking component shots of some HDR panoramas that I've been too lazy to stitch together. :-) I set it to do automatic exposure bracketing, so I would shoot three shots in rapid succession, turn a bit, shoot three more, etc. Those took about twice as long to fill out if I didn't have to wait for SD writing speed, and because of that it also allowed more movement of things in the scene. (It's impossible to get around all movement, but it's good to try to minimize them.)
There was also one time I was shooting a rocket launch and turned the quality down to JPEG so I could get continuous shots and I think I may have filled the buffer even then. I shot a second launch with a film camera because that could actually take more rapid-fire photos.
Basically I guess what I'd say is that I don't need a fast card almost all the time, but it is occasionally very helpful.
...and with the macbook pros starting at $1500, they're still more expensive.
OK, so before I begin, I should state a very big disclaimer that I actually haven't really used any e-readers (I'm too cheap). However, I have thought about what formats to use for typesetting technical textbook-like material, and played around with a couple toolchains a small amount. (I'm also very familiar with Latex.) It would be a useful thing for me to know, so take the following post with a hefty grain of "if you disagree back at me, feel free to give reasons why and I will certainly consider them."
My decision a while back was that I felt like what would be ideal would be to offer things in two formats: the first would be a print version in PDF formatted to work well on letter paper (e.g. use the full width for figures and tables where it's useful; put occasional information, cross references, figure captions, etc. in the margins; and push the text width a little wider that Latex gives you by default), and the second would be a reflowable version like HTML and/or EPUB.
The first problem is that the output quality isn't as good (see kindle and how it renders equations)
I sort of feel like this would likely be overruled by the increase in ease of reading the textual portions. I find reading full-page PDFs like I envision annoying enough on my 11.5" laptop screen (it's a convertible tablet so it is natural enough to hold in portrait mode), so I can't imagine trying to read the print version I'd envision on a screen that's much smaller like an iPad or Kindle.
And besides, you could always render equations (especially displayed ones) into images and include them, no?
This means that equations and figures in particular change location all the time meaning it is difficult to get a feel in the book where everything is. Familiarity with location is lost. For a novel this isn't an issue but for complex layout it because a hindrance rather than a virtue.
Here I mostly disagree, for two reasons.
First, I suspect that most people would be spending almost all of their time with your book or whatever with one format. So if the book looks different on two different devices... who really cares?
Second, it seems like most of the problem of that would go away if you have the ability to navigate to cross references easily. If the text says "See figure 1", it doesn't much matter that it moves around. I'm not sure that all platforms have something like this (in particular, does the Kindle?), but at least it seems like more general-purpose tablets are likely to.
I'm curious to know what your thoughts are.
I've been slightly interested in toolchains like this, and investigated a little bit AsciiDoc -> Docbook -> Latex -> PDF, but I didn't put a ton of time into it.
How does the flexibility of this approach differ from working right in Latex to when it comes to things like page layout (both margins and placement of floats and images and such), fonts, etc.?
I consider that statement to be one of those things that Politifact would rate "half true" or even "mostly false"; I think Musk overstates his case, and as a result I can't tell how much of a case he has. (At the moment, I don't find either side particularly credible.)
In particular, let's look at the portion where the battery died. Based on charging, this was (1) leave Milford, (2) arrive and spend the night at Groton, (3) do a tiny recharge in Norwich, (4) try to make it back to Milford.
Google maps says that the Milford->Groton distance is 60 miles. So in Milford, if you're trying to figure out how much you'll need to get to Groton and back, you only need 120. Now, Broder took a long-cut and increased that to 79 miles on the trip there, meaning that he'd really need 140 miles. (He was planning on taking a shorter path back, actually a bit less than my 60 miles: "I drove, slowly, to Stonington, Conn., for dinner and spent the night in Groton, a total distance of 79 miles. When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford." Musk's data says that, despite charging for less time than the original review said, he still stopped charging at 185 miles -- at least for someone used to gas driving (i.e. me) who doesn't have to worry about how the car takes into account heating and such in that range estimation, that's plenty of wiggle room. Nothing particularly dumb yet.
For some reason -- the four possibilities that come to mind are the range estimate ignoring the effects of cold weather + heater use, other causes of a very bad estimate on the part of the Tesla; a dumb mistake on the part of Broder, or deliberate malfeasance on the part of Broder -- the estimated range when leaving Milford was dramatically high. It's certainly possible that the cause of this was Broder's doing, but it seems equally likely to me that it was not, given that the Consumer Reports reviewer didn't exactly have a ton of leeway when they made it. And the Consumer Reports author (1) started from Milford with a larger charge, and (2) had warmer weather from what they say in their articles (which is admittedly very imprecise, but it was perhaps 15 or even 20 degrees difference). Anyway, if it was the car (very plausible), then there's no dumbness on Broder's part.
That leaves his behavior on the morning he left Groton. He took a detour to Norwich to get a trickle charge, which Musk's data shows he stopped at 28%. This is the one time that Broder left a charging station with a report that he had inadequate charge. How much this is "dumb" depends on your level of risk factor. Under a reasonable assumption, it was risky but reasonable to do. He felt that the Tesla was underreporting its available mileage. This is a reasonable assumption -- the batteries output less power when they're cold, and driving along was supposed to warm them up. That was the purpose of the conditioning. After all, this exact thing happened to the Consumer Reports reviewer, and is the reason I posted that link at the GP. ("The night before my voyage back to work, I had 88 miles left, according to the car's computation. ... But while parked outside my house overnight, the temperature dipped and so did the indicated range, which now read only 58 miles. (Yes, a little range anxiety began to set in.) ... According to Tesla, the car's computer takes into account the freezing temperature and readjusts the remaining range. The company also said that, upon restarting, the battery warms up and the computer once again updates the range.") Broder's or
Oops, my bad on the plaza thing [I assumed you had to take an exit off the freeway to go to a gas station that also had a charger].
It's on the NJ turnpike, so as is typical for toll roads (at least all around the north east out to Illinois) you don't have to exit and reenter.
This is because [ordinarily] you park, get a burger, then refuel and leave. ... But, then again, if the charging stations were actually in individual parking spaces in the parking lot this might make sense. ... However, having a charging cable in a parking slot might not be a good idea. Because, the parking lot is an area where children get in/out of cars. Letting them get near something that is potentially hazardous doesn't seem like a good idea. Upon further reflection, I would guess that the charger is in a special area near the gas pumps
There's no street view of the plaza itself so I can't check for certain, but that is exactly what I would expect. The thing is, because charging takes so long (relative to gas), the workflow is a lot closer to (1) park (2) charge (3) get a burger and hang out during the charge (4) leave. In other words, the appropriate place for the charger is exactly the same as the appropriate place for most people to park when eating -- the parking lot. The assembly line design you mention is exactly counter-productive to the goal of EV charging.
There is a shopping center parking lot nearby where I live that has EV charging stations. Where are they? In the parking lot as normal. And they're not quite the prime real estate for spots, but they're close.
You're overestimating the hazardous nature of the plugs too. The chance of an accident from a charging station I would speculate would be minuscule compared to the risk from all the cars driving around. :-)
But, if this were true, Tesla would know this and I don't think they'd mention it as an issue.
The Milford installation is "new". (Source.) Perhaps it hadn't been around for long enough for people to complain. Or perhaps the complaints didn't make their way up to Musk. Or perhaps it's somewhat of a common issue for EV owners, and none thought to report it. I still think that all of these explanations are way more plausible than Musk's pseudo-accusation of deliberate sabotage by driving around unnecessarily.
They could be combined/cross-checked to produce the most accurate result.
Yeah, but did Musk? IMO, for as transparent as he's pretending to be, he actually gives very little data about the data he's released. (As another example, he claims that the car was never out of power, even when being loaded onto the flatbed. But from some reports, the car has two battery sets -- the main battery, and a 12V. Presumably the graph Musk shows is of the main battery. Where's the data for the 12V? Are the charges combined together somehow on that chart? Is it gathered? Why doesn't Musk mention this omission if not? (I'm sure he knows about that.) There is a plausible explanation that the main batteries still had charge but the 12V died; if so, then it did need towed after all, making Musk's statement about the charge on the main batteries meaningless.)
Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm not actually on Broder's side on this really. Rather I don't find either side particularly credible at the moment.
Considering two other reporters from Consumer Reports and Motor Trends drove essentially the same route without any of the problems Broder had, ...
Actually that's not entirely true. The drop in battery charge overnight that doomed Broder by his account happened to the Consumer Reports author as well, and that was in slightly warmer conditions.