Sure, you can live on $15K/year as a kid, supporting just yourself, if you're lucky enough to be in good health. But for a family of 4, health care premiums alone average over $15K / year. $15k minus $15k doesn't leave a lot for other essentials. ("Family of 4" is the most reasonable unit of sustainability, since two people with two kids on average equals a steady population.)
Like many people, I have "employer-provided" health care that pays a good chunk of the $15k, but that no longer means as much as it used to. My share of the premiums, plus co-pays and deductibles, would take the lion's share of that $15K in a year. The glory days of being insured and therefore having no risk of health care expenses is long gone for most people.
Really? Your explanation for the Great Depression is that slackers back then were just too comfortable wearing potato sacks and eating from soup lines to get their butts in gear?
It's not fair to say that about Larry Page though. He invented page-rank and co-founded google. They were college students and made their own servers in pizza boxes. The worthless CEOs come in later, demanding the same pay as the founders who built the company from nothing.
The Volt isn't a blockbuster seller, but it isn't doing so terrible. They sell more Volts than Corvettes, for example. (I would imagine the margin on Corvettes is much better though).
If you covered the entire property of a typical single-family home with solar panels (*all* of it, not just the roof of the house/garage), you still wouldn't be able to take in enough energy to charge a typical eCar in under a week.
What are you talking about? The Chevy Volt charges from empty in 13 hours on a 120V circuit pulling a bit under 1KW. Its range on that charge is about 40 miles. Generating 1KW is easy - here is what it looks like - those plug straight into your existing outlets using built-in circuitry. Of course, people drive very different miles per day and live in different places, so I'm not saying it's currently feasible for most people. (I happen to live in New Mexico and have an 18 mile round-trip commute). But what you said is a big exaggeration.
I agree, this should happen pretty much in real-time now. If 1% of cars were constantly reporting their location, it would be plenty for real-time mapping of traffic flow (much less updating where roads are) in urban areas.
...let me just warm up my 360 degree camera and my LIDAR gear, like we all have one, and go take mapping data for my neighbourhood...
Sure, that's where Apple and Google are investing most of their resources now. Why? Because the useful information has already been gathered, so now they're competing way past the point of diminishing returns to make flashy eye candy.
Making good open maps for the normal purpose of getting around doesn't require any more sophisticated equipment than a GPS receiver.
With nobody buying (being sacked, can't afford), what's the point of producing? Everything would be relatively too expensive no matter how absolutely cheap.
Yup. But just because it's an obvious problem doesn't mean market forces won't cause it to happen.
Ponder the mystery of how mass unemployment is possible in the first place. If a bunch of people are unemployed - that is, both needy and idle - why don't they start exchanging goods and services? A financial shock metastasized into the Great Depression because policy makers assumed this was impossible (in the same way that nature abhors a vacuum), so it would soon work itself out.
At least they tried to use what little influence they had in a manner consistent with their values. I respect that. The boomers were still young enough at the time for America collectively to be tilted a bit towards idealism. Now everything is a sellout.
The US Navy had a program to integrate the CIWS gun with the Oto Melara 76mm Compact 75 on US frigates. The project, called Swarmbuster, does not seem to have been completed. The Compact 75 is a long range 3 inch gun that is effective in the counter-ship counter-boat role. It also has ammunition with sufficient burst to blow a swarming boat out of the water. Improved versions of the Oto gun fire 100 rounds per minute or better. It can use the same sensor as the CIWS gun.
If they haven't taken it to completion, it's because they don't think it's a big enough threat to bother.
According to the article (ahem) the top speed has not been announced but is expected to be around 100 MPH, which is of course slower than conventional speedboats. Moreover it is doubtful it could maneuver near this top speed. All this is in the article. I don't see how this could possibly be stealthy to sonobouys etc.
The article claims it is much smoother than a hydroplane in rough seas. Of course, since it is a hydrofoil. That doesn't mean it's smoother than other hydrofoil craft.
To me it appears to be a low-drag hydrofoil boat. The article doesn't have enough information to say whether the reduction in drag due to putting bubbles all around the hydrofoils outweighs the constraints of putting the gas turbine engines inside the hydrofoils.
The narrative in the article is that this was conceived as a defense against speedboat attacks on Navy ships, which makes little sense to me, since this defense would leave everything on the timespan of human command, control, and piloting. Instead, modify the sensors on existing CIWS to target speedboats. A gatling gun would rip a small boat full of explosives to shreds. It's just a matter of reacting fast enough - which in practice means balancing the danger of an unanticipated attack against the danger of shooting yourself in the foot.
Balancing writes to inner and outer tracks does seem like a clever idea - I wonder if somebody does it. But it would not be trivial to do correctly. RAID0 continuously writes an equal number of blocks to each drive, so you get twice the speed of the slower drive, so it would be as if you were writing to the slow inner sectors all the time if you did it with RAID0.
Also, the throughput writing files to a filesystem is somewhat slower than writing blocks to a disk. There is some bookkeeping overhead, such as updating inodes, that causes seeks to occur. Different filesystems will be somewhat faster or slower even on the same hardware.
SSD is certainly a good choice for speed given unlimited budget, but a 250 GB drive would only hold about 12 seconds of uncompressed video from this thing.
So, yes, I agree realtime compression must come into play. I guess that was my main point in the first place. You aren't going to find off-the-shelf hardware codecs to handle this resolution, so I guess that's the type of work they have cut out for them.
PS, obviously a hard drive cannot write that fast. Assuming 60 MB/s minimum sustained write speed, you'd need to stripe across 300 drives to push 18 GB/s:)
RTA, they're working on a 10 hz version now. Although I think "stitching" is a bit misleading, since it normally implies compute-intensive pattern matching to register the images over each other. In this case it seems like you'd only do that once, since the lenses are fixed, and then just re-use the same mapping.
Anyways, that works out to about 18 MB per sensor per frame, times 100 (sensors) times 10 (hz) so 18 GB / s. So I think they'll need hardware video compression as well to do much with it. Otherwise you're filling a 4TB hard drive in a little over 3 minutes.
Microsoft has had a great run for a long time. Comparing Microsoft vs Apple market cap for the last 20 years or so, it's very premature to call Apple the winner. Cellphones just don't entrench like enterprise software infrastructure. Apple's profits could nosedive completely with the release of one breakthrough competing product, whereas Windows cannot be displaced so easily.
Pell Grants have gone down in recent decades (i.e. increased at less than the rate of general inflation - to say nothing of the much higher rate of inflation in education costs) while loan programs have exploded.
So what if nobody comes to my restaurant? Thousands of people independently made that same choice, so it's clearly not my fault. If they don't want to eat here, that's their problem, not mine! Mostly likely, people just aren't smart enough to find my restaurant. Idiots. And my investors are like, "you need more customers!" What am I supposed to do, put a gun to peoples' heads? If they want to come they will, if not, what do I care?
The distinction is less when you remember that you never did own the music itself - only a copy on a specific piece of media.
I still collect music files on my hard drive, but I'm much more liberal about deleting things I don't like than I used to be about throwing away a CD; the collection itself largely amounts to a collection of bookmarks, reminding me of stuff I once liked and may again.
Again, sounds bad, until you compare to an actual war. Unfortunately this is an inherently political discussion so there's no avoiding pointing out that the odds of overt war (that is, real war) depend heavily on the outcome of the Presidential election.
Yeah, there's little point arguing whether somebody "invented the PDA." Something without a crisp definition will obviously not have a clear inventor or date of invention. Still, some are more innovative that others. I owned a Psion 3a and I don't remember anything just like it at the time.
Later my Palm III was effective and portable, but I agree with you, the Palm V was the apogee of the PDA before the term itself waned, rather arbitrarily.
Surely they wouldn't be dumb enough to downsample from 48 to 24 fps by simply dropping half the frames? Presumably you would blend pairs of frames to simulate a 1/24 shutter speed.
I don't understand your complaint, since I'm not aware of any movies that were shown in 3d only. One of my co-workers even went to Avatar in 2d, which I thought was a big mistake.
As for your predicted decrease in attendance, it's equally likely to be explained (post hoc) by people complaining the theaters did nothing to stay ahead of home cinema which was "obviously" poised to eat their lunch.
High framerate in itself is obviously a good thing to do. The "motionflow" (framerate upsampling) on current TVs is uncanny when it works, but sometimes it's bad because it fails and creates jitters. Filming at a higher framerate in the first place is a logical step.
A film maker with a presumptive blockbuster is pushing forward new technology. It's a good thing. Why the negative spin in the summary and initial posts? Give me higher resolution, more dynamic range, higher framerate, stereo vision, everything. But naturally if you try and over-charge for it, I will let you know by not paying the premium.
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Like many people, I have "employer-provided" health care that pays a good chunk of the $15k, but that no longer means as much as it used to. My share of the premiums, plus co-pays and deductibles, would take the lion's share of that $15K in a year. The glory days of being insured and therefore having no risk of health care expenses is long gone for most people.
Really? Your explanation for the Great Depression is that slackers back then were just too comfortable wearing potato sacks and eating from soup lines to get their butts in gear?
Correction, it was Duplo bricks.
It's not fair to say that about Larry Page though. He invented page-rank and co-founded google. They were college students and made their own servers in pizza boxes. The worthless CEOs come in later, demanding the same pay as the founders who built the company from nothing.
The Volt isn't a blockbuster seller, but it isn't doing so terrible. They sell more Volts than Corvettes, for example. (I would imagine the margin on Corvettes is much better though).
What are you talking about? The Chevy Volt charges from empty in 13 hours on a 120V circuit pulling a bit under 1KW. Its range on that charge is about 40 miles. Generating 1KW is easy - here is what it looks like - those plug straight into your existing outlets using built-in circuitry. Of course, people drive very different miles per day and live in different places, so I'm not saying it's currently feasible for most people. (I happen to live in New Mexico and have an 18 mile round-trip commute). But what you said is a big exaggeration.
I agree, this should happen pretty much in real-time now. If 1% of cars were constantly reporting their location, it would be plenty for real-time mapping of traffic flow (much less updating where roads are) in urban areas.
Sure, that's where Apple and Google are investing most of their resources now. Why? Because the useful information has already been gathered, so now they're competing way past the point of diminishing returns to make flashy eye candy.
Making good open maps for the normal purpose of getting around doesn't require any more sophisticated equipment than a GPS receiver.
Yup. But just because it's an obvious problem doesn't mean market forces won't cause it to happen.
Ponder the mystery of how mass unemployment is possible in the first place. If a bunch of people are unemployed - that is, both needy and idle - why don't they start exchanging goods and services? A financial shock metastasized into the Great Depression because policy makers assumed this was impossible (in the same way that nature abhors a vacuum), so it would soon work itself out.
At least they tried to use what little influence they had in a manner consistent with their values. I respect that. The boomers were still young enough at the time for America collectively to be tilted a bit towards idealism. Now everything is a sellout.
If they haven't taken it to completion, it's because they don't think it's a big enough threat to bother.
The article claims it is much smoother than a hydroplane in rough seas. Of course, since it is a hydrofoil. That doesn't mean it's smoother than other hydrofoil craft.
To me it appears to be a low-drag hydrofoil boat. The article doesn't have enough information to say whether the reduction in drag due to putting bubbles all around the hydrofoils outweighs the constraints of putting the gas turbine engines inside the hydrofoils.
The narrative in the article is that this was conceived as a defense against speedboat attacks on Navy ships, which makes little sense to me, since this defense would leave everything on the timespan of human command, control, and piloting. Instead, modify the sensors on existing CIWS to target speedboats. A gatling gun would rip a small boat full of explosives to shreds. It's just a matter of reacting fast enough - which in practice means balancing the danger of an unanticipated attack against the danger of shooting yourself in the foot.
Also, the throughput writing files to a filesystem is somewhat slower than writing blocks to a disk. There is some bookkeeping overhead, such as updating inodes, that causes seeks to occur. Different filesystems will be somewhat faster or slower even on the same hardware.
SSD is certainly a good choice for speed given unlimited budget, but a 250 GB drive would only hold about 12 seconds of uncompressed video from this thing.
So, yes, I agree realtime compression must come into play. I guess that was my main point in the first place. You aren't going to find off-the-shelf hardware codecs to handle this resolution, so I guess that's the type of work they have cut out for them.
PS, obviously a hard drive cannot write that fast. Assuming 60 MB/s minimum sustained write speed, you'd need to stripe across 300 drives to push 18 GB/s :)
Anyways, that works out to about 18 MB per sensor per frame, times 100 (sensors) times 10 (hz) so 18 GB / s. So I think they'll need hardware video compression as well to do much with it. Otherwise you're filling a 4TB hard drive in a little over 3 minutes.
Microsoft has had a great run for a long time. Comparing Microsoft vs Apple market cap for the last 20 years or so, it's very premature to call Apple the winner. Cellphones just don't entrench like enterprise software infrastructure. Apple's profits could nosedive completely with the release of one breakthrough competing product, whereas Windows cannot be displaced so easily.
Having failed once, they should now just give up forever?
OK, let's compare the number of lives lost (US or total, your choice) in wars under Bush vs. Obama. Good grief, it's not even within a factor of 10.
Pell Grants have gone down in recent decades (i.e. increased at less than the rate of general inflation - to say nothing of the much higher rate of inflation in education costs) while loan programs have exploded.
So what if nobody comes to my restaurant? Thousands of people independently made that same choice, so it's clearly not my fault. If they don't want to eat here, that's their problem, not mine! Mostly likely, people just aren't smart enough to find my restaurant. Idiots. And my investors are like, "you need more customers!" What am I supposed to do, put a gun to peoples' heads? If they want to come they will, if not, what do I care?
I still collect music files on my hard drive, but I'm much more liberal about deleting things I don't like than I used to be about throwing away a CD; the collection itself largely amounts to a collection of bookmarks, reminding me of stuff I once liked and may again.
Again, sounds bad, until you compare to an actual war. Unfortunately this is an inherently political discussion so there's no avoiding pointing out that the odds of overt war (that is, real war) depend heavily on the outcome of the Presidential election.
Later my Palm III was effective and portable, but I agree with you, the Palm V was the apogee of the PDA before the term itself waned, rather arbitrarily.
Surely they wouldn't be dumb enough to downsample from 48 to 24 fps by simply dropping half the frames? Presumably you would blend pairs of frames to simulate a 1/24 shutter speed.
As for your predicted decrease in attendance, it's equally likely to be explained (post hoc) by people complaining the theaters did nothing to stay ahead of home cinema which was "obviously" poised to eat their lunch.
High framerate in itself is obviously a good thing to do. The "motionflow" (framerate upsampling) on current TVs is uncanny when it works, but sometimes it's bad because it fails and creates jitters. Filming at a higher framerate in the first place is a logical step.
A film maker with a presumptive blockbuster is pushing forward new technology. It's a good thing. Why the negative spin in the summary and initial posts? Give me higher resolution, more dynamic range, higher framerate, stereo vision, everything. But naturally if you try and over-charge for it, I will let you know by not paying the premium.