"their Blu-Ray players have significant quality and reliability issues along with poor service."
You're not wrong. I bought a Samsung blu ray player and they put out a firmware update that knocked the audio out of sync. I waited for a fix which never came so I returned the player as faulty and they replaced it with another one which was fine until it did the same firmware update. Samsung had moved on to another model and weren't updating their previous player so I was stuck with a 6 month old player that didn't work. I ended up returning it as faulty and replacing it with a Panasonic which has been faultless. My wife works for a white goods repair man and he won't service Samsung gear because their parts availability is atrocious. Samsung just doesn't care it would seem.
It would be more accurate to say ARM is returning to the desktop market. The original ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) based Archimedes was a very fast 32 bit desktop machine released in the mid 1980's and I remember being amazed at the performance which utterly trounced anything Intel could produce at the time. I even used an Acorn R540 in 1990 which was running a nice UNIX environment and could even run a software PC to emulate both DOS and Windows on top of that. It took years before Intel was even in the same ballpark as the ARM from those days and even through the 90's there were plenty of chips that were much faster than anything Intel could make (Alpha for instance, what a joy!) and it is a shame that in the last 20 years or so we've seen most of these die off. Time for some new blood.
The shorts have borrowed shares and sold them. Their problem is they have to buy them back to return them and they were hoping the price would go down so they could pocket the difference. This isn't investment, it is parasitism. They gambled and the share price hasn't gone down, that's life.
Share prices rise and fall on all sorts of information and I don't think Musk would have said what he did without having the finance secured and his tweet was to alert all of his actual investors of what he was planning. Shorts aren't in on this, they don't have any shares.
"So for me $.15 for electric, for Gasoline up to $2.35 a gallon, 41 MPG is the same price."
Very market dependent of course. For me, I have my own solar panels on my roof and the power I generate earns me $0.07/kWh whereas I pay $0.20/kWh for power I buy. That makes it nearly 3x more cost effective for me to prioritise charging my Nissan LEAF from our solar when the sun is shining than the export power to the grid. In addition, fuel here is around US$8 a gallon. This means that even the most efficient hybrid is still way more expensive than an EV to run even if you just use grid power rather than solar as I do. Comparing a Tesla to a Prius isn't really fair since the Tesla is a much more expensive car, but comparing it to a LEAF makes more sense and here, the LEAF is way cheaper than the Prius for both fuel/charging and servicing, not to mention they're actually about the same price to buy. If you can work within the range limitations of the LEAF it is by far the better car.
"Tesla's cost more to charge than high MPG gas cars."
No, they don't. For the sake of argument, a high MPG gas car here would have to do more than 50MPG and you would have to always charge the Tesla using a supercharger and you would have to pay the rate that some superchargers charge if you don't get free supercharging. Charge your car at home and you pay far less. Get free supercharging by ordering and using a referral code and you can't even compare it with a high MPG car because charging costs zero at that point. 90% of charging is done at home at night rates, not the 25c/kW this whole argument requires just to get a 50MPG car in the same ball park, and it also requires the cost of fuel to be less than $2.60 a gallon which it isn't in many places and even if it is that low it can easily get higher quickly and make this whole argument completely irrelevant because it won't take much before you need a car that can do more than 100MPG and those simply don't exist.
"This is still great news, and hopefully there will be new breakthroughs on the dry side soon. AMD affects more than 10 million people just in America, roughly 3% of the population"
True, but this is a product of socialist medicine in the UK so that's what, communism? Or something? I'm sure Americans would rather stay blind than endorse such an anti-capitalist system of medicine.
"Plus gas is really $2.50 per gal. So assuming a 30mpg car it is $2.50/30 = 0.08. For Tesla you get 3 miles per kWh so it is.26/3 = $0.08/mile."
Of course price of fuel is only part of the equation. Servicing costs for an EV should be much lower than for an ICEV too although I believe Teslas are a little pricey for servicing, but when you take a more normal EV like my Nissan LEAF versus my BMW MINI the cost differences are stark.
Last year I charged my car at home or on free chargers at carparks mostly and I also had the 30,000Km full dealer service done. Total running cost for the LEAF over the year works out at $300 including servicing. My MINI covered about the same distance last year and here the price of fuel is $2 per litre so around $8 a US gallon (NZ$) and it costs me $100 to fill that car which will do 750km per tank. That's $4000 in fuel alone this last year, plus there was some fairly serious servicing that needed doing such as new brakes and discs, clutch, drive shaft and tyres, plus all the usual fluid changes and that lot adds up to another $3500.
The LEAF likely won't need new discs or pads for a long long time due to regenerative braking but the tyres are close to needing done so we could add say $800 for a new set of boots on the LEAF and still be over $6000 cheaper to run in the last year than the MINI which is a fuel efficient little car. Having both certainly brings home the marked difference in costs and while the cost of entry to the LEAF was higher, the annual running costs bring it to parity within three years of purchase and after that the LEAF is much cheaper.
My iPhone 6 has optical image stabilisation and it makes a huge difference compared with footage I made using my earlier devices (cameras or phones). I'm sure the later phones are even better but my footage looks very smooth and stable and nothing like your typical found footage stuff. Where I would worry more is in how the phone handles lighting conditions.
Personally I don't eat meat any more but you just have to look at the trends of the last few decades and the increasing availability of cheap mass farmed meats and the death of the traditional butcher shop to see the impact our current eating habits have on us. If we returned to meat being more of a treat we would be a lot healthier than we are but the meat industry has convinced everyone that they must eat far more meat than they actually should and worse, they have scaled up production to appalling levels inflicting terrible short lives on the animals people are eating.
I visited the USDA-MARC in Nebraska some years back and they are busy breeding animals to produce more meat with less food input and in shorter time because that's what the farmers want. The product of this intensive farming doesn't taste good compared with grass fed animals but people want (or have been convinced they want) a lot of cheap meat. Whatever technology can do to improve our diets and reduce the mistreatment of animals has got to be good. I wouldn't go so far as saying people can't eat meat, but I have to say that the amount of abuse I get from people who do eat it because I won't shows that they clearly know they're the ones on the wrong side of the fence.
I'm a daily user of Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Of the three, Mac OS is still the best option. Windows is and always has been horrible and the UI changes that keep coming along are terrible, plus they keep rebooting my machine for updates. Linux is reliable although having upgraded my machines to systemd I don't really think Linux users can cast stones anywhere.
The main advantage of Apple has always been the tight integration of hardware and software and I have to say that having used Macs for nearly 20 years now, we're in no way in some terrible low point in Apple software quality. It has always been a bit variable. I remember complaining to Apple multiple times about Terminal.app on Tiger which wouldn't open bash about 50% of the time you started it. Took them until 10.4.6 to fix that one I believe. Every time we have one of these articles people proclaim that it is because Jobs is gone but there were issues when he was around. It really isn't all that different to how it was except that they have a lot more users today than they did back in the PPC days and yet for all that success we still haven't had the promised plague of viruses and malware that Windows got despite the switch to Intel and the increasing user base. I'd say it works well enough and I'll keep buying because it saves me time and money in my business.
"Are the CPUs finally getting there to run the full windows desktop?"
ARM has always been capable of running a full desktop. I remember when the Acorn Archimedes came out back in the 1980's and it was the fastest machine out there running rings around anything Intel, Motorola or MOS had. There was even a software PC emulator that could run DOS and Windows at full speed.
Over the years ARM found itself in a variety of platforms but not so much the desktop and the design focussed on efficiency and low energy but there was always the potential to make a storming fast desktop machine again. Of course, it is going to be hobbled again trying to run Windows but stick Linux on ARM and it moves along pretty well.
ARM64 with gobs of RAM, a fast GPU and SSD would likely be a very respectable desktop today. The Apple A10 is very similar in performance to an Intel i5 so it is no slouch.
More like the desktop OS market is lost. People used to buy a PC because that's what they needed to access the internet. These days a phone can do that and MS already ceded the phone market so they're living on borrowed time as more and more people move away from the desktop. Being king of an ever shrinking market isn't a good thing. Linux doesn't need to win on the desktop, it already won the internet because the battlefield moved and MS couldn't move with it despite some very valiant attempts.
So on my Mac I have Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Firefox has a whole heap of extensions that help keep things tight so I'll use that in the darker regions of the net, and Chrome works well with Google Docs so that's pretty much all I use it for. Safari is my main browser and that's what I'm using now. For all the hate Apple gets they did kill Flash and if they can kill cookies then all the better, especially on mobile.
As others have said, Google is an advertising company and for all the good things about Android, that's the main thing that keeps me away. You would think though that the rise of AdBlock, and do not track, and cookie controls would be enough to tell these advertisers that we don't like what they're doing? Don't they track that stuff?
"I would imagine that they'll label it in some way just because I can't imagine vegetarians or vegans objecting to eating it."
Vegetarian here (almost vegan but very difficult to get rid of all dairy although I'm trying) and I won't eat this. I don't object to it on principle since it doesn't require an animal to die, but I won't eat it because meat just isn't something I want to eat regardless of source. If you've not eaten meat for any length of time, going back is hard because it actually doesn't taste that great. It has a strong flavour which drowns all the other food. I applaud the move to supply meat to the population without killing animals and the associated environmental harm of having to grow these beasts, but I wouldn't eat it any more than I would eat a real steak.
Netflix has clients on a large array of platforms so it is always easy to watch material. I have an Amazon Prime subscription but only a few devices have a client so I either watch on my laptop (rarely) or stream from my iPhone to my Apple TV (rarely) and I only have the subscription because of other benefits of Amazon Prime. Disney won't have such additional benefits so even at $5 a month, if I can't watch it other than on a few devices or in an inconvenient way via AirPlay then I'm not going to bother. There are other similar services around that are similarly limited and I don't subscribe to them either.
"The Tivo comes with 4 tuners, 1TB DVR storage and lifetime "service"...for about $399."
I have two TiVo's (actually three if you count the old Series 1 in storage but that's no use without an external tuner now) and the big problem I have is that TiVo's service provider here in the antipodes is dropping it. So, I've got two boxes with lifetime service which will stop working in October. There are some people working on chipping the units to allow them to be hacked and then use a local source of guide data but I'm just about ready to give up on this. TiVo was good while it lasted but the amount of stuff on broadcast TV I actually want to watch these days is slow small I don't think I'm going to miss it. All the good shows moved onto subscription services years back.
I've struggled a bit with weight for years and recently started a new diet which includes not drinking zero calorie fizzy drinks. Instead I keep chilled filtered water in the fridge and drink that. I've also calorie controlled my diet like I have previously but this time the weight is falling off. The only real difference is the lack of these zero calorie fizzy drinks. Anecdotal yes, but seriously worth considering.
"Solar power produces about 5 W/m^2, which means a nation would have to cover 20% of their land in solar PV panels to achieve a standard of living like the UK."
Hmm, now if only houses had a large surface area above them where you could fit solar panels. Then we wouldn't have to cover 20% of our land in solar PV panels, we could just use the land that is already covered in houses.
That's the problem right there. I have a PS4 so the PSVR wasn't too expensive and I'm enjoying the games I've got for it. I couldn't contemplate a Rift because my PC is too old and would need a serious upgrade. I don't use it much for gaming anyway so there's a substantial investment to get a Rift versus just buying the PSVR for the PS4 I already had because it has loads of games I like.
"2017 Tesla Model S 0-60 in 5.0, 1/4 mile in 13.6."
Your numbers are out of date. Tesla just updated the car and even the base Model S 75 without dual motors can now hit 60 in 4.3 seconds and costs $69,500 but you also get a $7500 tax credit bringing it down to $62,000. For that you get a car that needs very little servicing and you can get free supercharging for the life of the car with a referral. I know which one I would prefer.
Having been through the OSX transition from PPC to x86 this sounds very much like they've bought in Transitive's technology to allow them to dynamically recompile x86 native applications (I refuse to call them 'apps') to run on ARM. Apple handled this pretty well and there was very little that didn't work. We lost MacOS9 support, but we gained performance for native applications and PPC binaries actually ran surprisingly well if they were mostly GUI based. I did compile a few command line tools and run them under Rosetta and they were about 10x slower than native (still impressive honestly) but for something like MS Word the hit was much less. Today I can still run Word 2004 on my x86 MacBook under VMware which allows me to run Snow Leopard and it runs faster than the native Word 2016 I have on macOS Sierra. Go figure. Anyway, this is something MS should have done from the start as the technology was already out there but I suspect politically they wanted to push the store apps (yeah, those are apps) rather than let people continue running their old x86 binaries. That worked well for them didn't it?......
I used to buy PC laptops and desktops to run Linux and found I was always having issues unless I bought top spec equipment and even then for laptops the build quality was subpar unless you spent a lot of money so I would kill laptops each year with all the hard use and travel. I tried my first Mac back when the G4 iBook came out and that lasted 3x longer than any PC I had had and when I retired it, it went to my wife and continued to work for another 6 years in various uses. That's the thing, the Macs may not be the best bang for the buck but you get a well integrated and supported UNIX on hardware that is built to last so unless you're very cost sensitive at the time of purchase, the Mac will save money and be a better long term experience. Nothing to do with hipster this or shiny that, I'm a scientist working in genomics and the vast majority of my peers also use Macs. PCs running Linux are second most popular and Windows PC are a pathetic third place. We use Linux extensively for computing but for desktop and portable use a Mac is terrific.
Brand loyalty is a tricky one when all the companies that made computers when I was at school are gone. What I did learn from exposure to primitive 8 bit machines was variety and flexibility which took me into software development. Later when Macs and PCs hit schools, the level of interest kids had in programming or even understanding computers dropped so we ended up with a generation of kids who couldn't do much more than type up a letter in MS Word compared with my generation which were writing hand coded assembly and building robots. Thank goodness Linus came along with his kernel and we were able to have a real OS on cheap PC hardware and that has given me a solid career so if there's any brand loyalty it is to Linux. While I use a Mac today (best tool for the job when dealing with a mixed environment) I'm a Linux admin and programmer by profession. The fight by these companies to control the market is bad, we need a mixture and devices like the Raspberry Pi are what we should be using to get kids hooked. Typing up letters and doing spreadsheets is not computing but seems to be all the schools are prepared to teach.
There are cars on the market with range extenders but they're typically short range EVs and then REX and I can see the need for those. Once you've got to 200+ miles (or even 300+ as the top Teslas can now do) you're into a car that can do everything most people will want and you can't cripple it just for the few that want to go further and don't want to stop for an hour after driving for three hours. There are people who routinely travel long distance and for now EVs aren't for them but it will be and there's no reason to add a REX to a Tesla because the charging network is coming and in a few years that REX will be dead weight. For now, you should indeed buy a short range EV with REX or just stick with petrol for a bit longer but battery price and capacity are changing so quickly now that buying into long range EV and including a REX makes no sense to me. The next generation of batteries and chargers will get the recharge times down to around 10 mins and you should really stop for 10 mins after driving a few hundred miles if only for your own health.
Slashdot Mirror
"their Blu-Ray players have significant quality and reliability issues along with poor service."
You're not wrong. I bought a Samsung blu ray player and they put out a firmware update that knocked the audio out of sync. I waited for a fix which never came so I returned the player as faulty and they replaced it with another one which was fine until it did the same firmware update. Samsung had moved on to another model and weren't updating their previous player so I was stuck with a 6 month old player that didn't work. I ended up returning it as faulty and replacing it with a Panasonic which has been faultless. My wife works for a white goods repair man and he won't service Samsung gear because their parts availability is atrocious. Samsung just doesn't care it would seem.
It would be more accurate to say ARM is returning to the desktop market. The original ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) based Archimedes was a very fast 32 bit desktop machine released in the mid 1980's and I remember being amazed at the performance which utterly trounced anything Intel could produce at the time. I even used an Acorn R540 in 1990 which was running a nice UNIX environment and could even run a software PC to emulate both DOS and Windows on top of that. It took years before Intel was even in the same ballpark as the ARM from those days and even through the 90's there were plenty of chips that were much faster than anything Intel could make (Alpha for instance, what a joy!) and it is a shame that in the last 20 years or so we've seen most of these die off. Time for some new blood.
The shorts have borrowed shares and sold them. Their problem is they have to buy them back to return them and they were hoping the price would go down so they could pocket the difference. This isn't investment, it is parasitism. They gambled and the share price hasn't gone down, that's life.
Share prices rise and fall on all sorts of information and I don't think Musk would have said what he did without having the finance secured and his tweet was to alert all of his actual investors of what he was planning. Shorts aren't in on this, they don't have any shares.
"So for me $.15 for electric, for Gasoline up to $2.35 a gallon, 41 MPG is the same price."
Very market dependent of course. For me, I have my own solar panels on my roof and the power I generate earns me $0.07/kWh whereas I pay $0.20/kWh for power I buy. That makes it nearly 3x more cost effective for me to prioritise charging my Nissan LEAF from our solar when the sun is shining than the export power to the grid. In addition, fuel here is around US$8 a gallon. This means that even the most efficient hybrid is still way more expensive than an EV to run even if you just use grid power rather than solar as I do. Comparing a Tesla to a Prius isn't really fair since the Tesla is a much more expensive car, but comparing it to a LEAF makes more sense and here, the LEAF is way cheaper than the Prius for both fuel/charging and servicing, not to mention they're actually about the same price to buy. If you can work within the range limitations of the LEAF it is by far the better car.
"Tesla's cost more to charge than high MPG gas cars."
No, they don't. For the sake of argument, a high MPG gas car here would have to do more than 50MPG and you would have to always charge the Tesla using a supercharger and you would have to pay the rate that some superchargers charge if you don't get free supercharging. Charge your car at home and you pay far less. Get free supercharging by ordering and using a referral code and you can't even compare it with a high MPG car because charging costs zero at that point. 90% of charging is done at home at night rates, not the 25c/kW this whole argument requires just to get a 50MPG car in the same ball park, and it also requires the cost of fuel to be less than $2.60 a gallon which it isn't in many places and even if it is that low it can easily get higher quickly and make this whole argument completely irrelevant because it won't take much before you need a car that can do more than 100MPG and those simply don't exist.
"This is still great news, and hopefully there will be new breakthroughs on the dry side soon. AMD affects more than 10 million people just in America, roughly 3% of the population"
True, but this is a product of socialist medicine in the UK so that's what, communism? Or something? I'm sure Americans would rather stay blind than endorse such an anti-capitalist system of medicine.
"Plus gas is really $2.50 per gal. So assuming a 30mpg car it is $2.50/30 = 0.08. For Tesla you get 3 miles per kWh so it is .26/3 = $0.08/mile."
Of course price of fuel is only part of the equation. Servicing costs for an EV should be much lower than for an ICEV too although I believe Teslas are a little pricey for servicing, but when you take a more normal EV like my Nissan LEAF versus my BMW MINI the cost differences are stark.
Last year I charged my car at home or on free chargers at carparks mostly and I also had the 30,000Km full dealer service done. Total running cost for the LEAF over the year works out at $300 including servicing. My MINI covered about the same distance last year and here the price of fuel is $2 per litre so around $8 a US gallon (NZ$) and it costs me $100 to fill that car which will do 750km per tank. That's $4000 in fuel alone this last year, plus there was some fairly serious servicing that needed doing such as new brakes and discs, clutch, drive shaft and tyres, plus all the usual fluid changes and that lot adds up to another $3500.
The LEAF likely won't need new discs or pads for a long long time due to regenerative braking but the tyres are close to needing done so we could add say $800 for a new set of boots on the LEAF and still be over $6000 cheaper to run in the last year than the MINI which is a fuel efficient little car. Having both certainly brings home the marked difference in costs and while the cost of entry to the LEAF was higher, the annual running costs bring it to parity within three years of purchase and after that the LEAF is much cheaper.
My iPhone 6 has optical image stabilisation and it makes a huge difference compared with footage I made using my earlier devices (cameras or phones). I'm sure the later phones are even better but my footage looks very smooth and stable and nothing like your typical found footage stuff. Where I would worry more is in how the phone handles lighting conditions.
Personally I don't eat meat any more but you just have to look at the trends of the last few decades and the increasing availability of cheap mass farmed meats and the death of the traditional butcher shop to see the impact our current eating habits have on us. If we returned to meat being more of a treat we would be a lot healthier than we are but the meat industry has convinced everyone that they must eat far more meat than they actually should and worse, they have scaled up production to appalling levels inflicting terrible short lives on the animals people are eating.
I visited the USDA-MARC in Nebraska some years back and they are busy breeding animals to produce more meat with less food input and in shorter time because that's what the farmers want. The product of this intensive farming doesn't taste good compared with grass fed animals but people want (or have been convinced they want) a lot of cheap meat. Whatever technology can do to improve our diets and reduce the mistreatment of animals has got to be good. I wouldn't go so far as saying people can't eat meat, but I have to say that the amount of abuse I get from people who do eat it because I won't shows that they clearly know they're the ones on the wrong side of the fence.
I'm a daily user of Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Of the three, Mac OS is still the best option. Windows is and always has been horrible and the UI changes that keep coming along are terrible, plus they keep rebooting my machine for updates. Linux is reliable although having upgraded my machines to systemd I don't really think Linux users can cast stones anywhere.
The main advantage of Apple has always been the tight integration of hardware and software and I have to say that having used Macs for nearly 20 years now, we're in no way in some terrible low point in Apple software quality. It has always been a bit variable. I remember complaining to Apple multiple times about Terminal.app on Tiger which wouldn't open bash about 50% of the time you started it. Took them until 10.4.6 to fix that one I believe. Every time we have one of these articles people proclaim that it is because Jobs is gone but there were issues when he was around. It really isn't all that different to how it was except that they have a lot more users today than they did back in the PPC days and yet for all that success we still haven't had the promised plague of viruses and malware that Windows got despite the switch to Intel and the increasing user base. I'd say it works well enough and I'll keep buying because it saves me time and money in my business.
"Are the CPUs finally getting there to run the full windows desktop?"
ARM has always been capable of running a full desktop. I remember when the Acorn Archimedes came out back in the 1980's and it was the fastest machine out there running rings around anything Intel, Motorola or MOS had. There was even a software PC emulator that could run DOS and Windows at full speed.
Over the years ARM found itself in a variety of platforms but not so much the desktop and the design focussed on efficiency and low energy but there was always the potential to make a storming fast desktop machine again. Of course, it is going to be hobbled again trying to run Windows but stick Linux on ARM and it moves along pretty well.
ARM64 with gobs of RAM, a fast GPU and SSD would likely be a very respectable desktop today. The Apple A10 is very similar in performance to an Intel i5 so it is no slouch.
"lose the desktop OS market"
More like the desktop OS market is lost. People used to buy a PC because that's what they needed to access the internet. These days a phone can do that and MS already ceded the phone market so they're living on borrowed time as more and more people move away from the desktop. Being king of an ever shrinking market isn't a good thing. Linux doesn't need to win on the desktop, it already won the internet because the battlefield moved and MS couldn't move with it despite some very valiant attempts.
So on my Mac I have Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Firefox has a whole heap of extensions that help keep things tight so I'll use that in the darker regions of the net, and Chrome works well with Google Docs so that's pretty much all I use it for. Safari is my main browser and that's what I'm using now. For all the hate Apple gets they did kill Flash and if they can kill cookies then all the better, especially on mobile.
As others have said, Google is an advertising company and for all the good things about Android, that's the main thing that keeps me away. You would think though that the rise of AdBlock, and do not track, and cookie controls would be enough to tell these advertisers that we don't like what they're doing? Don't they track that stuff?
"I would imagine that they'll label it in some way just because I can't imagine vegetarians or vegans objecting to eating it."
Vegetarian here (almost vegan but very difficult to get rid of all dairy although I'm trying) and I won't eat this. I don't object to it on principle since it doesn't require an animal to die, but I won't eat it because meat just isn't something I want to eat regardless of source. If you've not eaten meat for any length of time, going back is hard because it actually doesn't taste that great. It has a strong flavour which drowns all the other food. I applaud the move to supply meat to the population without killing animals and the associated environmental harm of having to grow these beasts, but I wouldn't eat it any more than I would eat a real steak.
Netflix has clients on a large array of platforms so it is always easy to watch material. I have an Amazon Prime subscription but only a few devices have a client so I either watch on my laptop (rarely) or stream from my iPhone to my Apple TV (rarely) and I only have the subscription because of other benefits of Amazon Prime. Disney won't have such additional benefits so even at $5 a month, if I can't watch it other than on a few devices or in an inconvenient way via AirPlay then I'm not going to bother. There are other similar services around that are similarly limited and I don't subscribe to them either.
"The Tivo comes with 4 tuners, 1TB DVR storage and lifetime "service"...for about $399."
I have two TiVo's (actually three if you count the old Series 1 in storage but that's no use without an external tuner now) and the big problem I have is that TiVo's service provider here in the antipodes is dropping it. So, I've got two boxes with lifetime service which will stop working in October. There are some people working on chipping the units to allow them to be hacked and then use a local source of guide data but I'm just about ready to give up on this. TiVo was good while it lasted but the amount of stuff on broadcast TV I actually want to watch these days is slow small I don't think I'm going to miss it. All the good shows moved onto subscription services years back.
I've struggled a bit with weight for years and recently started a new diet which includes not drinking zero calorie fizzy drinks. Instead I keep chilled filtered water in the fridge and drink that. I've also calorie controlled my diet like I have previously but this time the weight is falling off. The only real difference is the lack of these zero calorie fizzy drinks. Anecdotal yes, but seriously worth considering.
"Solar power produces about 5 W/m^2, which means a nation would have to cover 20% of their land in solar PV panels to achieve a standard of living like the UK."
Hmm, now if only houses had a large surface area above them where you could fit solar panels. Then we wouldn't have to cover 20% of our land in solar PV panels, we could just use the land that is already covered in houses.
"high-end gaming PC capable of running VR"
That's the problem right there. I have a PS4 so the PSVR wasn't too expensive and I'm enjoying the games I've got for it. I couldn't contemplate a Rift because my PC is too old and would need a serious upgrade. I don't use it much for gaming anyway so there's a substantial investment to get a Rift versus just buying the PSVR for the PS4 I already had because it has loads of games I like.
"2017 Tesla Model S 0-60 in 5.0, 1/4 mile in 13.6."
Your numbers are out of date. Tesla just updated the car and even the base Model S 75 without dual motors can now hit 60 in 4.3 seconds and costs $69,500 but you also get a $7500 tax credit bringing it down to $62,000. For that you get a car that needs very little servicing and you can get free supercharging for the life of the car with a referral. I know which one I would prefer.
"paleontology research is utterly useless"
Without palaeontology, oil would be much harder to find. Is that useful enough for you?
Having been through the OSX transition from PPC to x86 this sounds very much like they've bought in Transitive's technology to allow them to dynamically recompile x86 native applications (I refuse to call them 'apps') to run on ARM. Apple handled this pretty well and there was very little that didn't work. We lost MacOS9 support, but we gained performance for native applications and PPC binaries actually ran surprisingly well if they were mostly GUI based. I did compile a few command line tools and run them under Rosetta and they were about 10x slower than native (still impressive honestly) but for something like MS Word the hit was much less. Today I can still run Word 2004 on my x86 MacBook under VMware which allows me to run Snow Leopard and it runs faster than the native Word 2016 I have on macOS Sierra. Go figure. Anyway, this is something MS should have done from the start as the technology was already out there but I suspect politically they wanted to push the store apps (yeah, those are apps) rather than let people continue running their old x86 binaries. That worked well for them didn't it?......
I used to buy PC laptops and desktops to run Linux and found I was always having issues unless I bought top spec equipment and even then for laptops the build quality was subpar unless you spent a lot of money so I would kill laptops each year with all the hard use and travel. I tried my first Mac back when the G4 iBook came out and that lasted 3x longer than any PC I had had and when I retired it, it went to my wife and continued to work for another 6 years in various uses. That's the thing, the Macs may not be the best bang for the buck but you get a well integrated and supported UNIX on hardware that is built to last so unless you're very cost sensitive at the time of purchase, the Mac will save money and be a better long term experience. Nothing to do with hipster this or shiny that, I'm a scientist working in genomics and the vast majority of my peers also use Macs. PCs running Linux are second most popular and Windows PC are a pathetic third place. We use Linux extensively for computing but for desktop and portable use a Mac is terrific.
Brand loyalty is a tricky one when all the companies that made computers when I was at school are gone. What I did learn from exposure to primitive 8 bit machines was variety and flexibility which took me into software development. Later when Macs and PCs hit schools, the level of interest kids had in programming or even understanding computers dropped so we ended up with a generation of kids who couldn't do much more than type up a letter in MS Word compared with my generation which were writing hand coded assembly and building robots. Thank goodness Linus came along with his kernel and we were able to have a real OS on cheap PC hardware and that has given me a solid career so if there's any brand loyalty it is to Linux. While I use a Mac today (best tool for the job when dealing with a mixed environment) I'm a Linux admin and programmer by profession. The fight by these companies to control the market is bad, we need a mixture and devices like the Raspberry Pi are what we should be using to get kids hooked. Typing up letters and doing spreadsheets is not computing but seems to be all the schools are prepared to teach.
There are cars on the market with range extenders but they're typically short range EVs and then REX and I can see the need for those. Once you've got to 200+ miles (or even 300+ as the top Teslas can now do) you're into a car that can do everything most people will want and you can't cripple it just for the few that want to go further and don't want to stop for an hour after driving for three hours. There are people who routinely travel long distance and for now EVs aren't for them but it will be and there's no reason to add a REX to a Tesla because the charging network is coming and in a few years that REX will be dead weight. For now, you should indeed buy a short range EV with REX or just stick with petrol for a bit longer but battery price and capacity are changing so quickly now that buying into long range EV and including a REX makes no sense to me. The next generation of batteries and chargers will get the recharge times down to around 10 mins and you should really stop for 10 mins after driving a few hundred miles if only for your own health.