Because TFA is a rose-colored glasses interpretation of the data.
Batteries costing $190/kWh by 2020 still means you're paying $190 to carry around 12 cents worth of electricity. Even if you completely charge and discharge the battery $190 / $0.12 = 1583x (equivalent to 375,000 miles on the Tesla S 90 @ 38 kWh/100 mi), you've still doubled the cost of the electricity you're using.
Over a 100,000 mile lifetime, you've cycled the battery pack only 100,000 mi * (38 kWh / 100mi) / (90 kWh) = 422x. So at a cost of $190 / kWh, your battery pack is still ($190 / 422) / ($0.12) = 3.75x the cost of the electricity you've used. So if you only drive 15 miles/day, the EV is actually a bad fit for you (economically), since you're only going to put on 5000 miles in a year and it'll take you several decades to absorb the cost of the battery. (Basically the same reason why it's more cost-effective to use rechargeable AA batteries in kids toys which need new batteries every couple weeks, but use alkaline AA batteries in TV remotes which need new batteries every couple years. It'll take you a lifetime to make back the extra cost of the rechargeables in a TV remote.)
Granted, it's still cheaper than gasoline. But the big difference is you pay for the gasoline as you use it over 10-20 years. You pay the entire cost of the battery up-front. This makes the purchase price of the EV much higher.
The lower lifetime cost though means it is probably more economically efficient than gasoline (though not necessarily more energy efficient - basically EVs use nearly the same amount of energy as ICE vehicles, and the main reason they're cheaper is that energy from coal-produced electricity is about 1/10th the cost per MJ of energy from gasoline). Which is why despite being a fiscal conservative, I'm not opposed to subsidies for purchasing EVs. Whether or not it's actually more economically efficient depends on the terms and interest rate of your car loan, and the lost opportunity cost of the extra money you have "invested" in the battery over the decade it takes you to reach 100,000 miles or 375,000 miles.
It's really hard to have people take you seriously when you're trying to convince them that Trump is reckless, when those opposed to Trump are the ones pulling stunts like this.
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D. The Macs started on Motorola, but switched to PowerPC when they started to fall behind Intel. Unfortunately the Macs (home and office PCs) accounted for something like 1% of PowerPC sales, so IBM didn't give a damn what Apple wanted. Their meat and potatoes was in the server market so that's what they tuned the PowerPC CPUs for, when the PC market was clearly moving towards low-power consumption laptops. That's what drove Apple to Intel in the first place.
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs. That could happen, but I'm not convinced it will. The tablet market is already floundering after reaching saturation. I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years). In a saturated marketplace, the Mac commands so little of the PC market it wasn't able to keep Motorola competitive nor sway IBM. And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
Intel (and Microsoft) is successful because they managed to find a market with consistently large annual sales (and profit margins) even after reaching saturation. So far Apple has been riding a growing mobile market to success - basically coasting downhill. It remains to be seen whether they can continue that momentum once the hill levels out, people stop upgrading every 2 years, and they're forced to really, truly innovate to create demand to sustain their sales.
I'm curious how this wheeled robot does on ice. The thing that was impressive with previous Boston Dynamics robots wasn't that the walked or ran - lots of robots can do that. It was how well they recovered from unexpected events.
Roundabout, but effective. The problem is vertical integration. The carrier owns the towers, and sells the handsets. As a result, if you want a specific plan, you're stuck with the limited phones that carrier supports and the tower network that carrier uses. You want these things to be separate. Companies which own towers compete with each other. Companies which sell with service compete with each other. And companies which sell handsets compete with each other.
I'm usually critical of the EU's (over)regulation. But this is one thing they're doing right - maximizing competition so the free market can decide who is best and who deserves to go bankrupt.
There were only 146 of the Toshiba 4TB drives and only 45 of the 8TB drives. The math implodes when a sample has 0 failures (reflecting the possibility that what you're sampling simply can't fail - I think it's safe to say that's not really possible here). But with these sample sizes, if there had been the minimum number of failures (just 1), the margin of error is:
for 4TB with a 95% confidence interval, 1.96 * sqrt [(1/146) * (145/146) / 146 ] = 0.0134, or +/- 1.3%
for 4TB with a 99% confidence interval, 2.58 * sqrt [ (1/146) * (145/146) / 146 ] = 0.0178 or +/- 1.8%
for 8TB with a 95% confidence interval, 1.96 * sqrt [(1/45) * (44/45) / 45 ] = 0.0430 or +/- 4.3%
for 4TB with a 99% confidence interval, 2.58 * sqrt [ (1/146) * (145/146) / 146 ] = 0.0567 or +/- 5.7%
These error margins put the actual failure rate (within the confidence interval) well within the range of most other drives tested. So you can't say with confidence that these particular drives with zero failures were the most reliable. (Looking over their data, it does seem HGST drives are statistically more reliable than Seagate and WD drives. Goody for me - I've been a big fan of the IBM/HGST/Toshiba drives ever since they went overboard improving them following the "DeathStar" fiasco, and have been using them predominantly. Sometimes an embarrassing product failure is the best thing for a company.)
The device probably works better with certain people, not so well with others. So the average success rate in controlled studies may not be relevant to a specific individual.
Still, it seems like it'd be trivial for family members to come up with questions that only the patient would know the answer to. Write them on a note, doctor takes it into the room and asks the questions, writes down what the machine says are the answers, and brings it back out to the family for review. (Can't have the family in the room when the calibration questions are asked, lest the doctor takes queues from the family and guesses the answer.)
Pioneer 11 was the first probe to visit Saturn. One of its trajectories considered for the mission (and eventually rejected) was to pass right through the Cassini Division. Once Pioneer got there, we found out the Cassini Division wasn't quite as empty as it appears from Earth.
You know, there's a simpler explanation. Maybe fact-checking is a more "left-leaning and liberal" preoccupation.
That's mostly irrelevant. It still means that "fake news" which conforms to left-leaning biases is more likely to slip through the fact-checking.
e.g. Every major media outlet calling it Trump's ban on Muslim immigrants, when it's actually a 120 day freeze (not that I agree with with it). By their definition, Obama banned pay raises for government workers (2 years > 120 days). Or how they unilaterally decided to call them "undocumented" immigrants instead of illegal immigrants, much to the confusion of the public (ask most people what Trump's view of legal Mexican immigrants is, and they'll quote you things he said about illegal Mexican immigrants - because the media deliberately failed at their job to inform the public in order to advocate their own political biases).
There's a saying that was popular when I was growing up: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case. The new version seems to be "I disagree with what you say, and I will do everything in my power to impede your ability to say it." When you take up the mantra of fact-checking, you are by definition agreeing to cast as critical an eye on stuff you agree with as that you disagree with. I've seen them fail at that numerous times. In one discussion with the folks who run Snopes, they told me you could refuse to hire followers of Al Qaeda because they consider women to be chattel thus violating the EEOC prohibitions against discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex." I had to point out to them that, as they had just written, that would violate the EEOC's prohibition against discrimination on the basis of religion. If you're not gonna hire an Al Qaeda follower, it should be because they murder people, not because you disagree with their religious beliefs.
That's pretty much why I've stopped using 3rd party anti-virus, and just rely on Windows Defender. Dealing with all the unwanted and intrusive "features" and bugs in 3rd party anti-virus got to be more of a chore than dealing with actual viruses. When it's less annoying to deal with a virus infection after the fact than it is to live with your anti-virus every day, that's a pretty good sign you're doing something wrong.
Malwarebytes still gets my thumbs up though. Clean, simple, and effective.
That said, 64-bit does have some quite significant advantages for iOS, so I don't imagine Apple wanting to keep the 32-bit code around in the OS for longer than they have to.
Microsoft ran the same hyped up 64-bit campaign when switching from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows.
64-bit basically gets you three things.
A flat memory space above 4 GB of RAM. This is convenient (especially if a single program actually needs to store more than 4GB of data), but not necessary. 8-bit could only address 256 bytes of memory, 16-bit only 64kB. We got around in those days with segmented memory. Given a choice I would always pick flat memory over segmented, but it's not a show-stopper.
double floats and long ints (long long int in the old days) can be loaded and handled in one instruction instead of two. Regular floats are 32-bit, as are regular ints (long int in the old days). Those are handled exactly the same as on a 32-bit processor. The vast majority of programs do just fine with a 4 billion int range, and single point floating point.
Char types can be handled 8 bytes at a time instead of 4 bytes at a time. This isn't as useful as it sounds - it mostly affects data compression where you're handling a long, continuous stream of chars. Most other operations are not bottlenecked by the speed at which you can handle chars.
That's it. The vast majority of programs run exactly the same speed in 32-bit as they do in 64-bit, except they take up a bit more memory. So there's no advantage to 64-bit, and a slight disadvantage. The only programs which benefit from 64-bit are ones which need more than 4GB of RAM (no iOS device yet has more than 4GB of RAM), ones which need double floats or long ints (mostly scientific applications large accounting databases and spreadsheets - stuff you wouldn't want running on an iOS device), and ones which do a lot of data processing like compression. Most of the speed advantages of Apples 64-bit processors in iOS device benchmarks was due to new instructions and hardware functions they added, not due to it being 64-bit.
As practically no iOS program can actually use 64-bit to its advantage on their current hardware, right now it's mostly marketing hype to get people with older hardware to feel bad and upgrade (even though the upgrade provides no advantage). Long-term, Apple is being proactive about trying to avoid falling into the trap Office fell into. A lot of the extensions written for Office are 32-bit, so Microsoft still recommends installing 32-bit Office instead of 64-bit Office a decade after we transitioned to 64-bit Windows.
I'm still waiting for Microsoft to collapse. Like I've been predicting since 1988 when I learned that they weren't even competent enough to write DOS, they had to trick a competitor into selling it to them.
Isn't that the way it has to be? If you can successfully sue someone for doing something which might cause you harm, that's going to stop the economy cold. The ambulance chasers would have a field day suing everyone and everything for near-misses, potential risks, negligence which had no consequences (like rolling stops, driving over the speed limit), etc.
Verizon and their archaic system that disallows data during a call needs to be thrown out.
Oh my. That hasn't been true since phones got 4G LTE.
See, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM used TDMA - each phone took turns talking to the tower, so bandwidth is divided by the number of phones even if some (or most) of those phones don't have anything to transmit. CDMA allows each phone to transmit simultaneously. The tower tells them apart because each is assigned an orthogonal code. Each phone see other phones' transmissions as an increase in the noise floor, which drops the signal-to-noise ratio, dividing bandwidth evenly between all phones which are transmitting at any given time. If there are 20 GSM phones with active data connections with a tower, but only one actually transmitting data at a given time, it gets 5% of the total bandwidth. If there are 20 CDMA phones with active data connections with a tower, but only one actually transmitting data at a given time, it gets 100% of the total bandwidth.
Consequently, CDMA completely wiped the floor with GSM when it came to data connections. This is why CDMA networks got 3G data about a year before GSM networks did. After about a year, GSM threw in the towel, licensed CDMA from Qualcomm, and added it to the GSM spec. Most 3G data connections on GSM phones (HSPA, HSDPA, UMTS) are based on wideband CDMA. Because CDMA was better than the original GSM.
That is why GSM phones could talk and use data simultaneously. They had to have two separate radios to function - a TDMA radio for voice, and a wideband CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones on Verizon and Sprint only had a single CDMA radio. It had to be put into one mode to make voice calls, into a different mode to support data. Consequently they couldn't do voice and data at the same time. They could've added an extra CDMA radio, but the simultaneous voice + data capability wasn't judged to be important enough to warrant it. It wasn't because GSM was superior. It was because GSM was inferior and needed the crutch of a second radio to handle data competently. Simultaneous voice and data comms was just a pleasant side-effect.
Most LTE implementations use OFDMA, so requires yet another radio. LTE CDMA phones thus have (at least) two radios and can do voice and data simultaneously (CDMA for voice, LTE for data).
(As a side note, Sprint's LTE network is different from the other carriers'. The other carriers primarily use 2 LTE frequencies. Sprint converted their old iDEN frequency to LTE, so uses 3 LTE frequencies to create their "Spark" LTE network. Unfortunately, modern phones are limited to only 3 simultaneous communications bands, so Sprint phones which are "Spark-capable" cannot do voice and data simultaneously. If they're doing LTE data, all the phone's resources are committed to LTE data. Older Sprint LTE phones which don't support tri-band LTE can do voice and LTE data simultaneously, just like Verizon's phones.)
All of you hating on CDMA should actually be thanking it. If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA to compete, our data speeds today would probably be down around 1 Mbps. And LTE would probably still be in the experimental stages. (OFDMA also allows all phones to transmit simultaneously, just using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA was the proof of concept which confirmed that this type of communications could successfully be scaled to a nationwide network. Without CDMA, nobody today would be sure if OFDMA LTE would actually work when scaled.)
It's widely abused. You've seen those job advertisements which require a dozen specific degrees and certifications, x years experience in one field, y years experience in another somewhat related field, and z years experience in a completely unrelated field? Those are H1-B ads. They already know which foreigner they want to hire, and they tailor the job requirements to exactly match that person. This reduces the chance that any American will "qualify" for the job to near zero, and they can honestly say that there were no qualified American applicants.
My router is next to my cable modem, which is next to the cable TV coax outlet in the family room behind the TV. When I had DSL, it was next to my DSL modem, which was next to the wall phone jack. Neither of these were located anywhere near my main computer (den/bedroom). That's why they invented Ethernet cables and WiFi - so your computer doesn't have to be right next to your router.
Ohhhhhh, wait, I get it. They're testing this with a Macbook Pro, which doesn't have an Ethernet jack, so they're using WiFi. And to assure maximum WiFi speed they're putting the router as close as they can to the MBP. Well, RF interference from things which are designed to broadcast RF (like routers) has always been a risk. I remember the picture on an old CRTs wavering if it came too close to a walkie talkie. Maybe you should ask Apple why they removed the Ethernet jack - the technology designed to prevent this type of problem - from their "Pro" system, forcing you to choose between an annoying dongle or risk of RF interference.
Back then that was the only way to sell music, so they had to build the factory equipment to produce and stamp the LPs.
Today, vinyl records are a fad. And the manufacturers know it's a fad so they're afraid to invest money in manufacturing equipment, lest they be stuck with a bunch of useless equipment when the fad dies.
What's next? Let's all go back to watching movies on VHS and old CRTs!
Actually, there was a short-lived drive to resurrect CRTs. You see, the ideal pixel isn't a square. It's a blob whose brightness falls off with radius, which is almost exactly what a CRT produces. The pixel is supposed to represent the brightness and color of an infinitely small sample at a certain location. A CRT phosphor's blob does that very well. When you represent it with a square LCD pixel, you're introducing a lot of high-frequency noise which doesn't exist in the original sample. In 2D imagery they're called jaggies, and we've had to implement anti-aliasing, especially in fonts, to remove that noise and make things look pretty much like they did on a CRT. LCDs only produce "sharper" output when displaying perfectly horizontal and vertical edges (like windows on a computer desktop) because in those cases the noise coincides with what's being represented. For all other shapes and angles, a CRT's pixels are better.
The movement died when extremely high PPI LCDs became available - the high-frequency noise due to square pixels in those is too small to be visible.
There have been a lot of airbursts. The smaller the meteor, the narrower the window where it will survive to impact the Earth. Too slow or too shallow and angle and it spends too much time in the atmosphere and burns up (like much of our rocket launch debris). Too fast and the energy of hitting our atmosphere fragments it, greatly increasing its surface area and again causing it to burn up. It has to hit the atmosphere at just the right speed and angle to form an impact crater. Fast enough that it doesn't burn up entirely before hitting ground (angle of impact determining how much atmosphere it has to travel through), but slow enough that the stresses of re-entry don't cause it to break up. So most small meteors which intersect the Earth end up as airbursts.
The truth is this happens pretty frequently. We just really suck at spotting the near-misses.
Adpbe Creative Cloud actually makes sense for many users. They used to release a new version of Photoshop every year, so about $150/yr. $125 if you could get it on sale. Photoshop + Lightroom on CC costs $10/mo, or $120/yr. So the CC version is actually cheaper.
In contrast, the Home and Student version of Office used to cost about $140. Office 365 costs $100/yr, but the release schedule for Office used to be about 3 years (2007, 2010, 2013, 2016). So Microsoft is trying to get you to pay $300 for what used to cost you $140.
And unlike Office, the new features and improvements they add to CC are actually useful. New tools and filters enhance and speed up your ability to edit pictures. Getting a new version of Office doesn't help you write a letter faster. I know people who are still using a 10 or even 13 year old version of Office. But show some of the beta features of Photoshop to users and the vast majority of them will ask when they can buy it.
The problem wasn't the electronic key system. The problem was the hotel stupidly made their electronic key system (or at least the server) accessible from the public Internet.
I used to work at a hotel and helped select one of these key card systems for purchase (I wasn't around for the installation). You're supposed to keep it on a separate and isolated network specifically to prevent problems like this. The system is completely self-contained and internal. Nothing else needs access to it, and you don't need to have access to anything else from it. The person using the key card server doesn't need to be able to browse their Facebook page on it. The only data being entered into it should be the front desk staff keying in the guest's name and dates of stay so that a new key card can be generated and the lock for that room reprogrammed.
Physical keys at hotels were/are a huge problem because anyone can make a copy of the key. Theoretically a guest could make a copy to access the room at a later date. But more commonly, one of the maids (who have master keys so they can access all rooms) makes a copy, gives it to someone else, who then goes into the rooms and steals stuff when the maid is off-duty (so as not to arouse suspicion as to who copied their key). Changing the locks is expensive and doesn't help, because the corrupt maid simply makes a copy of the new key. It's cheaper to make a copy of a physical key than it is to change all the physical locks. OTOH, it's cheaper to change all the electronic lock keys than it is to make a copy of the newer RFID key cards. Switching back to physical keys is huge step backwards in security.
It's not quite so bad. Microsoft defers update control to a technical authority who is skilled enough to make decisions about updating in Microsoft's stead. In the case of the Enterprise version of Windows, it's the IT department. In the case of the retail version of Windows, it's anyone technically skilled enough to know you can just disable the Windows Update service to stop the forced updates.
I'm uncomfortable with forcing less skilled users to get updates, but given the number of Windows exploits and vulnerabilities (and botnets) out there, I'm inclined to agree that it's probably better this way.
My real gripe is taking away control over which updates get installed. I've already encountered a situation where a particular update broke my 3D graphics, but I wasn't able to avoid it because it kept getting reinstalled as part of the bundle of Windows updates. For about three months, I had to waste time reinstalling my laptop vendor-provided video drivers after each update, until Intel finally sent Microsoft a new graphics driver update which fixed their bug.
This is a common error known as Simpson's Paradox. When you divide a statistical population into arbitrary (unrelated) groupings, you can end up with trends within each group which contradict the trend as a whole. The best know recent example is Trump winning the Presidency despite losing the popular vote - because the Electoral College tally is divided into groupings by state. Another example is Derek Jeter's and Dave Justice's batting averages from 1995-1997. In all three of those years, Justice had a higher average than Jeter. But for all three years combined, Jeter had a higher average than Justice.
It's pretty easy to disprove the notion that there's any correlation between tax contributions/receipt and voting record (blue/red-ness) of state. Imagine if there were just two states each with a population of three individuals:
Red State
R1: pays $100 in taxes
R2: pays $100 in taxes
D3: receives $300 in benefits
Blue state
R1: pays $500 in taxes
D2: receives $200 in benefits
D3: receives $200 in benefits
In this example, all the Red voters are tax payers, and all the Blue voters are benefit recipients. Yet the Blue state is the net tax payer, and the Red state is the net tax recipient The correlation you're assuming between these two stats (tax payment/receipt and voting record of state) doesn't exist.
In particular, Republicans tend to have higher incomes than Democrats. People with higher incomes pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes (up to about $2 million, above which the percentage falls but still remains higher than the tax rate paid by people making less than $500k). Ergo, Republicans tend to pay more taxes per capita than Democrats. Dividing it up by states just allows you to silently and deceptively shift the tax contributions of Republicans in Blue states into the Blue category, even though they're paid by Red voters. And assign blame for benefits received by Democrats in Red states into the Red category.
I actually blame the Media, not Trump. Trump (and the people who voted for him) are the symptom. The cause is the Media giving a massively disproportionate amount of news coverage to deaths due to terrorism. Just like they give disproportionate amounts of coverage to child abductions by strangers, school shootings, airliner crashes, nuclear power accidents, etc. All of these are irrationally feared by the public because of irresponsible reporting by the Media. (Child abductions by strangers account for less than 0.01% of missing children cases. Your kids are more likely to be shot outside of school than while at school, so pulling them out of school due to fear of school shootings is actually counter-productive. The drive to/from the airport is typically more dangerous than the flight. And nuclear power is statistically the safest method of generating electricity that man has invented.)
Fact is, movies and TV have to be considered purchases.
I just take the MPAA/RIAA up on their insistence that we're buying a license, not purchasing a product. Any song or movie I've already paid for, I just download it from a pirate site. After all, I already bought a license (on record, tape, CD, VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray).
Slashdot Mirror
Because TFA is a rose-colored glasses interpretation of the data.
Batteries costing $190/kWh by 2020 still means you're paying $190 to carry around 12 cents worth of electricity. Even if you completely charge and discharge the battery $190 / $0.12 = 1583x (equivalent to 375,000 miles on the Tesla S 90 @ 38 kWh/100 mi), you've still doubled the cost of the electricity you're using.
Over a 100,000 mile lifetime, you've cycled the battery pack only 100,000 mi * (38 kWh / 100mi) / (90 kWh) = 422x. So at a cost of $190 / kWh, your battery pack is still ($190 / 422) / ($0.12) = 3.75x the cost of the electricity you've used. So if you only drive 15 miles/day, the EV is actually a bad fit for you (economically), since you're only going to put on 5000 miles in a year and it'll take you several decades to absorb the cost of the battery. (Basically the same reason why it's more cost-effective to use rechargeable AA batteries in kids toys which need new batteries every couple weeks, but use alkaline AA batteries in TV remotes which need new batteries every couple years. It'll take you a lifetime to make back the extra cost of the rechargeables in a TV remote.)
Granted, it's still cheaper than gasoline. But the big difference is you pay for the gasoline as you use it over 10-20 years. You pay the entire cost of the battery up-front. This makes the purchase price of the EV much higher.
The lower lifetime cost though means it is probably more economically efficient than gasoline (though not necessarily more energy efficient - basically EVs use nearly the same amount of energy as ICE vehicles, and the main reason they're cheaper is that energy from coal-produced electricity is about 1/10th the cost per MJ of energy from gasoline). Which is why despite being a fiscal conservative, I'm not opposed to subsidies for purchasing EVs. Whether or not it's actually more economically efficient depends on the terms and interest rate of your car loan, and the lost opportunity cost of the extra money you have "invested" in the battery over the decade it takes you to reach 100,000 miles or 375,000 miles.
It's really hard to have people take you seriously when you're trying to convince them that Trump is reckless, when those opposed to Trump are the ones pulling stunts like this.
They moved to Intel because the Mac doesn't have enough sales volume to drive its own CPU R&D. The Macs started on Motorola, but switched to PowerPC when they started to fall behind Intel. Unfortunately the Macs (home and office PCs) accounted for something like 1% of PowerPC sales, so IBM didn't give a damn what Apple wanted. Their meat and potatoes was in the server market so that's what they tuned the PowerPC CPUs for, when the PC market was clearly moving towards low-power consumption laptops. That's what drove Apple to Intel in the first place.
They're gambling that ARM CPUs (SoCs) will become powerful enough to accomplish the tasks people ask of from Macs, while revenue from phone, tablet, and other small device sales (e.g. Apple TV) will be enough to sustain R&D to keep it progressing as rapidly as Intel CPUs. That could happen, but I'm not convinced it will. The tablet market is already floundering after reaching saturation. I'm guessing phones will soon join them once 5G arrives (5G data will be fast enough there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your phone for 5-10 years). In a saturated marketplace, the Mac commands so little of the PC market it wasn't able to keep Motorola competitive nor sway IBM. And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
Intel (and Microsoft) is successful because they managed to find a market with consistently large annual sales (and profit margins) even after reaching saturation. So far Apple has been riding a growing mobile market to success - basically coasting downhill. It remains to be seen whether they can continue that momentum once the hill levels out, people stop upgrading every 2 years, and they're forced to really, truly innovate to create demand to sustain their sales.
I'm curious how this wheeled robot does on ice. The thing that was impressive with previous Boston Dynamics robots wasn't that the walked or ran - lots of robots can do that. It was how well they recovered from unexpected events.
Roundabout, but effective. The problem is vertical integration. The carrier owns the towers, and sells the handsets. As a result, if you want a specific plan, you're stuck with the limited phones that carrier supports and the tower network that carrier uses. You want these things to be separate. Companies which own towers compete with each other. Companies which sell with service compete with each other. And companies which sell handsets compete with each other.
I'm usually critical of the EU's (over)regulation. But this is one thing they're doing right - maximizing competition so the free market can decide who is best and who deserves to go bankrupt.
These error margins put the actual failure rate (within the confidence interval) well within the range of most other drives tested. So you can't say with confidence that these particular drives with zero failures were the most reliable. (Looking over their data, it does seem HGST drives are statistically more reliable than Seagate and WD drives. Goody for me - I've been a big fan of the IBM/HGST/Toshiba drives ever since they went overboard improving them following the "DeathStar" fiasco, and have been using them predominantly. Sometimes an embarrassing product failure is the best thing for a company.)
The device probably works better with certain people, not so well with others. So the average success rate in controlled studies may not be relevant to a specific individual.
Still, it seems like it'd be trivial for family members to come up with questions that only the patient would know the answer to. Write them on a note, doctor takes it into the room and asks the questions, writes down what the machine says are the answers, and brings it back out to the family for review. (Can't have the family in the room when the calibration questions are asked, lest the doctor takes queues from the family and guesses the answer.)
Pioneer 11 was the first probe to visit Saturn. One of its trajectories considered for the mission (and eventually rejected) was to pass right through the Cassini Division. Once Pioneer got there, we found out the Cassini Division wasn't quite as empty as it appears from Earth.
That's mostly irrelevant. It still means that "fake news" which conforms to left-leaning biases is more likely to slip through the fact-checking.
e.g. Every major media outlet calling it Trump's ban on Muslim immigrants, when it's actually a 120 day freeze (not that I agree with with it). By their definition, Obama banned pay raises for government workers (2 years > 120 days). Or how they unilaterally decided to call them "undocumented" immigrants instead of illegal immigrants, much to the confusion of the public (ask most people what Trump's view of legal Mexican immigrants is, and they'll quote you things he said about illegal Mexican immigrants - because the media deliberately failed at their job to inform the public in order to advocate their own political biases).
There's a saying that was popular when I was growing up: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case. The new version seems to be "I disagree with what you say, and I will do everything in my power to impede your ability to say it." When you take up the mantra of fact-checking, you are by definition agreeing to cast as critical an eye on stuff you agree with as that you disagree with. I've seen them fail at that numerous times. In one discussion with the folks who run Snopes, they told me you could refuse to hire followers of Al Qaeda because they consider women to be chattel thus violating the EEOC prohibitions against discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex." I had to point out to them that, as they had just written, that would violate the EEOC's prohibition against discrimination on the basis of religion. If you're not gonna hire an Al Qaeda follower, it should be because they murder people, not because you disagree with their religious beliefs.
That's pretty much why I've stopped using 3rd party anti-virus, and just rely on Windows Defender. Dealing with all the unwanted and intrusive "features" and bugs in 3rd party anti-virus got to be more of a chore than dealing with actual viruses. When it's less annoying to deal with a virus infection after the fact than it is to live with your anti-virus every day, that's a pretty good sign you're doing something wrong.
Malwarebytes still gets my thumbs up though. Clean, simple, and effective.
Microsoft ran the same hyped up 64-bit campaign when switching from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows.
64-bit basically gets you three things.
That's it. The vast majority of programs run exactly the same speed in 32-bit as they do in 64-bit, except they take up a bit more memory. So there's no advantage to 64-bit, and a slight disadvantage. The only programs which benefit from 64-bit are ones which need more than 4GB of RAM (no iOS device yet has more than 4GB of RAM), ones which need double floats or long ints (mostly scientific applications large accounting databases and spreadsheets - stuff you wouldn't want running on an iOS device), and ones which do a lot of data processing like compression. Most of the speed advantages of Apples 64-bit processors in iOS device benchmarks was due to new instructions and hardware functions they added, not due to it being 64-bit.
As practically no iOS program can actually use 64-bit to its advantage on their current hardware, right now it's mostly marketing hype to get people with older hardware to feel bad and upgrade (even though the upgrade provides no advantage). Long-term, Apple is being proactive about trying to avoid falling into the trap Office fell into. A lot of the extensions written for Office are 32-bit, so Microsoft still recommends installing 32-bit Office instead of 64-bit Office a decade after we transitioned to 64-bit Windows.
I'm still waiting for Microsoft to collapse. Like I've been predicting since 1988 when I learned that they weren't even competent enough to write DOS, they had to trick a competitor into selling it to them.
Isn't that the way it has to be? If you can successfully sue someone for doing something which might cause you harm, that's going to stop the economy cold. The ambulance chasers would have a field day suing everyone and everything for near-misses, potential risks, negligence which had no consequences (like rolling stops, driving over the speed limit), etc.
Oh my. That hasn't been true since phones got 4G LTE.
See, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. GSM used TDMA - each phone took turns talking to the tower, so bandwidth is divided by the number of phones even if some (or most) of those phones don't have anything to transmit. CDMA allows each phone to transmit simultaneously. The tower tells them apart because each is assigned an orthogonal code. Each phone see other phones' transmissions as an increase in the noise floor, which drops the signal-to-noise ratio, dividing bandwidth evenly between all phones which are transmitting at any given time. If there are 20 GSM phones with active data connections with a tower, but only one actually transmitting data at a given time, it gets 5% of the total bandwidth. If there are 20 CDMA phones with active data connections with a tower, but only one actually transmitting data at a given time, it gets 100% of the total bandwidth.
Consequently, CDMA completely wiped the floor with GSM when it came to data connections. This is why CDMA networks got 3G data about a year before GSM networks did. After about a year, GSM threw in the towel, licensed CDMA from Qualcomm, and added it to the GSM spec. Most 3G data connections on GSM phones (HSPA, HSDPA, UMTS) are based on wideband CDMA. Because CDMA was better than the original GSM.
That is why GSM phones could talk and use data simultaneously. They had to have two separate radios to function - a TDMA radio for voice, and a wideband CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones on Verizon and Sprint only had a single CDMA radio. It had to be put into one mode to make voice calls, into a different mode to support data. Consequently they couldn't do voice and data at the same time. They could've added an extra CDMA radio, but the simultaneous voice + data capability wasn't judged to be important enough to warrant it. It wasn't because GSM was superior. It was because GSM was inferior and needed the crutch of a second radio to handle data competently. Simultaneous voice and data comms was just a pleasant side-effect.
Most LTE implementations use OFDMA, so requires yet another radio. LTE CDMA phones thus have (at least) two radios and can do voice and data simultaneously (CDMA for voice, LTE for data).
(As a side note, Sprint's LTE network is different from the other carriers'. The other carriers primarily use 2 LTE frequencies. Sprint converted their old iDEN frequency to LTE, so uses 3 LTE frequencies to create their "Spark" LTE network. Unfortunately, modern phones are limited to only 3 simultaneous communications bands, so Sprint phones which are "Spark-capable" cannot do voice and data simultaneously. If they're doing LTE data, all the phone's resources are committed to LTE data. Older Sprint LTE phones which don't support tri-band LTE can do voice and LTE data simultaneously, just like Verizon's phones.)
All of you hating on CDMA should actually be thanking it. If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA to compete, our data speeds today would probably be down around 1 Mbps. And LTE would probably still be in the experimental stages. (OFDMA also allows all phones to transmit simultaneously, just using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA was the proof of concept which confirmed that this type of communications could successfully be scaled to a nationwide network. Without CDMA, nobody today would be sure if OFDMA LTE would actually work when scaled.)
It's widely abused. You've seen those job advertisements which require a dozen specific degrees and certifications, x years experience in one field, y years experience in another somewhat related field, and z years experience in a completely unrelated field? Those are H1-B ads. They already know which foreigner they want to hire, and they tailor the job requirements to exactly match that person. This reduces the chance that any American will "qualify" for the job to near zero, and they can honestly say that there were no qualified American applicants.
My router is next to my cable modem, which is next to the cable TV coax outlet in the family room behind the TV. When I had DSL, it was next to my DSL modem, which was next to the wall phone jack. Neither of these were located anywhere near my main computer (den/bedroom). That's why they invented Ethernet cables and WiFi - so your computer doesn't have to be right next to your router.
Ohhhhhh, wait, I get it. They're testing this with a Macbook Pro, which doesn't have an Ethernet jack, so they're using WiFi. And to assure maximum WiFi speed they're putting the router as close as they can to the MBP. Well, RF interference from things which are designed to broadcast RF (like routers) has always been a risk. I remember the picture on an old CRTs wavering if it came too close to a walkie talkie. Maybe you should ask Apple why they removed the Ethernet jack - the technology designed to prevent this type of problem - from their "Pro" system, forcing you to choose between an annoying dongle or risk of RF interference.
Back then that was the only way to sell music, so they had to build the factory equipment to produce and stamp the LPs.
Today, vinyl records are a fad. And the manufacturers know it's a fad so they're afraid to invest money in manufacturing equipment, lest they be stuck with a bunch of useless equipment when the fad dies.
Actually, there was a short-lived drive to resurrect CRTs. You see, the ideal pixel isn't a square. It's a blob whose brightness falls off with radius, which is almost exactly what a CRT produces. The pixel is supposed to represent the brightness and color of an infinitely small sample at a certain location. A CRT phosphor's blob does that very well. When you represent it with a square LCD pixel, you're introducing a lot of high-frequency noise which doesn't exist in the original sample. In 2D imagery they're called jaggies, and we've had to implement anti-aliasing, especially in fonts, to remove that noise and make things look pretty much like they did on a CRT. LCDs only produce "sharper" output when displaying perfectly horizontal and vertical edges (like windows on a computer desktop) because in those cases the noise coincides with what's being represented. For all other shapes and angles, a CRT's pixels are better.
The movement died when extremely high PPI LCDs became available - the high-frequency noise due to square pixels in those is too small to be visible.
There have been a lot of airbursts. The smaller the meteor, the narrower the window where it will survive to impact the Earth. Too slow or too shallow and angle and it spends too much time in the atmosphere and burns up (like much of our rocket launch debris). Too fast and the energy of hitting our atmosphere fragments it, greatly increasing its surface area and again causing it to burn up. It has to hit the atmosphere at just the right speed and angle to form an impact crater. Fast enough that it doesn't burn up entirely before hitting ground (angle of impact determining how much atmosphere it has to travel through), but slow enough that the stresses of re-entry don't cause it to break up. So most small meteors which intersect the Earth end up as airbursts.
The truth is this happens pretty frequently. We just really suck at spotting the near-misses.
Adpbe Creative Cloud actually makes sense for many users. They used to release a new version of Photoshop every year, so about $150/yr. $125 if you could get it on sale. Photoshop + Lightroom on CC costs $10/mo, or $120/yr. So the CC version is actually cheaper.
In contrast, the Home and Student version of Office used to cost about $140. Office 365 costs $100/yr, but the release schedule for Office used to be about 3 years (2007, 2010, 2013, 2016). So Microsoft is trying to get you to pay $300 for what used to cost you $140.
And unlike Office, the new features and improvements they add to CC are actually useful. New tools and filters enhance and speed up your ability to edit pictures. Getting a new version of Office doesn't help you write a letter faster. I know people who are still using a 10 or even 13 year old version of Office. But show some of the beta features of Photoshop to users and the vast majority of them will ask when they can buy it.
The problem wasn't the electronic key system. The problem was the hotel stupidly made their electronic key system (or at least the server) accessible from the public Internet.
I used to work at a hotel and helped select one of these key card systems for purchase (I wasn't around for the installation). You're supposed to keep it on a separate and isolated network specifically to prevent problems like this. The system is completely self-contained and internal. Nothing else needs access to it, and you don't need to have access to anything else from it. The person using the key card server doesn't need to be able to browse their Facebook page on it. The only data being entered into it should be the front desk staff keying in the guest's name and dates of stay so that a new key card can be generated and the lock for that room reprogrammed.
Physical keys at hotels were/are a huge problem because anyone can make a copy of the key. Theoretically a guest could make a copy to access the room at a later date. But more commonly, one of the maids (who have master keys so they can access all rooms) makes a copy, gives it to someone else, who then goes into the rooms and steals stuff when the maid is off-duty (so as not to arouse suspicion as to who copied their key). Changing the locks is expensive and doesn't help, because the corrupt maid simply makes a copy of the new key. It's cheaper to make a copy of a physical key than it is to change all the physical locks. OTOH, it's cheaper to change all the electronic lock keys than it is to make a copy of the newer RFID key cards. Switching back to physical keys is huge step backwards in security.
It's not quite so bad. Microsoft defers update control to a technical authority who is skilled enough to make decisions about updating in Microsoft's stead. In the case of the Enterprise version of Windows, it's the IT department. In the case of the retail version of Windows, it's anyone technically skilled enough to know you can just disable the Windows Update service to stop the forced updates.
I'm uncomfortable with forcing less skilled users to get updates, but given the number of Windows exploits and vulnerabilities (and botnets) out there, I'm inclined to agree that it's probably better this way.
My real gripe is taking away control over which updates get installed. I've already encountered a situation where a particular update broke my 3D graphics, but I wasn't able to avoid it because it kept getting reinstalled as part of the bundle of Windows updates. For about three months, I had to waste time reinstalling my laptop vendor-provided video drivers after each update, until Intel finally sent Microsoft a new graphics driver update which fixed their bug.
This is a common error known as Simpson's Paradox. When you divide a statistical population into arbitrary (unrelated) groupings, you can end up with trends within each group which contradict the trend as a whole. The best know recent example is Trump winning the Presidency despite losing the popular vote - because the Electoral College tally is divided into groupings by state. Another example is Derek Jeter's and Dave Justice's batting averages from 1995-1997. In all three of those years, Justice had a higher average than Jeter. But for all three years combined, Jeter had a higher average than Justice.
It's pretty easy to disprove the notion that there's any correlation between tax contributions/receipt and voting record (blue/red-ness) of state. Imagine if there were just two states each with a population of three individuals:
Red State
R1: pays $100 in taxes
R2: pays $100 in taxes
D3: receives $300 in benefits
Blue state
R1: pays $500 in taxes
D2: receives $200 in benefits
D3: receives $200 in benefits
In this example, all the Red voters are tax payers, and all the Blue voters are benefit recipients. Yet the Blue state is the net tax payer, and the Red state is the net tax recipient The correlation you're assuming between these two stats (tax payment/receipt and voting record of state) doesn't exist.
In particular, Republicans tend to have higher incomes than Democrats. People with higher incomes pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes (up to about $2 million, above which the percentage falls but still remains higher than the tax rate paid by people making less than $500k). Ergo, Republicans tend to pay more taxes per capita than Democrats. Dividing it up by states just allows you to silently and deceptively shift the tax contributions of Republicans in Blue states into the Blue category, even though they're paid by Red voters. And assign blame for benefits received by Democrats in Red states into the Red category.
I actually blame the Media, not Trump. Trump (and the people who voted for him) are the symptom. The cause is the Media giving a massively disproportionate amount of news coverage to deaths due to terrorism. Just like they give disproportionate amounts of coverage to child abductions by strangers, school shootings, airliner crashes, nuclear power accidents, etc. All of these are irrationally feared by the public because of irresponsible reporting by the Media. (Child abductions by strangers account for less than 0.01% of missing children cases. Your kids are more likely to be shot outside of school than while at school, so pulling them out of school due to fear of school shootings is actually counter-productive. The drive to/from the airport is typically more dangerous than the flight. And nuclear power is statistically the safest method of generating electricity that man has invented.)
I just take the MPAA/RIAA up on their insistence that we're buying a license, not purchasing a product. Any song or movie I've already paid for, I just download it from a pirate site. After all, I already bought a license (on record, tape, CD, VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray).