Same as manned spaceflight - the glory days have gone.
This is 300 foot long. The Graf Zeppelin of 1928 was 776 feet long with a useful lift of 60 tonnes.
The Hindenberg was even bigger.
Material science and strength calculation complexity was a lot less advanced in the 1920s. You could build a better airship today if you wanted to, but it probably wouldn't make sense. Cargo airplanes are likely more cost efficient. Fuel-wise, the airship might be favorable, but the financial impact of an expensive asset taking 3 days to travel 6,000 miles vs 12 hours for a plane is a large consideration. The 747-ERF freighter can carry 248,600 lb (112,760 kg), nearly double the Graf Zepplin. And it can do 3 round trips of 6,000 miles in the time that it would take the Graf Zepplin to do a single 1-way trip. It's not easy to think of a market nowadays where airships would make sense.
The Helium used in party balloons is highly impure and it is not cost effective to refine. One would hope that this aircraft is using the same impure Helium.
Not always. According to this helium wholesaler, grade 4.5 (99.995%) gas is often used in the balloon industry. Granted, getting the "5th nine" is a lot more costlier than getting to 4 nines, but I would not use "highly impure" to describe that level of purity. Most industrial uses use 99.997%. Anything higher than that is research/military grade and probably relatively low-volume in comparison to the welding shops, cryogenic cooling systems, and manufacturing users using 99.997% or lower.
And here I am, having been an unlimited-everything T-Mobile customer for the better part of a decade...
Several of the MVNO's using AT&T's own network have offered "unlimited" (usually capped 4G + unlimited 3G) for several years. Their network could obviously support the traffic. The only reason AT&T didn't until now was because they could get away with it. I guess the competition finally forced their hand.
I am not sure the concept of "emerging market" has much relevance any longer...mainly due to "time". Manufacturing has gotten so fast and mimicry so entrenched as a business plan that anything emerging this year won't be emerging next year. It will either be fully emerged or, worse, stale. Companies look at what Apple did to some markets and are now determined not get Appled by Apple or anyone else. There is an article on NYT about how companies are evading anti-trust laws by buying any startup that looks like it might become a competitor.
Every smart phone looks like an iPhone to me, there's no differentiation that regular customers could care about. Self-driving cars seems like a hot new area. Except no car company of any reasonable size is not working on them. There will be no emerging market for these, it will be created fully merged. Robotic assembly lines make it relatively easy and quick to switch on production of just about anything requiring mass quantities. Scaling up is easier with robotics.
I see this as a consequence of global supply chains, subcontracting, and little if any vertical integration. All the little details that used to be trade secrets of a vertically-integrated company are now quite transparent. You open up the device, see who made all the different components, and call them up and ask for a quote. We have come a long way from the days when a company manufactured most of their core products in-house. Just as one example, GE has been subcontracting out the manufacture of steam turbines, to their own competitors, since at least the 1970s. You could argue that they were simply divesting themselves of "mature" technology in order to focus on the more profitable cutting-edge stuff, but I would argue that steam turbine technology only became fully mature because they gave away (licensed) the technology to Hitachi, Toshiba, Doosan, and Ansaldo and let them run with it.
Many new-model phones are based on the latest reasonable tech. That $400 OnePlus Three uses a state-of-the-art Qualcomm processor with six cores operating in heterogeneous mode--slow and fast cores run at the same time, allowing for power scaling without scaling the whole system down. You can get eight-core or eight-and-eight core phones, if you want to pay $1,000 for them, too.
Packing more cores into the phone doesn't necessarily improve performance. Down the line, your 4-core phone might not be outperformed by an 8-core phone of the same speed; yet the new phones have 4-core processors running at 1.5 the clock rate, with more-efficient processors, consuming less battery and executing at 3x the computational speed. New applications and the sheer load of the stuff you're already running increase, and your phone doesn't work so well anymore.
So a phone that's "Made to last" might require technology that costs 4x as much, eats battery at 6x the rate, and halves the replacement rate. Overall, that phone will cost you twice as much (costs x 4, lifetime x 2). A phone that's made on the state-of-the-art might last 2-3 years, at a stretch.
Then someone releases a new graphics standard, and your phone is incapable of using certain things. Not really important on a phone; it's not like you need the latest OpenGL/Vulcan to run Android.
People think the manufacturers are purposely making phones to wear out after 1-2 years. They don't want to pony up $1,400 for a phone that'll still run well in 6 years, all the while running nearly hot enough to burn a hole in your pocket, with a 4-hour battery life.
You could have made all the same points (minus the multicore discussion) in the 1990s/early 2000s about desktop PCs. Nowadays, the notion of upgrading or replacing a PC or laptop every 2-3 years seems somewhat archaic. Any powerful PC/laptop today generally remains so for 3-5 years now. The lack of major desktop/laptop processor advancements has been going on so long now that people don't even talk about it, because it is irrelevant for most people. SSDs were the last upgrade worth having, and those are very widespread now.
Phones will get to that point of maturity too, probably within 10-20 years. The only potential obstacle is the issue of software and software updates.
And where might those be? As a fellow Houstonian, I was under the impression that you had to go way out into the countryside to escape light pollution.
Tell you what, it's not going to be real dark skies, but it's better than downtown Chicago (where I'm from). I was in Hermann Park last night, and the viewing wasn't as bad as most cities I've been in.
Say, as a fellow Houstonian, can you give me any tips for decent camping nearby? I've only lived in Houston for 11 days (I got here on the first). It's my first time down here.
I have yet to go camping in state, but I have heard good things about Brazos Bend State Park. The Galveston area could be an option, although Galveston is a bit trashy in general. If you do camp near/on the gulf, take care about how far back from the water you are. The tidal range can be several hundred feet, especially in Galveston where the slope of the beach is so gradual.
The viewing is good here in Texas. I'm in Houston, and not far from downtown, but because of the strange variations in population density here, and the complete lack of zoning laws, you can still find some relatively dark skies where I am.
I'd forgotten all about Perseid until I saw the second one and remembered this is August.
And where might those be? As a fellow Houstonian, I was under the impression that you had to go way out into the countryside to escape light pollution.
He was most likely put up to it by his activist dad, particularly since he knew exactly what to say to the cops - he told them the truth, but in such a way that they would think he's lying. That's not something you know when you're 14.
The whole thing smells rotten to me too, but I have to disagree with your reasoning. A 14 year old kid can be just as shifty and generally suspicious as adults. He didn't have to know how to be truthful but suspicious. That might just be his character. Plenty of people just seem to be "up to something" or "hiding something" all the time. Those behaviors didn't just appear at age 18.
They can buy stuff from the Russians just like we do.
This sort of thing isn't hard anymore. The key technologies (advanced materials, computer-aided design and manufacturing, computer guidance systems) are so widely available, and cheap now that even the idea of an embargo or blockade is ridiculous. I just searched for "inconel 718" (a key superalloy used for many aerospace parts) on Alibaba and 19,658 results came back. I wouldn't put chinese materials in my rocket engine, but for the DPRK they will probably work fine. The only obstacle in designing and building a rocket is money, and the cost gets lower every day. CNC hot glue guns (aka 3D printers) are incredibly cheap. The same technology (4-axis of motion, PID temperature control of multiple heaters) was used for many "advanced manufacturing" processes that were cutting edge in the 1960s and required for aerospace development. Back then it cost a fortune, but today some of the Prusa machines are approaching impulse-buy price points. Designing complex assemblies with the CAD packages today is a breeze compared to the nightmare it was 50 years ago. There is very little stopping the DPRK from developing everything they need by themselves.
Why on Earth are browsers revealing my battery status to random websites?
Does Google dictate these changes in exchange for funding?
I think it might be a case of "we could do it, so we did". The battery HTML API can indicate whether a device is plugged in and charging, or not. In theory, you could write code that was more computationally-intensive if the device was plugged in, or very lean if the device was on battery. That seems like a legitimate use to me. It may not have occurred to anyone that this would be used for nefarious purposes.
1. Floss
2. Smell used floss
3. Be totally grossed out.
4. Floss forever.
Story is a beat up. They didn't say it makes no difference. They just said the research supporting it was old and had poor methodology, possibly because "Big Floss" didn't think "floss research" was worth throwing money at and people have been doing it anyway because it's common sense.
So another clickbait headline which will have AP's media customers rubbing their hands with glee, but misleading and many people will take away the wrong conclusion.
There's a legitimate medical question here. The existing studies are not great and some have conflicting results. I agree that flossing has many benefits (odor being a huge one) but the floss manufacturers make various claims as to the medical benefit which aren't backed up. Yet. Given proper study, medical benefits will probably be shown. There are many different floss materials, different coatings, etc. There are even non-floss floss-type products, like the awful flossing sticks. Some may work better than others. Some may even be useless or detrimental compared to not flossing. More studies aren't a bad thing.
I think it is great they are setting the example with Floss. If the company-sponsored studies for Floss can be questioned, the company-sponsored studies for most any other personal care item with health claims can be questioned too. Maybe companies running these studies will be more careful in the future. There are certainly a lot of shoddy pro-product studies out there.
From the 1930's to about the 1950's or so, most normal people idolized the cream of the intelligentsia, Albert Einstein was quite the celebrity in his day, even among common folk. Werner Von Braun and the Rocket Kids of the 1950's-1960's were probably the last of the scientists regular people looked up to.
I used to have some respect for Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson but since the politicalization of science, they both have gotten too political and are nearly as bad as the anti-fact people they rail against.
This might look like a moral crusade to you but porn has fundamentally altered the relationship dynamics of the modern world.
Perhaps, but whether that is for better or worse is debatable and a matter of opinion. I would argue that allowing legal outlets for people to indulge their inner fantasies is a good thing. It is almost certainly better than living in a more conservative society where such people would be forced to break the law just to satisfy harmless urges.
And their fire line is far more locked down than Apple could ever dream of, with a small pool of apps.
Locked down what? You can sideload any app you want to any fire device you want. And what's more, you don't even need to plug in a USB cable to do it; They have ES File Explorer in their store. Once you have that installed, you can install anything you want, and uninstall ES if you like afterwards. The latest revision of the launcher on the Fire TV stick finally integrated non-Appstore apps into the app menu, so you don't have to launch them from application settings.
Amazon is not kind to sideloaded applications. My Kodi install gets screwed up or deleted from my FireTV randomly during some of their automatic updates.
It is a stretch to call powdered metal laser sintered Inconel 718 "3d printed". If we as a society are going to apply the term "3d printed" so such processes, then the term is just a stand-in phrase used by idiots to mean "any CNC manufacturing process that I don't know anything about".
As an aside, Inconel 718 is pretty awesome stuff. The entire Inconel family (625, 82, etc) has excellent properties, but 718 is my go-to material for high strength, high temperature, high erosion environments. The people who applied the term "superalloy" chose their words carefully, unlike the people who called this engine 3d printed.
. [The fact that] ULA has provided support for this effort again suggests that the leadership of Bruno is reshaping the company into a much more innovative and competitive company.
No, what it means is that they are getting their asses beaten so badly by SpaceX that they have moved to desperation and PR tactics.
I see it as an attempt to keep their workforce engaged. I have worked on long-term (18month-30months before anything exciting happens) projects before and it is a long grind without a lot of incremental satisfaction. Even a company-paid milestone dinner every few months was a major morale booster since there was very little concrete evidence of all the work people were putting in. Employee turnover is very damaging to this type of long-term project, so launching a small rocket every now and then might be well worth the cost just to keep employee morale up.
I assume Mr. Ford has not been around enough heavy equipment to that you consider it live unless you can see the lockout.
This was a movie set. There's basically 2 overriding rules about safety on a movie set:
* Don't depend on the actors to be smart enough, or paying enough attention, to get anything right.
* There's no excuse for injuring an actor. That's just about the worst thing you can be responsible for.
Everything potentially dangerous on a big-budget movie set is supposed to have a minder - both because the actors' full attention should be on their roles, and because it's a movie set, and dangerous-looking things are often props.
From the (one-sided) summary, this was a massive fuckup, on the order of having a real gun mixed in with prop guns, or carelessness with pyro.
Movie sets generally have a lot more accidents than "normal" industries. The deck is stacked with contributing factors such as-
The work location changes often
Safety-responsible crews often have a set building / movie background, rather than an industrial one
Some OSHA regulations applicable to Construction/General Industry may not apply. Others are specifically excluded.
Reliance on contractors and/or temp workers
Most persons on the set do not have much industrial safety experience
The primary purpose of a set is for looks, safety and accessibility are sometimes an afterthought
Every set is different, and may be modified frequently during the course of filming
Onsite changes to the set probably do not go through a rigorous safety process
Desire to continue filming in order to not miss out on desired weather, or to be on schedule for the next location
Relatively low pay of junior crew members, and ease of replacing them. This tends to promote "get it done" attitudes and reduces the amount of questions raised about safety.
I routinely work in an industrial environment. Working on a movie set seems more dangerous in comparison. The safety culture and recognition of all the hazards just isn't there.
Reading shit headlines like that always brings home the fact that most reporters are almost completely ignorant about the subject matter at hand, and will generally spew whatever their "sources" tell them, even if the primary article says something completely different.
Who did the hacking is irrelevant. It's just a distraction. Nobody (that we know of) made those DNC staffers and managers write what they wrote. The inner workings of both major US political parties as it relates to rewarding large donors, choosing party candidates, and dealing with "disruptive" candidates is very ugly. The emails show this. Looking out for the average person is clearly at the bottom of the list of their priorities. This could have easily happened to the RNC (if it hasn't already) and a similar pile of shit would likely be unearthed.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Those who make it partisan are just sweeping "their side's" problems under the rug and allowing the problem to continue. The way we pick presidential candidates is really, really, bad. The primary system gives too much power to those with strong and vocal opinions. The disapproval ratings for the DNC and RNC candidates are at record high levels and speak for themselves. At this point, a random lottery would be better than the current system. We do this dance every 4 years and it isn't getting better. By November, people will have forgotten all about the primaries and nothing will change.
You know those commercials that sometimes come on local stations late at night for "Consumers Cellular"? The ads sell it like a cell phone provider for old people, since they always have sixty-somethings being hip with their no-contract cell phones and buying slutty red dresses to see if they can interest their hubbies in one more roll in the clover.
What you may not know, is that Consumer Cellular is actually a really good provider. You pay as you go, you can use practically any smartphone, including the iStatus from Apple. They mail you out a sim card and away you go. Data, calls, texts, it's cheap as shit. If you pay attention to what you're doing and know your way around, you can even avoid giving them real information, so it's the anonymity of a burner phone and the convenience of a major provider. And no contracts.
My wife has some Cadillac plan from one of the big providers, but when my contract was up with AT&T but my phone was still good, I figured, "What the hell?" and tried Consumers Cellular. It works great, has coverage wherever the other companies have coverage and AT&T can just suck my dick.
Many of the MVNOs are actually quite good. We have Straight Talk and the coverage is great, at least for the places we go. They were not great during account setup and device activation (customer support is overseas) but once set up, there is no reason to talk to them. They have "unlimited" plans with an allotment of 4G data then 3G after that. Pricing and real-world signal strength was more favorable than T-mobile last time I checked.
I have also heard very good things about Page Plus wireless as well- a little more expensive than Straight Talk but apparently their customer support is excellent.
Considering how awful the main network providers are lately, many of the MVNOs are a better choice at this point.
No they wont and in reality they dont. you have been able to buy GSM watch phones for over 5 years now all over ebay and other places from china makers. They just do not sell because they sound like shit and have battery times measured in minutes. I had one, the latest china iteration of one and it's battery life sucked, it's OS sucked, it's audio quality and call quality sucked. oh and you cant change the band as the antennas are in that.
smartwatch+phone+bt headset is my killer mix and it works fantastically. glance at watch, press answer, talk to person on my headset. Best of all worlds.
That's 3 separate things you need to charge. Two of them daily. Technology serves me, not the other way around.
The biggest problem raised in the article is the commingling of inventory. Many sellers of products provide the products to Amazon, and they are shipped out of Amazon warehouses. When multiple companies are selling the exact same product, Amazon commingles the inventory, as they consider the products to be fungible. In theory, that's fine. However, if some of the companies are selling knock-offs, you have a problem. People ordering from the knock-off seller have a good chance of getting the real thing and writing a great review. People ordering from legitimate sellers get knock-offs and write terrible reviews.
I've seen a number of products myself where the reviews clearly indicate that people are receiving different products, and there's no way to tell which one you might actually receive.
If Amazon were to fix this one problem, they would be in a much better position to manage counterfeit products.
I'm not sure they can fix this. Amazon wants to be both a vendor/logistics company and a marketplace. For the vendor/logistics company side to work, they need to have as few listings for the same product as possible. So a Pink 5L Kitchenaid Mixer from 1 vendor is the same listing as a Pink 5L Kitchenaid Mixer from another vendor.
Aliexpress takes a different approach. They are not a vendor/logistics company, just a marketplace. So each vendor is responsible for their own listings. That results in multiple listings for the same product, and multiple similar listings for similar products. Each listing has a rating and each vendor has a rating. Finding the differences between listings is sometimes a struggle, but if you get a 1-star product on a 5-star listing, there is a clear entity at fault (the seller) and no smoke and mirrors for them to hide behind.
As long as Amazon is a vendor and logistics company, they will probably have this problem. I don't think their model would work if every seller had their own product pages for each product. Amazon's logistics side of the business relies too much on the one product= one ASIN (SKU) listing for this to work.
Summary quotes the Birkenstock CEO as saying "The Amazon marketplace, which operates as an "open market,” creates an environment where we experience unacceptable business practices which we believe jeopardize our brand." It leaves out a later sentence in the same paragraph, which it probably at least as much of an issue as the counterfeiting problem: "It also includes a constant stream of unidentifiable unauthorized sellers who show a blatant disregard for our pricing policies."
Birkenstock wants all dealers to sell at full list - stores were selling on Amazon at a discount, and undercutting other dealers, who were complaining to Birkenstock.
I used to be 100% against such policies until I realized the advantage. With MSRP policies, vendors have to compete on service and customer satisfaction. Without minimum pricing policies, the main competitive advantage comes down to price. Minimum sales price policies protect small vendors against large ones, to some extent. The big companies might be getting a volume discount from the manufacturer, but at least the small businesses have a chance at competition on their merits (service / reputation / customer satisfaction), rather than on price.
Another point is that the manufacturer dodges the potential legal problems of preferring one reseller to another. They can point to their MSRP policy as proof that they don't play favorites (they don't illegally play favorites, anyway) with their resellers.
I'm not saying MSRP policies are good, but they aren't 100% bad either.
Knockoff doesn't have to mean low quality. Often times the quality is almost as good as the premium name item.
Just saying.
True, but you should:
1. Be clearly informed that what you're getting is a knockoff, not the real thing
2. Be supported by Amazon when attempting to return substandard goods
3. Expect that Amazon would insist on the above
That's not happening. My increasing reluctance to deal with non-"Prime" vendors is due solely to Amazon's lackadaisical attitude towards what is being sold. As long as they get their cut, they appear not to care. And the product descriptions on some of this stuff are misleading and so brief as not to provide any significant information about what is being sold. I'm talking about lack of dimensions, poor product photos, that sort of thing.
Amazon's on track to become as sketchy as Ebay.
Fixing the review system would fix a lot of the problem. Currently, it is far too easy for a vendor to list some sketchy goods, pay for a few 5-star reviews, and go off to the races. When they get bad reviews they relist the product and repeat. Vendor ratings are not as prominently displayed as they could be. Actually, on most products they aren't even listed on the product page, you have to click on the vendor name to go check them out.
An even larger problem is that Amazon has a 1-product listing-->Many Vendor system. So even if the product is 5 stars, another vendor can sell under that listing and sell counterfeit or substandard goods. There is little way to know. Compare this to the Aliexpress system, which is organized Vendor--> Product. On Aliexpress, each seller is responsible for creating their product listing. You can't go to the page for XYZ product and click the "I have one to sell" button. Vendors can still pull a bait-and-switch but at least they aren't using the good ratings of other vendors to do it. The feedback score for both the specific product AND the vendor is listed right on the product page, no digging required. Both ratings are even visible right on the search page. Amazon is doing a big disservice to customers by hiding the vendor ratings behind a click.
There are definitely problems with the Aliexpress's Vendor--> Product system, such as 20 vendors listing 100 products all the same but slightly different. That is a big issue, but vendor and product rating shenanigans are much less of a problem compared to Amazon's 1-product listing-->Many Vendor system.
It reminds me of the Hobbit movies, in particular of the battle on the river. I was taken out of the movie by the splashes. They looked fake, but I knew that this was more because the movie was shot at 48FPS and so captured the motion better.
So does it look fake because it is fake, or does it look fake because it's different from what we expect to see?
Hobbit looked bad because the CGI was bad. The piles of gold in the Smaug scenes were especially bad, and the other CGI wasn't very good.
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Same as manned spaceflight - the glory days have gone. This is 300 foot long. The Graf Zeppelin of 1928 was 776 feet long with a useful lift of 60 tonnes. The Hindenberg was even bigger.
Material science and strength calculation complexity was a lot less advanced in the 1920s. You could build a better airship today if you wanted to, but it probably wouldn't make sense. Cargo airplanes are likely more cost efficient. Fuel-wise, the airship might be favorable, but the financial impact of an expensive asset taking 3 days to travel 6,000 miles vs 12 hours for a plane is a large consideration. The 747-ERF freighter can carry 248,600 lb (112,760 kg), nearly double the Graf Zepplin. And it can do 3 round trips of 6,000 miles in the time that it would take the Graf Zepplin to do a single 1-way trip. It's not easy to think of a market nowadays where airships would make sense.
The Helium used in party balloons is highly impure and it is not cost effective to refine. One would hope that this aircraft is using the same impure Helium.
Not always. According to this helium wholesaler, grade 4.5 (99.995%) gas is often used in the balloon industry. Granted, getting the "5th nine" is a lot more costlier than getting to 4 nines, but I would not use "highly impure" to describe that level of purity. Most industrial uses use 99.997%. Anything higher than that is research/military grade and probably relatively low-volume in comparison to the welding shops, cryogenic cooling systems, and manufacturing users using 99.997% or lower.
And here I am, having been an unlimited-everything T-Mobile customer for the better part of a decade...
Several of the MVNO's using AT&T's own network have offered "unlimited" (usually capped 4G + unlimited 3G) for several years. Their network could obviously support the traffic. The only reason AT&T didn't until now was because they could get away with it. I guess the competition finally forced their hand.
I am not sure the concept of "emerging market" has much relevance any longer...mainly due to "time". Manufacturing has gotten so fast and mimicry so entrenched as a business plan that anything emerging this year won't be emerging next year. It will either be fully emerged or, worse, stale. Companies look at what Apple did to some markets and are now determined not get Appled by Apple or anyone else. There is an article on NYT about how companies are evading anti-trust laws by buying any startup that looks like it might become a competitor.
Every smart phone looks like an iPhone to me, there's no differentiation that regular customers could care about. Self-driving cars seems like a hot new area. Except no car company of any reasonable size is not working on them. There will be no emerging market for these, it will be created fully merged. Robotic assembly lines make it relatively easy and quick to switch on production of just about anything requiring mass quantities. Scaling up is easier with robotics.
I see this as a consequence of global supply chains, subcontracting, and little if any vertical integration. All the little details that used to be trade secrets of a vertically-integrated company are now quite transparent. You open up the device, see who made all the different components, and call them up and ask for a quote. We have come a long way from the days when a company manufactured most of their core products in-house. Just as one example, GE has been subcontracting out the manufacture of steam turbines, to their own competitors, since at least the 1970s. You could argue that they were simply divesting themselves of "mature" technology in order to focus on the more profitable cutting-edge stuff, but I would argue that steam turbine technology only became fully mature because they gave away (licensed) the technology to Hitachi, Toshiba, Doosan, and Ansaldo and let them run with it.
Well, it depends.
Many new-model phones are based on the latest reasonable tech. That $400 OnePlus Three uses a state-of-the-art Qualcomm processor with six cores operating in heterogeneous mode--slow and fast cores run at the same time, allowing for power scaling without scaling the whole system down. You can get eight-core or eight-and-eight core phones, if you want to pay $1,000 for them, too.
Packing more cores into the phone doesn't necessarily improve performance. Down the line, your 4-core phone might not be outperformed by an 8-core phone of the same speed; yet the new phones have 4-core processors running at 1.5 the clock rate, with more-efficient processors, consuming less battery and executing at 3x the computational speed. New applications and the sheer load of the stuff you're already running increase, and your phone doesn't work so well anymore.
So a phone that's "Made to last" might require technology that costs 4x as much, eats battery at 6x the rate, and halves the replacement rate. Overall, that phone will cost you twice as much (costs x 4, lifetime x 2). A phone that's made on the state-of-the-art might last 2-3 years, at a stretch.
Then someone releases a new graphics standard, and your phone is incapable of using certain things. Not really important on a phone; it's not like you need the latest OpenGL/Vulcan to run Android.
People think the manufacturers are purposely making phones to wear out after 1-2 years. They don't want to pony up $1,400 for a phone that'll still run well in 6 years, all the while running nearly hot enough to burn a hole in your pocket, with a 4-hour battery life.
You could have made all the same points (minus the multicore discussion) in the 1990s/early 2000s about desktop PCs. Nowadays, the notion of upgrading or replacing a PC or laptop every 2-3 years seems somewhat archaic. Any powerful PC/laptop today generally remains so for 3-5 years now. The lack of major desktop/laptop processor advancements has been going on so long now that people don't even talk about it, because it is irrelevant for most people. SSDs were the last upgrade worth having, and those are very widespread now.
Phones will get to that point of maturity too, probably within 10-20 years. The only potential obstacle is the issue of software and software updates.
Tell you what, it's not going to be real dark skies, but it's better than downtown Chicago (where I'm from). I was in Hermann Park last night, and the viewing wasn't as bad as most cities I've been in.
Say, as a fellow Houstonian, can you give me any tips for decent camping nearby? I've only lived in Houston for 11 days (I got here on the first). It's my first time down here.
I have yet to go camping in state, but I have heard good things about Brazos Bend State Park. The Galveston area could be an option, although Galveston is a bit trashy in general. If you do camp near/on the gulf, take care about how far back from the water you are. The tidal range can be several hundred feet, especially in Galveston where the slope of the beach is so gradual.
The viewing is good here in Texas. I'm in Houston, and not far from downtown, but because of the strange variations in population density here, and the complete lack of zoning laws, you can still find some relatively dark skies where I am.
I'd forgotten all about Perseid until I saw the second one and remembered this is August.
And where might those be? As a fellow Houstonian, I was under the impression that you had to go way out into the countryside to escape light pollution.
He was most likely put up to it by his activist dad, particularly since he knew exactly what to say to the cops - he told them the truth, but in such a way that they would think he's lying. That's not something you know when you're 14.
The whole thing smells rotten to me too, but I have to disagree with your reasoning. A 14 year old kid can be just as shifty and generally suspicious as adults. He didn't have to know how to be truthful but suspicious. That might just be his character. Plenty of people just seem to be "up to something" or "hiding something" all the time. Those behaviors didn't just appear at age 18.
They can buy stuff from the Russians just like we do.
This sort of thing isn't hard anymore. The key technologies (advanced materials, computer-aided design and manufacturing, computer guidance systems) are so widely available, and cheap now that even the idea of an embargo or blockade is ridiculous. I just searched for "inconel 718" (a key superalloy used for many aerospace parts) on Alibaba and 19,658 results came back. I wouldn't put chinese materials in my rocket engine, but for the DPRK they will probably work fine. The only obstacle in designing and building a rocket is money, and the cost gets lower every day. CNC hot glue guns (aka 3D printers) are incredibly cheap. The same technology (4-axis of motion, PID temperature control of multiple heaters) was used for many "advanced manufacturing" processes that were cutting edge in the 1960s and required for aerospace development. Back then it cost a fortune, but today some of the Prusa machines are approaching impulse-buy price points. Designing complex assemblies with the CAD packages today is a breeze compared to the nightmare it was 50 years ago. There is very little stopping the DPRK from developing everything they need by themselves.
Why on Earth are browsers revealing my battery status to random websites? Does Google dictate these changes in exchange for funding?
I think it might be a case of "we could do it, so we did". The battery HTML API can indicate whether a device is plugged in and charging, or not. In theory, you could write code that was more computationally-intensive if the device was plugged in, or very lean if the device was on battery. That seems like a legitimate use to me. It may not have occurred to anyone that this would be used for nefarious purposes.
1. Floss 2. Smell used floss 3. Be totally grossed out. 4. Floss forever. Story is a beat up. They didn't say it makes no difference. They just said the research supporting it was old and had poor methodology, possibly because "Big Floss" didn't think "floss research" was worth throwing money at and people have been doing it anyway because it's common sense. So another clickbait headline which will have AP's media customers rubbing their hands with glee, but misleading and many people will take away the wrong conclusion.
There's a legitimate medical question here. The existing studies are not great and some have conflicting results. I agree that flossing has many benefits (odor being a huge one) but the floss manufacturers make various claims as to the medical benefit which aren't backed up. Yet. Given proper study, medical benefits will probably be shown. There are many different floss materials, different coatings, etc. There are even non-floss floss-type products, like the awful flossing sticks. Some may work better than others. Some may even be useless or detrimental compared to not flossing. More studies aren't a bad thing.
I think it is great they are setting the example with Floss. If the company-sponsored studies for Floss can be questioned, the company-sponsored studies for most any other personal care item with health claims can be questioned too. Maybe companies running these studies will be more careful in the future. There are certainly a lot of shoddy pro-product studies out there.
From the 1930's to about the 1950's or so, most normal people idolized the cream of the intelligentsia, Albert Einstein was quite the celebrity in his day, even among common folk. Werner Von Braun and the Rocket Kids of the 1950's-1960's were probably the last of the scientists regular people looked up to.
I used to have some respect for Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson but since the politicalization of science, they both have gotten too political and are nearly as bad as the anti-fact people they rail against.
This might look like a moral crusade to you but porn has fundamentally altered the relationship dynamics of the modern world.
Perhaps, but whether that is for better or worse is debatable and a matter of opinion. I would argue that allowing legal outlets for people to indulge their inner fantasies is a good thing. It is almost certainly better than living in a more conservative society where such people would be forced to break the law just to satisfy harmless urges.
And their fire line is far more locked down than Apple could ever dream of, with a small pool of apps.
Locked down what? You can sideload any app you want to any fire device you want. And what's more, you don't even need to plug in a USB cable to do it; They have ES File Explorer in their store. Once you have that installed, you can install anything you want, and uninstall ES if you like afterwards. The latest revision of the launcher on the Fire TV stick finally integrated non-Appstore apps into the app menu, so you don't have to launch them from application settings.
Amazon is not kind to sideloaded applications. My Kodi install gets screwed up or deleted from my FireTV randomly during some of their automatic updates.
Let me guess, the "3d printed engine" is a regular engine, but they printed the stickers out on a 3d printer.
And you would be wrong. VULCAN-1
It is a stretch to call powdered metal laser sintered Inconel 718 "3d printed". If we as a society are going to apply the term "3d printed" so such processes, then the term is just a stand-in phrase used by idiots to mean "any CNC manufacturing process that I don't know anything about".
As an aside, Inconel 718 is pretty awesome stuff. The entire Inconel family (625, 82, etc) has excellent properties, but 718 is my go-to material for high strength, high temperature, high erosion environments. The people who applied the term "superalloy" chose their words carefully, unlike the people who called this engine 3d printed.
. [The fact that] ULA has provided support for this effort again suggests that the leadership of Bruno is reshaping the company into a much more innovative and competitive company.
No, what it means is that they are getting their asses beaten so badly by SpaceX that they have moved to desperation and PR tactics.
I see it as an attempt to keep their workforce engaged. I have worked on long-term (18month-30months before anything exciting happens) projects before and it is a long grind without a lot of incremental satisfaction. Even a company-paid milestone dinner every few months was a major morale booster since there was very little concrete evidence of all the work people were putting in. Employee turnover is very damaging to this type of long-term project, so launching a small rocket every now and then might be well worth the cost just to keep employee morale up.
I assume Mr. Ford has not been around enough heavy equipment to that you consider it live unless you can see the lockout.
This was a movie set. There's basically 2 overriding rules about safety on a movie set: * Don't depend on the actors to be smart enough, or paying enough attention, to get anything right. * There's no excuse for injuring an actor. That's just about the worst thing you can be responsible for.
Everything potentially dangerous on a big-budget movie set is supposed to have a minder - both because the actors' full attention should be on their roles, and because it's a movie set, and dangerous-looking things are often props.
From the (one-sided) summary, this was a massive fuckup, on the order of having a real gun mixed in with prop guns, or carelessness with pyro.
Movie sets generally have a lot more accidents than "normal" industries. The deck is stacked with contributing factors such as-
The work location changes often
Safety-responsible crews often have a set building / movie background, rather than an industrial one
Some OSHA regulations applicable to Construction/General Industry may not apply. Others are specifically excluded.
Reliance on contractors and/or temp workers
Most persons on the set do not have much industrial safety experience
The primary purpose of a set is for looks, safety and accessibility are sometimes an afterthought
Every set is different, and may be modified frequently during the course of filming
Onsite changes to the set probably do not go through a rigorous safety process
Desire to continue filming in order to not miss out on desired weather, or to be on schedule for the next location
Relatively low pay of junior crew members, and ease of replacing them. This tends to promote "get it done" attitudes and reduces the amount of questions raised about safety.
I routinely work in an industrial environment. Working on a movie set seems more dangerous in comparison. The safety culture and recognition of all the hazards just isn't there.
Reading shit headlines like that always brings home the fact that most reporters are almost completely ignorant about the subject matter at hand, and will generally spew whatever their "sources" tell them, even if the primary article says something completely different.
Who did the hacking is irrelevant. It's just a distraction. Nobody (that we know of) made those DNC staffers and managers write what they wrote. The inner workings of both major US political parties as it relates to rewarding large donors, choosing party candidates, and dealing with "disruptive" candidates is very ugly. The emails show this. Looking out for the average person is clearly at the bottom of the list of their priorities. This could have easily happened to the RNC (if it hasn't already) and a similar pile of shit would likely be unearthed.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Those who make it partisan are just sweeping "their side's" problems under the rug and allowing the problem to continue. The way we pick presidential candidates is really, really, bad. The primary system gives too much power to those with strong and vocal opinions. The disapproval ratings for the DNC and RNC candidates are at record high levels and speak for themselves. At this point, a random lottery would be better than the current system. We do this dance every 4 years and it isn't getting better. By November, people will have forgotten all about the primaries and nothing will change.
You know those commercials that sometimes come on local stations late at night for "Consumers Cellular"? The ads sell it like a cell phone provider for old people, since they always have sixty-somethings being hip with their no-contract cell phones and buying slutty red dresses to see if they can interest their hubbies in one more roll in the clover.
What you may not know, is that Consumer Cellular is actually a really good provider. You pay as you go, you can use practically any smartphone, including the iStatus from Apple. They mail you out a sim card and away you go. Data, calls, texts, it's cheap as shit. If you pay attention to what you're doing and know your way around, you can even avoid giving them real information, so it's the anonymity of a burner phone and the convenience of a major provider. And no contracts.
My wife has some Cadillac plan from one of the big providers, but when my contract was up with AT&T but my phone was still good, I figured, "What the hell?" and tried Consumers Cellular. It works great, has coverage wherever the other companies have coverage and AT&T can just suck my dick.
Many of the MVNOs are actually quite good. We have Straight Talk and the coverage is great, at least for the places we go. They were not great during account setup and device activation (customer support is overseas) but once set up, there is no reason to talk to them. They have "unlimited" plans with an allotment of 4G data then 3G after that. Pricing and real-world signal strength was more favorable than T-mobile last time I checked.
I have also heard very good things about Page Plus wireless as well- a little more expensive than Straight Talk but apparently their customer support is excellent.
Considering how awful the main network providers are lately, many of the MVNOs are a better choice at this point.
In the spirit of Boaty McBoatface, why not "Ronald McDonald"? ...... oh, wait
The "R" sound is difficult for Japanese people to pronounce, so In Japan, he is known as Donald McDonald.
No they wont and in reality they dont. you have been able to buy GSM watch phones for over 5 years now all over ebay and other places from china makers. They just do not sell because they sound like shit and have battery times measured in minutes. I had one, the latest china iteration of one and it's battery life sucked, it's OS sucked, it's audio quality and call quality sucked. oh and you cant change the band as the antennas are in that.
smartwatch+phone+bt headset is my killer mix and it works fantastically. glance at watch, press answer, talk to person on my headset. Best of all worlds.
That's 3 separate things you need to charge. Two of them daily. Technology serves me, not the other way around.
The biggest problem raised in the article is the commingling of inventory. Many sellers of products provide the products to Amazon, and they are shipped out of Amazon warehouses. When multiple companies are selling the exact same product, Amazon commingles the inventory, as they consider the products to be fungible. In theory, that's fine. However, if some of the companies are selling knock-offs, you have a problem. People ordering from the knock-off seller have a good chance of getting the real thing and writing a great review. People ordering from legitimate sellers get knock-offs and write terrible reviews.
I've seen a number of products myself where the reviews clearly indicate that people are receiving different products, and there's no way to tell which one you might actually receive.
If Amazon were to fix this one problem, they would be in a much better position to manage counterfeit products.
I'm not sure they can fix this. Amazon wants to be both a vendor/logistics company and a marketplace. For the vendor/logistics company side to work, they need to have as few listings for the same product as possible. So a Pink 5L Kitchenaid Mixer from 1 vendor is the same listing as a Pink 5L Kitchenaid Mixer from another vendor.
Aliexpress takes a different approach. They are not a vendor/logistics company, just a marketplace. So each vendor is responsible for their own listings. That results in multiple listings for the same product, and multiple similar listings for similar products. Each listing has a rating and each vendor has a rating. Finding the differences between listings is sometimes a struggle, but if you get a 1-star product on a 5-star listing, there is a clear entity at fault (the seller) and no smoke and mirrors for them to hide behind.
As long as Amazon is a vendor and logistics company, they will probably have this problem. I don't think their model would work if every seller had their own product pages for each product. Amazon's logistics side of the business relies too much on the one product= one ASIN (SKU) listing for this to work.
Summary quotes the Birkenstock CEO as saying "The Amazon marketplace, which operates as an "open market,” creates an environment where we experience unacceptable business practices which we believe jeopardize our brand." It leaves out a later sentence in the same paragraph, which it probably at least as much of an issue as the counterfeiting problem: "It also includes a constant stream of unidentifiable unauthorized sellers who show a blatant disregard for our pricing policies."
Birkenstock wants all dealers to sell at full list - stores were selling on Amazon at a discount, and undercutting other dealers, who were complaining to Birkenstock.
I used to be 100% against such policies until I realized the advantage. With MSRP policies, vendors have to compete on service and customer satisfaction. Without minimum pricing policies, the main competitive advantage comes down to price. Minimum sales price policies protect small vendors against large ones, to some extent. The big companies might be getting a volume discount from the manufacturer, but at least the small businesses have a chance at competition on their merits (service / reputation / customer satisfaction), rather than on price.
Another point is that the manufacturer dodges the potential legal problems of preferring one reseller to another. They can point to their MSRP policy as proof that they don't play favorites (they don't illegally play favorites, anyway) with their resellers.
I'm not saying MSRP policies are good, but they aren't 100% bad either.
Knockoff doesn't have to mean low quality. Often times the quality is almost as good as the premium name item. Just saying.
True, but you should: 1. Be clearly informed that what you're getting is a knockoff, not the real thing 2. Be supported by Amazon when attempting to return substandard goods 3. Expect that Amazon would insist on the above
That's not happening. My increasing reluctance to deal with non-"Prime" vendors is due solely to Amazon's lackadaisical attitude towards what is being sold. As long as they get their cut, they appear not to care. And the product descriptions on some of this stuff are misleading and so brief as not to provide any significant information about what is being sold. I'm talking about lack of dimensions, poor product photos, that sort of thing.
Amazon's on track to become as sketchy as Ebay.
Fixing the review system would fix a lot of the problem. Currently, it is far too easy for a vendor to list some sketchy goods, pay for a few 5-star reviews, and go off to the races. When they get bad reviews they relist the product and repeat. Vendor ratings are not as prominently displayed as they could be. Actually, on most products they aren't even listed on the product page, you have to click on the vendor name to go check them out.
An even larger problem is that Amazon has a 1-product listing-->Many Vendor system. So even if the product is 5 stars, another vendor can sell under that listing and sell counterfeit or substandard goods. There is little way to know. Compare this to the Aliexpress system, which is organized Vendor--> Product. On Aliexpress, each seller is responsible for creating their product listing. You can't go to the page for XYZ product and click the "I have one to sell" button. Vendors can still pull a bait-and-switch but at least they aren't using the good ratings of other vendors to do it. The feedback score for both the specific product AND the vendor is listed right on the product page, no digging required. Both ratings are even visible right on the search page. Amazon is doing a big disservice to customers by hiding the vendor ratings behind a click.
There are definitely problems with the Aliexpress's Vendor--> Product system, such as 20 vendors listing 100 products all the same but slightly different. That is a big issue, but vendor and product rating shenanigans are much less of a problem compared to Amazon's 1-product listing-->Many Vendor system.
It reminds me of the Hobbit movies, in particular of the battle on the river. I was taken out of the movie by the splashes. They looked fake, but I knew that this was more because the movie was shot at 48FPS and so captured the motion better.
So does it look fake because it is fake, or does it look fake because it's different from what we expect to see?
Hobbit looked bad because the CGI was bad. The piles of gold in the Smaug scenes were especially bad, and the other CGI wasn't very good.