Geeks are just as good the world over, whether Japan, Taiwan, EU, US or China. Product quality has nothing to do with the quality of the designers and builders and everything to do with the budget and time constraints they have to do their stuff. And that is all about where their company wants to position itself in the price/quality/reputation landscape.
Sharp has a well-deserved reputation for good quality and sometimes off-beat or niche products that delight a few even if they don't become huge sellers. And that's of course part reason why they've been in trouble for some years now. Foxconn doesn't have a reputation for premium products or for doing their own thing.
I share the worry that Sharp as we know it will disappear, and just become another nameplate pasted on bland, forgettable me-too stuff.
What dbc says in his answer. But there's also that you can to some degree choose to shift complexity to hardware or software.
You can for instance have a very expensive, high-quality, difficult to design and build harmonic-drive limb joint. The hardware is strong, accurate and reliable. There's no backlash or slack anywhere. Your software for moving the joint can in such a case be more or less "move_to_angle(something)" and you're done.
Or you can have a hobby servo moving a hinge consisting of two holes threaded with a wire hanger. You can build it in five minutes. But now your software has to take all the slop, and all the inaccuracies into account. The behaviour of the joint will change depending on bending angle, direction to the floor, what it's holding and probably a lot more. You'll need extra sensors and probably some kind of adaptive system that learns to control the rickety thing.
So you can decide whether you want to shift more of your problems to the hardware or to the software.
I've built things that sold in the 10's of thousands of dollars range and took people years to develop in the 90's that can now be made (often better) by a kid in high school with lunch money. I wonder what the long term affect this has on the economy.
Well, if it really takes off, the school cafeteria sector revenues are going to be hurting.
I play games on Linux. I loved the Portal games, and I'm spending more time than is perhaps good for me in Kerbal Space Program. Got XCOM waiting for me once I take a break from KSP. On my laptop I play FTL, and I've slowly playing through Baldurs Gate; something fun to do during business trips.
If I didn't have these games on Linux, I would not be playing on Windows. Dual-booting is completely impractical, since you'd have to close your work and shut down just to play a game. I'd not use Windows; I'd probably just get a game console instead. Or be content with the games I can play on my tablet. Without Linux games, I would not be playing PC games at all.
New battery technologies are being implemented, and battery technology has been constantly improving. Batteries today are far better - smaller, lighter, energy denser - than those of twenty years ago.
Some of the announcements of the past twelve months will end up in working batteries. But it will take a few years, and there will be no fanfare or press releases when it happens. Your next model phone or whatever will just be a bit faster, or support some new transmission standard, or charge a bit quicker, and you'll never realize the improved battery in it is part of the reason that could happen.
Instead they're using the RCS system, a low-efficiency thruster which was only meant for steering, to perform orbital injection. Reportedly, this is the first time that's been done for a planetary transfer,
In real life, yes. Meanwhile, in Kerbal Space Program...
I think KSP is, in a way, ruining real space exploration for me much the same way science fiction ruins the expectations for real robots. Out of fuel? Use your RCS. RCS also out of fuel? Get out and push! Lander strut broken? Use RCS to balance the lander until time to take off.
How does a Pi with a remote text terminal session compare performance wise to a PDP-11:-)
Way faster, way more capable. I worked with a PDP11 on a summer job. If I remember correctly, it had 2x64KB memory (data and code pages); the Pi has more main memory than the PDP had hard rive storage.
It managed to support about a dozen concurrent users that used it for monitoring an industrial process. It was tight enough, though, that we had to stop people using a full-screen clock application, since it couldn't cope with all terminals running it at the same time.
No frustration. It's not as if Android is lacking in games after all. And IOS-only games are, well, only available on IOS. Since I have no iphone I never hear about them, and don't miss them.
There is no longer any need to filter prior to publishing - filtering can happen after. Researchers should just "publish" their papers on their own or school's website.
There is a need. Look at it from the readers' side. You are asking me to trawl the websites of tens of thousands of labs and researchers in order to keep up with events. And we'd all have to individually act as gatekeepers, sifting out the good stuff from the bad, the deliberately fake and the crap put out by people with mental health problems.
I already spend far too much of my time just trying to stay on top of what happens; without aggregators - places to collect papers in one place - and gatekeepers - people that do the filtering so we don't all have to - I could spend 100% of my time on this and still fail.
I absolutely agree that we don't need the classic limited-space, expensive paper journal. PLoS and the like, along with Arxiv for preprints, are good replacements for that. Especially as they're pushing for applying metrics on a per-paper basis, not journal.
The problem is the editing/gatekeeping/evaluation. Peer review sucks. Problem is, I have yet to hear of another system that would both suck less and actually work in a real-world setting. And we do need it. We need to share the job of filtering out the valid science from the invalid crap, the pranks and the religious rants.
Yes; you don't just need the free area, but enough extra margin that you don't risk bumping into things or breaking something when you flail about. Especially since you can't see, are focused on a game and have little clue where you actually are in real life. 3x3m really means 1.5x1.5m of actual, safe space - or less.
I have no idea. But they are aimed at business users, especially for frequent traveller-type people. I would not be surprised if they're covered worldwide. Send Panasonic in your country an email and ask.
I know exactly what this is. And it is still larger, more expensive and more power hungry than most AVR processors. At the extreme end, you can get an ATTiny in a 8-pin DIP package that costs less than 50 yen in single units and needs nothing more than the usual sprinkling of 10uf capacitors to work. If you need the additional processing power and memory, ARM is a good choice; but in many cases you do not, in which case it is not.
Neither is "better" in an absolute sense; which is the better choice depends on your application. It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. They're targeting different parts of the application spectrum.
The ARM is more powerful, but is also bigger, costs several times more and draws more power. If you don't need the power - many or most embedded applications don't - you're increasing the cost and reducing battery life for nothing.
Don't get me wrong; A tiny low-end ARM system is fun and useful. Just like an ATTiny, or ATmega, or larger, more capable ARM systems. They all address different needs.
A remarkable number of people believe homeopathy works. A remarkable number of people believe in gods, devils, prophets and an afterlife. A remarkable number of people believe scrying, remote sensing, dousing or fortune telling is real. A remarkable number of people firmly believe various economic, political or social "truths" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A remarkable number of people are intelligent, well-adjusted and successful in their lives, and still manage to hold one or several of the beliefs above without ever experiencing any sense of disconnect. Those remarkable people almost certainly includes myself, and most likely you as well.
Japan's farmers are old because Japan is a segregated society. Farmers, fishermen, and other manual laborers who's professions are considered 'unclean' are a subclass heavily discriminated against.
No. You're confusing manual labour - well respected, fishermen and farmers especially - with "burakumin", the old class of people that did work forbidden by buddhism, such as butchering, leather tanning and so on.
Discrimination of burakumin still exists, but mostly among the kind of people that worry their daughters will marry the "wrong sort" of people, and "wrong sort" also includes not having a foreigner in the family tree, not being a member of the right country clubs, having insufficient money and so on. The recent mayor of Osaka, for instance, is burakumin, but while there are many reasons to dislike him, I've heard of nobody doing so for that reason.
An A4-sized version would have been nice. Could read research papers full-page without squinting. Would also give more screen space for remote connections and the like.
2) Compatibility with.docx sucks. Compatibility with Excel is _terrible_.
Excel is almost hopeless, since you really need the full scripting environment as well.
But docx has not really been a problem in practice. If you make sure you have the fonts installed, it's good enough. I asked one of our secretaries once about the doc files I send her. She said there were always some oddities - but there were oddities in files from everybody at the department. And most of them do use Office. Different versions; some use the US English version while others use the Japanese one; different base settings and so on.
Libre Office incompatibilities were in her eyes no worse than Office incompatibilities with itself. She didn't know I wasn't using Office, in fact.
The Sony tablets are very, very nice, and they have an 8" compact version. They're very lightly skinned, they're water resistant (you can wash off the screen) and they're very light. So light, in fact, that the first time I picked up the Z I thought it was an empty display model. That lightness, more than anything, is what makes it so pleasant to use for me. Can hold it up without effort for long periods when reading for instance.
Crude is the raw material. You still ned to manufacture and distribute the gasoline. As a guess, the refinery capacity hasn't increased in your area of the world. Nor is it likely to, as the trend is toward hybrids and all-electrics. Projected future consumption is not likely to support a large refinery project for the next 30-50 years.
Achieving practical nuclear fusion for power generation would be a very nice step forward. But "holy grail" is rather overselling it, I suspect.
Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants that depend on a long supply chain for all its parts, the high-purity fuel and so on. When you consider the building, running and maintenance costs, and the cost of dealing with the spent fuel (much better than for fission plants of course) the energy won't be all that cheap. Hopefully cheaper than fossil fuels at least, but I would not be surprised if a first generation of plants, at least, become more expensive than that.
And they'll be competing with rapidly dropping costs for solar and other renewables. A big, expensive plant like that will need a 40-50 year lifetime to pay for itself. If you can't show that it will likely run profitably for that time period few or no companies will be willing to take on the very major investment. We may well see a technical breakthrough for fusion, and still get no plants actually built.
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Geeks are just as good the world over, whether Japan, Taiwan, EU, US or China. Product quality has nothing to do with the quality of the designers and builders and everything to do with the budget and time constraints they have to do their stuff. And that is all about where their company wants to position itself in the price/quality/reputation landscape.
Sharp has a well-deserved reputation for good quality and sometimes off-beat or niche products that delight a few even if they don't become huge sellers. And that's of course part reason why they've been in trouble for some years now. Foxconn doesn't have a reputation for premium products or for doing their own thing.
I share the worry that Sharp as we know it will disappear, and just become another nameplate pasted on bland, forgettable me-too stuff.
What dbc says in his answer. But there's also that you can to some degree choose to shift complexity to hardware or software.
You can for instance have a very expensive, high-quality, difficult to design and build harmonic-drive limb joint. The hardware is strong, accurate and reliable. There's no backlash or slack anywhere. Your software for moving the joint can in such a case be more or less "move_to_angle(something)" and you're done.
Or you can have a hobby servo moving a hinge consisting of two holes threaded with a wire hanger. You can build it in five minutes. But now your software has to take all the slop, and all the inaccuracies into account. The behaviour of the joint will change depending on bending angle, direction to the floor, what it's holding and probably a lot more. You'll need extra sensors and probably some kind of adaptive system that learns to control the rickety thing.
So you can decide whether you want to shift more of your problems to the hardware or to the software.
Well, if it really takes off, the school cafeteria sector revenues are going to be hurting.
I play games on Linux. I loved the Portal games, and I'm spending more time than is perhaps good for me in Kerbal Space Program. Got XCOM waiting for me once I take a break from KSP. On my laptop I play FTL, and I've slowly playing through Baldurs Gate; something fun to do during business trips.
If I didn't have these games on Linux, I would not be playing on Windows. Dual-booting is completely impractical, since you'd have to close your work and shut down just to play a game. I'd not use Windows; I'd probably just get a game console instead. Or be content with the games I can play on my tablet. Without Linux games, I would not be playing PC games at all.
New battery technologies are being implemented, and battery technology has been constantly improving. Batteries today are far better - smaller, lighter, energy denser - than those of twenty years ago.
Some of the announcements of the past twelve months will end up in working batteries. But it will take a few years, and there will be no fanfare or press releases when it happens. Your next model phone or whatever will just be a bit faster, or support some new transmission standard, or charge a bit quicker, and you'll never realize the improved battery in it is part of the reason that could happen.
Or "Word".
In real life, yes. Meanwhile, in Kerbal Space Program...
I think KSP is, in a way, ruining real space exploration for me much the same way science fiction ruins the expectations for real robots. Out of fuel? Use your RCS. RCS also out of fuel? Get out and push! Lander strut broken? Use RCS to balance the lander until time to take off.
Way faster, way more capable. I worked with a PDP11 on a summer job. If I remember correctly, it had 2x64KB memory (data and code pages); the Pi has more main memory than the PDP had hard rive storage.
It managed to support about a dozen concurrent users that used it for monitoring an industrial process. It was tight enough, though, that we had to stop people using a full-screen clock application, since it couldn't cope with all terminals running it at the same time.
The Japanese K built by Fujitsu uses Sparc64.
No frustration. It's not as if Android is lacking in games after all. And IOS-only games are, well, only available on IOS. Since I have no iphone I never hear about them, and don't miss them.
There is a need. Look at it from the readers' side. You are asking me to trawl the websites of tens of thousands of labs and researchers in order to keep up with events. And we'd all have to individually act as gatekeepers, sifting out the good stuff from the bad, the deliberately fake and the crap put out by people with mental health problems.
I already spend far too much of my time just trying to stay on top of what happens; without aggregators - places to collect papers in one place - and gatekeepers - people that do the filtering so we don't all have to - I could spend 100% of my time on this and still fail.
I absolutely agree that we don't need the classic limited-space, expensive paper journal. PLoS and the like, along with Arxiv for preprints, are good replacements for that. Especially as they're pushing for applying metrics on a per-paper basis, not journal.
The problem is the editing/gatekeeping/evaluation. Peer review sucks. Problem is, I have yet to hear of another system that would both suck less and actually work in a real-world setting. And we do need it. We need to share the job of filtering out the valid science from the invalid crap, the pranks and the religious rants.
Yes; you don't just need the free area, but enough extra margin that you don't risk bumping into things or breaking something when you flail about. Especially since you can't see, are focused on a game and have little clue where you actually are in real life. 3x3m really means 1.5x1.5m of actual, safe space - or less.
..Or by children and adults in a larger home where neither they nor their spouse want the common areas cluttered up with piles of gear.
I have no idea. But they are aimed at business users, especially for frequent traveller-type people. I would not be surprised if they're covered worldwide. Send Panasonic in your country an email and ask.
I know exactly what this is. And it is still larger, more expensive and more power hungry than most AVR processors. At the extreme end, you can get an ATTiny in a 8-pin DIP package that costs less than 50 yen in single units and needs nothing more than the usual sprinkling of 10uf capacitors to work. If you need the additional processing power and memory, ARM is a good choice; but in many cases you do not, in which case it is not.
Neither is "better" in an absolute sense; which is the better choice depends on your application. It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. They're targeting different parts of the application spectrum.
The Panasonic Let's Note series has 10" display models, and they've always worked quite well with Linux. Not cheap, though the quality is really good.
The ARM is more powerful, but is also bigger, costs several times more and draws more power. If you don't need the power - many or most embedded applications don't - you're increasing the cost and reducing battery life for nothing.
Don't get me wrong; A tiny low-end ARM system is fun and useful. Just like an ATTiny, or ATmega, or larger, more capable ARM systems. They all address different needs.
A remarkable number of people believe homeopathy works. A remarkable number of people believe in gods, devils, prophets and an afterlife. A remarkable number of people believe scrying, remote sensing, dousing or fortune telling is real. A remarkable number of people firmly believe various economic, political or social "truths" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A remarkable number of people are intelligent, well-adjusted and successful in their lives, and still manage to hold one or several of the beliefs above without ever experiencing any sense of disconnect. Those remarkable people almost certainly includes myself, and most likely you as well.
No. You're confusing manual labour - well respected, fishermen and farmers especially - with "burakumin", the old class of people that did work forbidden by buddhism, such as butchering, leather tanning and so on.
Discrimination of burakumin still exists, but mostly among the kind of people that worry their daughters will marry the "wrong sort" of people, and "wrong sort" also includes not having a foreigner in the family tree, not being a member of the right country clubs, having insufficient money and so on. The recent mayor of Osaka, for instance, is burakumin, but while there are many reasons to dislike him, I've heard of nobody doing so for that reason.
An A4-sized version would have been nice. Could read research papers full-page without squinting. Would also give more screen space for remote connections and the like.
Sony Z5 Compact should be good for you? Definitely high end, and smaller than any other premium phone out there, iphone included.
Excel is almost hopeless, since you really need the full scripting environment as well.
But docx has not really been a problem in practice. If you make sure you have the fonts installed, it's good enough. I asked one of our secretaries once about the doc files I send her. She said there were always some oddities - but there were oddities in files from everybody at the department. And most of them do use Office. Different versions; some use the US English version while others use the Japanese one; different base settings and so on.
Libre Office incompatibilities were in her eyes no worse than Office incompatibilities with itself. She didn't know I wasn't using Office, in fact.
The Sony tablets are very, very nice, and they have an 8" compact version. They're very lightly skinned, they're water resistant (you can wash off the screen) and they're very light. So light, in fact, that the first time I picked up the Z I thought it was an empty display model. That lightness, more than anything, is what makes it so pleasant to use for me. Can hold it up without effort for long periods when reading for instance.
Crude is the raw material. You still ned to manufacture and distribute the gasoline. As a guess, the refinery capacity hasn't increased in your area of the world. Nor is it likely to, as the trend is toward hybrids and all-electrics. Projected future consumption is not likely to support a large refinery project for the next 30-50 years.
Achieving practical nuclear fusion for power generation would be a very nice step forward. But "holy grail" is rather overselling it, I suspect.
Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants that depend on a long supply chain for all its parts, the high-purity fuel and so on. When you consider the building, running and maintenance costs, and the cost of dealing with the spent fuel (much better than for fission plants of course) the energy won't be all that cheap. Hopefully cheaper than fossil fuels at least, but I would not be surprised if a first generation of plants, at least, become more expensive than that.
And they'll be competing with rapidly dropping costs for solar and other renewables. A big, expensive plant like that will need a 40-50 year lifetime to pay for itself. If you can't show that it will likely run profitably for that time period few or no companies will be willing to take on the very major investment. We may well see a technical breakthrough for fusion, and still get no plants actually built.