But durability is not its strong suit: {...} it takes just a couple of years of regular use for a display to become yellowed.
And this is a problem for Samsung how ?
In the modern era of planed obsolescence where manufacturer expect their user base to throw away the old gizmo and buy a new one every 12 months, nobody gives a fart if the device's display will eventually die after a few years.
Or at least that what manufacturer are thinking. Now whether it does actually makes sense to spend on an expensive mixed-reality gadget, only to throw it away after 1-2 years is an entirely different question that is completely ignored by manufacturers (and Apple users too, BTW).
although the opensource version currently lacks fancier features such as OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan
Regarding fancies features : - the necessary bits are being upstreamed for ROCm, so you should be getting out-of-the-box OpenCL soonish. - DC/DAL is finally getting submitted for upstreaming, so by the time kernel 4.15 you'll get all the features such as Freesync, etc. - RADV, though developed, by 3rd parties (not by AMD) is getting rather decent. Conformance is getting good, though authors haven't been started putting lots of effort on optimisation yet. - Depending on whom you ask on the forums, AMD might consider giving support to RADV as an intermediate official solution.
Actually, AMD is one of the few companies that *pays developpers* for an official opensource stack.
Since quite some time, the opensource stack is the official openGL stack on windows, while the closed source (formely fglrx, now only a user-land GL stack that runs over the same AMDGPU kernel driver) is mainly targetted for the few workstation edge-cases that need some weird quirks for some obscure CAD software.
Since the AMDGPU kernel driver, part of the code is shared accross platforms, thus new feature added to windows (like Freesync, etc.) can be added to Linux to.
Since the past couple of weeks, DC/DAL is in the process of being merged upstream, (so Freesync and co should be working out of the box for linux kernel 4.15).
Since the past couple of weeks, ROCm is also getting merged (so OpenCL should be working for out-of-the box Linux).
The only currently missing bit, is an official opensource Vulkan implementation by AMD. Instead we currently get RADV which is opensource, but developped by outsiders and is getting more and more feature ful by the week, with lots of games working (though currently not with enormous performance gains normally expected of Vulkan - i.e.: the developpers are currently in 'conformance mode', trying to get the API implemented, they'll get to optimisations afterward). Notice that, depending on whomever from AMD you ask, they are officially hesitating if they shouldn't perhaps back RADV as an officially supported solution.
TL;DR: opensource linux drivers by AMD is the normal way to go with Radeon.
Actually, LiOn/LiPo battery charge circuitry monitors battery temperature to determine when to start throttling-back in the initial phase of the charging profile. It does not monitor current
The charging circuitry in the smartphone/laptop indeed does NOT monitor anything beyond temperature (sometimes using a dedicated thermistor inside the battery using an extra conductor). (and sometimes, it has also a very primitive "do not charge if battery undercharged under given very-low voltage" protection)
The battery management chip inside the battery itself DOES monitor current and voltage (both over/under). (See the characteristic of any battery management chip). It also exports these informations over the I2C bus or whatever that peculiar smartphone/laptop uses.
most people don't care about upgrading single components. To them, a computer is as much a monolithic black box as a stove, microwave or TV.
As a simple metaphor : how many people will upgrade the magnetron on a microwave ? Sure there's going to be a few people proudly screaming "me!" on/. But in your family ? Normal people around you ? The most probable answer is going to be "What a magnetron ?"
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that approach (well, provided you don't mind the trash), most people don't care about upgrading single components.
But some region of the world are going more conscious about all the electronic waste. European countries have putting effort to bring the "Repair instead of throw away" idea into the public radar. Upgrading RAM and SSD is a good way to insuflate a few more years into a laptop and avoid the whole thing going to a landfill.
So even if grandma has the slightest idea what an "SSD" is and thinks that "RAM" is a male sheep, it's still good for the environment if her old laptop can be upgraded/refurbished instead of thrown to trash.
Except that minix is only ARM, whereas current trend in smartphones chips tend to be AArch64. And Minix is Tannenbaum's creation, not something that Google controls.
Also, I don't know to which point Minix's API between userland driver-daemons is specially designed to allow ABI stability for the bits that are likely to end up as binary proprietary daemons. (Like it's the case currently with the drivers on various versions of Windows, leaving a little bit of wiggle room to install across several OS versions) (And completely unlike Linux, where ABI and API breakage is expected to happen as new better cool features are introduced into the kernel (e.g.: GPU support for kernel mode setting, atomic, tearfree, etc.) but at the cost that proprietary binary drivers are pretty much married to an exact kernel version - see headaches of trying to use Nvidia's blob on a rolling distro with modern kernels, see android kernel where your smartphone will never ever move beyond 3.10) (You can bet that Google is devoting resources to explicitly avoid these problems in Fuschia).
Linux LTS kernels are mostly useful for Android smartphone (specially the older letters).
The main problem is that the hardware manufacturer that build the base PCB that are used by phone manufacturer to build the smartphone rely heavily on binary drivers (Intel being one of the few exceptions). Usually, they'll fork whatever is the current version of the kernel in the Android letter-du-jour, slap binary GPU (and a few other special chips, like sensors) drivers, and ship that in the devkits they give to smartphone manufacturer.
End result : it's 2017, the current kernel is 4.14, but your smartphone is stuck at running some ancient 3.2.xxx kernel because that's what Android Jelly Bean was running back when Qualcomm designed this chipset, and they haven't bothered to make any upgrade since.
By making extremely long LTS release cycles, it means that, even if current crop of android kernel is stuck to kernel 4.14 because of Android Oreo, in 6 years, there will be still patches and bugfixes publilshed for this kernel, and LineageOS would be able to ship some hack of Android K(akao ?) running on kernel version 4.14.986 with all the latest security fixes.
---------------
The strategy of Fuschia is different.
It's supposed to be a micro-kernel architecture : - The kernel is only a very low-level hardware abstraction layer. - Everything else are user-land server.
That could in theory enable Anroid Y/Z to use binary proprietary user-land server for the chip-set specific drivers written by the hardware manufacturer, but upgrade the other servers to the latest security corrections.
Anyways, perhaps they would step away from these ridiculous demands if social media became more decentralized and distributed: store messages locally, removing the ability of a central agency to "censor through forced deletion".
And that would also be a very good reason to concentrate efforts on teaching critical thinking rather trying to censor, as I've mentioned.
The younger generation seem to be more active on WhatsApp (the reason why Facebook bought them), SnapChat (the reason why Zuckerberg is enraged of not being successful to buy them), or Telegram (often criticized in old-school media to harbor lots of extremists chat groups).
i.e. platforms that tend to practice more often end-to-end encryption (as opposed to client-to-server) and store a lot less centrally.
(Probably initially liked by the younger generation because their parent can't whatch them for the above reason, unlike centralized social media such as Facebook)
It would be hard to implement censoring in these kind of platform. But teaching the people to use their brain would still be useful even in these case.
Free Speech from the American perspective isn't a universal perspective. It is unique to our circumstance and our history. The EU has Free Speech but the details are a little different and that is fine in principle.
And we tend to be a little bit less nipple-averse than the US.
Indeed, based on past history, each side of the Atlantic pond has a slightly different approach on the Free Speech vs Censorship scale.
We can quibble over the details of where the line on free speech should be but you have to address how you plan to control hate groups if you let their rhetoric flow freely.
There are also other very valid trends in Europe that try instead to instil a little bit of critical thinking when exposed to bullshit on internet. (This specific youtube channel deals more about fakenews and conspiracy theories, but the general approach of teaching critical thinking is also applicable for anything else going on the internet). So instead of blocking the rhetoric of hate groups, you try tackling the problem from the other side by making the people less receptive to the king of bullshit that goes online.
(And by the way the channel names happens to have some unfortunate implication in the US, but in its native France it's just a quote from a known author)
---
(*) : Common, naked butts and visible female nipples ? Facebook's censors are going to have brain haemorrhage if they visit certain breaches in Europe.
CFL bulbs suck and are toxic to the environment. Thanks for the apt comparison.
CFL light bulb was a stupid stop gap measure launched by panicking manufacturer. It didn't make any sense from engineering pov (it uses toxic substance in the tube, use complex starting circuitry that can easily fail). It was mainly done so :
- classical lightbulb manufacturer can do something that "passes" such potential laws, while using technology that they already have the patents for since ages (most classic lightbulb manufacturer have also been making various fluorescent tubes for age - CFL was a small incremental evolution). they did successfully manage to circumvent ban (but so did even the manufacturer that replaced plain classic incandescent filament with slightly better efficient halogen bulbs. I joke you note - in Europe, OSRAM successfully managed to circumvent incandescent lightbulb ban using another incandescent technology, just by being enough more efficient)
- with any chance, the back lash against the poor light quality and high failure rate will cause backlash against classic incandescent bulb ban. It did not.
LED light bulb is the actual real step ahead. It requires a lot less weird substances (e.g.: doesn't need toxic mercury) and the electronics are much simpler. (Modern LED bulb imitating the old classic edison filament style manage to cram all the electronics inside the screw) and the overall efficiency is even better than CFL.
Yes, LED bulb require a little bit more resource (and cause a little bit more emission) per unit built. But over the life-time of a LED bulb (usually in the decade range - the warranty of some Phillips models is actually 10 years) those initial building impact is completely dwarves by the enormous power economy.
over 10 years, your LED bulb will have ended up being a lot less toxic to the environment than the long serie of incandesent
----------
The same "LED" situation is currently happening with EV.
Yes lithium battery are toxic to the environment to produce. But ICE engine don't grow on (organic) tree neither.
Compared to the production of a classic car, the production of an EV is only fractionally more impacting (to lazy to google, seem to remember it being in the ball park of 25%). But this number (environmental impact at production) is completely insignificant compared to the rest of the lifetime of a vehicle (environmental impact during years of use).
Current research show that over the life-time of a car, even lots of country that still burn fossils for electricity production, the environmental impact of an EV ends up being smaller. (Again, too lazy to google. If I remember correctly : only India, China and Australia have such awful electricity production that there's no difference between driving an EV or an ICE car. Even in the US that relies a lot on fossil for its electricity, the EV end up being less impacting. Here around in Europe it's even better due to several countries moving to renewables)
Error correction works fine for one, or possibly a small number of errors,
If the level of cosmic radiation that is bathing your workplace causes more than the occasional bit flip that the above poster has suggested, I think you might be having more serious problems to consider.
Like needing to find shelter asap.
Or enjoy your new "fantastic 4" super-powers.
sd cards? how would you know what's going on inside?
Now for the more serious answers : again ecc is used against the occasional random bitflip, as in the concerns about cosmic radiation by the above posters.
For the rest of your concern (i.e.: the media turning bad), the micro-controller inside the sd card handle the flash management. At least, on high range models, they can move the data from "about to fail" block to fresh blocks, and mark "failed to unreusable state" blocks and retire them. (Works both during read-modify-write cycles "dynamic wear levelling", and also with old data currently sitting on the disk "static wear levelling").
Some card even have status reporting (but its not as standardized as "smart" on ata/sata/scsi/usb). - so on these, with the proper tooling, you can actually get some prediction and indication of general health.
All the high-end sd card that I have seen go bad due to eventually accumulating too much corruption (the inevitable death of any flash media) have locked themselves in read-only mode. - so on these, you notice that they'll go bad really soon when they stop to write, and you still have a little bit of time to copy data of them.
Of course, this requires the microcontroller to be powered. But given that flash media mostly decays by erasing, the microcontroller would be working at the most crucial time.
Still, the sd card could be victim to cell-voltage decay while staying in cold storage. (But then, error correction *can* detect it, and the controller of flashmedia *can* attempt to re-read the block with decayed voltage. So this type of decay on flash media usually results in awefully slow read rates, rather than data corruption and static wear-leveling can eventually recover it)
Basically, keep in mind that high range sd cards behave like some kind of ssd. Except one with a lot less ram in the microcontroler (do not expect to have as many working chunks kept in memory). And with much slower data rates (the controler is usually talking to one single nand flash chip). And not a very standardized monitoring protocol. And of course speaking a different protocol (mmc instead of sata).
Compact flash card are even closer : they are basically pata ssds, but with a smaller connector. some of the high range even support straight smart protocol like any other pata/sata device.
That's unlike xd cards or the older smartmedia which are basically direct access to the nand chip.
on the tape as much as it is to get the data off the tape.
Of course, the fact that your tape is guaranteed to hold data for 50 years, isn't an excuse to actually wait 50 years before checking if you can actually read the data on it, or even find it.
Checking that you can restore the data should actually be part of the normal backup cycle.
(A very simple personal example : - A test server that we use to develop and test new code, uses a local copy of the same data as the database used by the production server. - We've implemented it, by having the test server rebuild its local database using the yesterday evening backup of the production server. - If the backup couldn't be read back, the "restore" process will fail on the test server and will be immediately visible.)
At thousands times more data the density would need to be high enough that cosmic radiation should start affecting tape also?
Nearly every modern serious data storage (even some high-range SD flash cards: see Transcend) uses some form of error correction. Neither tape nor harddisks (nor SD cards with ECC) are that much affected by single bit flips induced by cosmic radiation.
But HDD can still be affected by mechanical failures. While on the other hand, "mechanical failure" is hardly a risk for a medium that is just basically just a long band of magnetic tape.
Also, the bitrot of tape is better known because it has been studied for a longer time.
Not to mention that modern tapes still has a lower density than modern harddisks (with all their "super-paramagnetic" and "shingled" tricks). An LTO-7 tape is shy of 1km of lenght for 12mm width (they have exactly 11 square meters to store their native uncompressed raw 6.0 TB) A Seagate drive of similar capacity crams its data on 6 platters (of 9cm diameter each - that's 0.076 square meters)
is there any reason to use tape instead of just doing a rotation of RAID systems and disconnecting the unused ones?
The main reason IS the one you mentioned (with tape, you basically disconnect only the medium, the magnetic tape. Not the whole read/write drive or even whole RAID cabinet. So you only need to pay for magnetic media as you expand capacity, not full blown electronics. A single tape drive and robot can last you quite some time).
But there is also some other practical consideration :
- Tape has been around for a lot of time. It has been already quite studied regarding its longevity. Its various failure modes are all well known (ghosting). Manufacturer are now pretty much sure they can guarantee you that you can store a tape cartridge in fridge for Yyy years and it will still be 100% readable afterward.
- Hardisk are a bit more recent technology. We don't have quite the same guarantee regarding mechanical failures, bitrot, etc. Since the whole purpose of this approach is to disconnect completely the storage, it means that the back-up disk will need to be reconnected and re-spun back to 7200RPMS at some point in the future. A small number out of all disk will fail and will not spin, due to various mechanical feature. A small number of the spinning disks will have suffered bitrot and will have corrupted. Companies don't have the half-century long experience to make exact guarantee for Zzz years.
It's nothing horrible that can't be compensated with correct duplication and erasure coding. But it's still a bit less guaranteed.
Perhaps if he blows away the Tesla P100D (or whatever's current in their lineup at that time) on straightline acceleration, he'll get an obligatory number of sales from that chunk of the superrich that have to have all of the fastest toys.
And given how Dyson markets its over expensive and well-fucking-over-engineered fans, vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and vacuuming robots, that clealy seems to be the only market strategy on which Dyson focuses.
And given their pricing tendency, you can expect the cars to cost in the million price range. And thus selling the small number of cars you mentioned will be enough to cover their cost.
The rest of the planet can safely ignore their circus.
I just want someone to explain to me what the hell a digital motor is that they advertise all the time when I still see spinning analog motors in their vacuums.
It's market-speak buzzwords for "IC-driven AC motor".
They are all AC motor - you got a spinning rotor in the middle, whose magnetic field can be static (e.g.: even a rare earth permanent magnet can do it). - you got a stator on the outside that uses electro magnets.
You need to feed AC current to the stator, so the magnetic polarity of the electro magnet will change overtime, which will cause the rotor to turn.
In classical AC motors (market speak "analog") : - you simply feed an AC current into the electro magnet (some industrial appliance in Europe even use the fact that you got tri-phase power plugs - you just put 3 electro magnet at 60 deg of each other and because of the phase shift between each live feed, you get automatically 50Hz spinning with almost no electrical wiring complexity). If your pet has a small water fountain for drinking, it's likely that it uses this kind of AC motor in its pump (but only using a single 50/60Hz 12v AC feed). The draw-back is that the most simple implementation only works best at a single motor RPM (3000 or 3600 RPMs in my above examples). (So it works best for air vacuum pumps. I.e.: where the turbofan is free to spin at its optimal speed. Such simple wiring won't work best for cars where speed and power vary).
In IC-driven AC motors (market speak "digital") : - you feed a high power DC current to an electronic chip. That chip will usually use PWM (or some similar approach) and will produce an ideally shaped AC current. The shape of this AC current (both the power, the frequency, and the phase going to each electromagnet) can be adapted to the current speed and to the amount of physical obstacles (friction/viscosity/whatever) the motor need to rotate against. That is the kind of technology that goes into EV motors (like the Tesla) - because they need to be optimal over a very wide range of RPMs / horsepower of traction. Speaking of water pumps, that's also the kind of things that you got into DDC Laing watercooling pumps in your computer (and thus it could adapt easily and optimaly to any kind of resistance in the tube you connected them to).
A "digital motor" in a Dyson fan blower is complete over engineering. Yup in theory driving the FAN's AC motor with an IC makes them more powerful / tiny bit more efficient. But who the hell needs that much engineering into an accessory that basically just needs to stir the air around a bit ? Yes, techno-geek reviewer on youtube will go nut when they analyse the "perfectness" of the AC feed going into the motor with their oscilloscope. But at the end of the day, it's pretty much useless over-engineering.
A "digital motor" in an EV is a necessity, and there's already a ton of research being done in the field.
Basically, Dyson's PR/Marketing department is simply telling Tesla: "our engineers are going to be better than yours". Given the kind of budget that Dyson is usually throwing on R&D and hiring the best engineers : yes, they might produce better motors. But the motors will be only marginally better (because the rest of the EV field is also spending a lot on R&D already, there isn't much left for Dyson to improve) and will cost a metric-fuckton more than the nearest competitor.
Also, expect the car to be shaped like an empty doughnut for some weird bullshit aerodynamic reasons.
But the smart money is on this project utterly failing. There is a huge amount of technical and marketing expertise involved in designing something as complex as a car. If he's coming into this without involving a lot of people really experienced with all aspects of car development, the chances are really good that the project will be doomed to failure.
Common, it's Dyson that we're talking about. The guy who takes the concept of "over-engineering", laugh at it and then turn the level up to 11. The guy who cannot comprehend the concept of over-spending. (And that's both during design AND the price the customers are then expected to pay for) The guy who utterly fails to understand why there is even a "budget" category, or what are the main points attracting customers to current tech.
We all know how this will end. (Just look at his fans and vacuum cleaners for a reference - case in point : their vacuuming robot is wrong on so many levels).
Dyson *will* successfully develop a new electric car. With brand new motor and brand new battery techs. Except that this new car will cost 10 millions £, will be extremely loud, and at the end of the day actually fulfils only marginally better the needs of the customer. And due to its weird "designer" shape cannot even take most of the tunnels around your country.
And if the car is too different from existing designs, he's going to have a hell of a time convincing people to buy it.
That I totally agree. I half expect the car to be sphere shaped.
(The other half expects the car to be shaped like an empty torus for weird aerodynamics reasons).
Basically people need a more or less cheap box to get around. Expect Dyson to construct something that is more appropriate for some World Designer Expo.
Slashdot Mirror
But durability is not its strong suit: {...} it takes just a couple of years of regular use for a display to become yellowed.
And this is a problem for Samsung how ?
In the modern era of planed obsolescence where manufacturer expect their user base to throw away the old gizmo and buy a new one every 12 months, nobody gives a fart if the device's display will eventually die after a few years.
Or at least that what manufacturer are thinking.
Now whether it does actually makes sense to spend on an expensive mixed-reality gadget, only to throw it away after 1-2 years is an entirely different question that is completely ignored by manufacturers (and Apple users too, BTW).
they expect at least 80% of their current Zune-on-Android and Zune-on-iOS users to switch {...}
What ? At least 4 of them ?
That's some optimism !
No he didn't hear it : the sound of the whoosh was encoded with MP3 at a too low quality setting, he should have used FLAC instead.
although the opensource version currently lacks fancier features such as OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan
Regarding fancies features :
- the necessary bits are being upstreamed for ROCm, so you should be getting out-of-the-box OpenCL soonish.
- DC/DAL is finally getting submitted for upstreaming, so by the time kernel 4.15 you'll get all the features such as Freesync, etc.
- RADV, though developed, by 3rd parties (not by AMD) is getting rather decent. Conformance is getting good, though authors haven't been started putting lots of effort on optimisation yet.
- Depending on whom you ask on the forums, AMD might consider giving support to RADV as an intermediate official solution.
Actually, AMD is one of the few companies that *pays developpers* for an official opensource stack.
Since quite some time, the opensource stack is the official openGL stack on windows, while the closed source (formely fglrx, now only a user-land GL stack that runs over the same AMDGPU kernel driver) is mainly targetted for the few workstation edge-cases that need some weird quirks for some obscure CAD software.
Since the AMDGPU kernel driver, part of the code is shared accross platforms, thus new feature added to windows (like Freesync, etc.) can be added to Linux to.
Since the past couple of weeks, DC/DAL is in the process of being merged upstream, (so Freesync and co should be working out of the box for linux kernel 4.15).
Since the past couple of weeks, ROCm is also getting merged (so OpenCL should be working for out-of-the box Linux).
The only currently missing bit, is an official opensource Vulkan implementation by AMD.
Instead we currently get RADV which is opensource, but developped by outsiders and is getting more and more feature ful by the week, with lots of games working (though currently not with enormous performance gains normally expected of Vulkan - i.e.: the developpers are currently in 'conformance mode', trying to get the API implemented, they'll get to optimisations afterward).
Notice that, depending on whomever from AMD you ask, they are officially hesitating if they shouldn't perhaps back RADV as an officially supported solution.
TL;DR: opensource linux drivers by AMD is the normal way to go with Radeon.
Actually, LiOn/LiPo battery charge circuitry monitors battery temperature to determine when to start throttling-back in the initial phase of the charging profile. It does not monitor current
The charging circuitry in the smartphone/laptop indeed does NOT monitor anything beyond temperature
(sometimes using a dedicated thermistor inside the battery using an extra conductor).
(and sometimes, it has also a very primitive "do not charge if battery undercharged under given very-low voltage" protection)
The battery management chip inside the battery itself DOES monitor current and voltage (both over/under).
(See the characteristic of any battery management chip).
It also exports these informations over the I2C bus or whatever that peculiar smartphone/laptop uses.
most people don't care about upgrading single components. To them, a computer is as much a monolithic black box as a stove, microwave or TV.
As a simple metaphor : how many people will upgrade the magnetron on a microwave ? /.
Sure there's going to be a few people proudly screaming "me!" on
But in your family ? Normal people around you ?
The most probable answer is going to be "What a magnetron ?"
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that approach (well, provided you don't mind the trash), most people don't care about upgrading single components.
But some region of the world are going more conscious about all the electronic waste.
European countries have putting effort to bring the "Repair instead of throw away" idea into the public radar.
Upgrading RAM and SSD is a good way to insuflate a few more years into a laptop and avoid the whole thing going to a landfill.
So even if grandma has the slightest idea what an "SSD" is and thinks that "RAM" is a male sheep, it's still good for the environment if her old laptop can be upgraded/refurbished instead of thrown to trash.
See also - Minix 3.
Basically, yes.
Except that minix is only ARM, whereas current trend in smartphones chips tend to be AArch64.
And Minix is Tannenbaum's creation, not something that Google controls.
Also, I don't know to which point Minix's API between userland driver-daemons is specially designed to allow ABI stability for the bits that are likely to end up as binary proprietary daemons.
(Like it's the case currently with the drivers on various versions of Windows, leaving a little bit of wiggle room to install across several OS versions)
(And completely unlike Linux, where ABI and API breakage is expected to happen as new better cool features are introduced into the kernel (e.g.: GPU support for kernel mode setting, atomic, tearfree, etc.) but at the cost that proprietary binary drivers are pretty much married to an exact kernel version - see headaches of trying to use Nvidia's blob on a rolling distro with modern kernels, see android kernel where your smartphone will never ever move beyond 3.10)
(You can bet that Google is devoting resources to explicitly avoid these problems in Fuschia).
Linux LTS kernels are mostly useful for Android smartphone (specially the older letters).
The main problem is that the hardware manufacturer that build the base PCB that are used by phone manufacturer to build the smartphone rely heavily on binary drivers (Intel being one of the few exceptions).
Usually, they'll fork whatever is the current version of the kernel in the Android letter-du-jour, slap binary GPU (and a few other special chips, like sensors) drivers, and ship that in the devkits they give to smartphone manufacturer.
End result : it's 2017, the current kernel is 4.14, but your smartphone is stuck at running some ancient 3.2.xxx kernel because that's what Android Jelly Bean was running back when Qualcomm designed this chipset, and they haven't bothered to make any upgrade since.
By making extremely long LTS release cycles, it means that, even if current crop of android kernel is stuck to kernel 4.14 because of Android Oreo, in 6 years, there will be still patches and bugfixes publilshed for this kernel, and LineageOS would be able to ship some hack of Android K(akao ?) running on kernel version 4.14.986 with all the latest security fixes.
---------------
The strategy of Fuschia is different.
It's supposed to be a micro-kernel architecture :
- The kernel is only a very low-level hardware abstraction layer.
- Everything else are user-land server.
That could in theory enable Anroid Y/Z to use binary proprietary user-land server for the chip-set specific drivers written by the hardware manufacturer,
but upgrade the other servers to the latest security corrections.
Anyways, perhaps they would step away from these ridiculous demands if social media became more decentralized
and distributed: store messages locally, removing the ability of a central agency to "censor through forced deletion".
And that would also be a very good reason to concentrate efforts on teaching critical thinking rather trying to censor, as I've mentioned.
The younger generation seem to be more active on WhatsApp (the reason why Facebook bought them), SnapChat (the reason why Zuckerberg is enraged of not being successful to buy them), or Telegram (often criticized in old-school media to harbor lots of extremists chat groups).
i.e. platforms that tend to practice more often end-to-end encryption (as opposed to client-to-server) and store a lot less centrally.
(Probably initially liked by the younger generation because their parent can't whatch them for the above reason, unlike centralized social media such as Facebook)
It would be hard to implement censoring in these kind of platform. But teaching the people to use their brain would still be useful even in these case.
Free Speech from the American perspective isn't a universal perspective. It is unique to our circumstance and our history. The EU has Free Speech but the details are a little different and that is fine in principle.
And we tend to be a little bit less nipple-averse than the US.
Our concept of Free Speech vs Censorship doesn't in any way go nut whenever there's a little bit of flesh shown somewhere (*).
Nudity isn't a reason to kick-ban you from European media, because of "Think of the Children" and "OMG! Femal Anatomy ! Run for your lives !".
Indeed, based on past history, each side of the Atlantic pond has a slightly different approach on the Free Speech vs Censorship scale.
We can quibble over the details of where the line on free speech should be but you have to address how you plan to control hate groups if you let their rhetoric flow freely.
There are also other very valid trends in Europe that try instead to instil a little bit of critical thinking when exposed to bullshit on internet.
(This specific youtube channel deals more about fakenews and conspiracy theories, but the general approach of teaching critical thinking is also applicable for anything else going on the internet).
So instead of blocking the rhetoric of hate groups, you try tackling the problem from the other side by making the people less receptive to the king of bullshit that goes online.
(And by the way the channel names happens to have some unfortunate implication in the US, but in its native France it's just a quote from a known author)
---
(*) : Common, naked butts and visible female nipples ?
Facebook's censors are going to have brain haemorrhage if they visit certain breaches in Europe.
CFL bulbs suck and are toxic to the environment. Thanks for the apt comparison.
CFL light bulb was a stupid stop gap measure launched by panicking manufacturer.
It didn't make any sense from engineering pov (it uses toxic substance in the tube, use complex starting circuitry that can easily fail).
It was mainly done so :
- classical lightbulb manufacturer can do something that "passes" such potential laws, while using technology that they already have the patents for since ages (most classic lightbulb manufacturer have also been making various fluorescent tubes for age - CFL was a small incremental evolution).
they did successfully manage to circumvent ban (but so did even the manufacturer that replaced plain classic incandescent filament with slightly better efficient halogen bulbs. I joke you note - in Europe, OSRAM successfully managed to circumvent incandescent lightbulb ban using another incandescent technology, just by being enough more efficient)
- with any chance, the back lash against the poor light quality and high failure rate will cause backlash against classic incandescent bulb ban.
It did not.
LED light bulb is the actual real step ahead. It requires a lot less weird substances (e.g.: doesn't need toxic mercury) and the electronics are much simpler. (Modern LED bulb imitating the old classic edison filament style manage to cram all the electronics inside the screw) and the overall efficiency is even better than CFL.
Yes, LED bulb require a little bit more resource (and cause a little bit more emission) per unit built.
But over the life-time of a LED bulb (usually in the decade range - the warranty of some Phillips models is actually 10 years) those initial building impact is completely dwarves by the enormous power economy.
over 10 years, your LED bulb will have ended up being a lot less toxic to the environment than the long serie of incandesent
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The same "LED" situation is currently happening with EV.
Yes lithium battery are toxic to the environment to produce.
But ICE engine don't grow on (organic) tree neither.
Compared to the production of a classic car, the production of an EV is only fractionally more impacting (to lazy to google, seem to remember it being in the ball park of 25%).
But this number (environmental impact at production) is completely insignificant compared to the rest of the lifetime of a vehicle (environmental impact during years of use).
Current research show that over the life-time of a car, even lots of country that still burn fossils for electricity production, the environmental impact of an EV ends up being smaller.
(Again, too lazy to google. If I remember correctly : only India, China and Australia have such awful electricity production that there's no difference between driving an EV or an ICE car. Even in the US that relies a lot on fossil for its electricity, the EV end up being less impacting. Here around in Europe it's even better due to several countries moving to renewables)
23 amino acids (and a stop) encoded by 64 code words ? :-D
That's a proof that the intelligent designer has built-in redundancy in the system !~~~~
This thing will be a giant greenhouse in an already suffocatingly hot place.
This is Dubai.
The place that already has a giant fridge in the middle of the desert so you can ski indoor in it.
Indeed. Don't you think requiring that we get our tape storage systems from Fisher-Price is moving the goalposts a bit?
Yup, toddler proofing the tape storage system is going to be way too much costly.
I would suggest dialing back to something a little bit less rugged.
Better stick to a tape system that can only survive a mere orbital re-entry. That's going to be a lot more cheaper and simpler than toddler-proofing.
Error correction works fine for one, or possibly a small number of errors,
If the level of cosmic radiation that is bathing your workplace causes more than the occasional bit flip that the above poster has suggested, I think you might be having more serious problems to consider.
Like needing to find shelter asap.
Or enjoy your new "fantastic 4" super-powers.
sd cards? how would you know what's going on inside?
Now for the more serious answers :
again ecc is used against the occasional random bitflip, as in the concerns about cosmic radiation by the above posters.
For the rest of your concern (i.e.: the media turning bad), the micro-controller inside the sd card handle the flash management.
At least, on high range models, they can move the data from "about to fail" block to fresh blocks, and mark "failed to unreusable state" blocks and retire them.
(Works both during read-modify-write cycles "dynamic wear levelling", and also with old data currently sitting on the disk "static wear levelling").
Some card even have status reporting (but its not as standardized as "smart" on ata/sata/scsi/usb).
- so on these, with the proper tooling, you can actually get some prediction and indication of general health.
All the high-end sd card that I have seen go bad due to eventually accumulating too much corruption (the inevitable death of any flash media) have locked themselves in read-only mode.
- so on these, you notice that they'll go bad really soon when they stop to write, and you still have a little bit of time to copy data of them.
Of course, this requires the microcontroller to be powered.
But given that flash media mostly decays by erasing, the microcontroller would be working at the most crucial time.
Still, the sd card could be victim to cell-voltage decay while staying in cold storage.
(But then, error correction *can* detect it, and the controller of flashmedia *can* attempt to re-read the block with decayed voltage. So this type of decay on flash media usually results in awefully slow read rates, rather than data corruption and static wear-leveling can eventually recover it)
Basically, keep in mind that high range sd cards behave like some kind of ssd.
Except one with a lot less ram in the microcontroler (do not expect to have as many working chunks kept in memory).
And with much slower data rates (the controler is usually talking to one single nand flash chip).
And not a very standardized monitoring protocol.
And of course speaking a different protocol (mmc instead of sata).
Compact flash card are even closer : they are basically pata ssds, but with a smaller connector. some of the high range even support straight smart protocol like any other pata/sata device.
That's unlike xd cards or the older smartmedia which are basically direct access to the nand chip.
You've never seen a kid handle a tape, have you?
If your kid is roaming free in the middle of your company's big data center, you have an entirely different level of problems...
on the tape as much as it is to get the data off the tape.
Of course, the fact that your tape is guaranteed to hold data for 50 years, isn't an excuse to actually wait 50 years before checking if you can actually read the data on it, or even find it.
Checking that you can restore the data should actually be part of the normal backup cycle.
(A very simple personal example :
- A test server that we use to develop and test new code, uses a local copy of the same data as the database used by the production server.
- We've implemented it, by having the test server rebuild its local database using the yesterday evening backup of the production server.
- If the backup couldn't be read back, the "restore" process will fail on the test server and will be immediately visible.)
At thousands times more data the density would need to be high enough that cosmic radiation should start affecting tape also?
Nearly every modern serious data storage (even some high-range SD flash cards: see Transcend) uses some form of error correction.
Neither tape nor harddisks (nor SD cards with ECC) are that much affected by single bit flips induced by cosmic radiation.
But HDD can still be affected by mechanical failures.
While on the other hand, "mechanical failure" is hardly a risk for a medium that is just basically just a long band of magnetic tape.
Also, the bitrot of tape is better known because it has been studied for a longer time.
Not to mention that modern tapes still has a lower density than modern harddisks (with all their "super-paramagnetic" and "shingled" tricks).
An LTO-7 tape is shy of 1km of lenght for 12mm width (they have exactly 11 square meters to store their native uncompressed raw 6.0 TB)
A Seagate drive of similar capacity crams its data on 6 platters (of 9cm diameter each - that's 0.076 square meters)
- books
Although that varies a bit depending on the chemistry of the paper (e.g.: acid-free vs. acidic)
On the other hand, the *toner* used to laser-print on them (basically, fused plastic) will surely outlive the acidic paper.
is there any reason to use tape instead of just doing a rotation of RAID systems and disconnecting the unused ones?
The main reason IS the one you mentioned (with tape, you basically disconnect only the medium, the magnetic tape. Not the whole read/write drive or even whole RAID cabinet. So you only need to pay for magnetic media as you expand capacity, not full blown electronics. A single tape drive and robot can last you quite some time).
But there is also some other practical consideration :
- Tape has been around for a lot of time. It has been already quite studied regarding its longevity. Its various failure modes are all well known (ghosting).
Manufacturer are now pretty much sure they can guarantee you that you can store a tape cartridge in fridge for Yyy years and it will still be 100% readable afterward.
- Hardisk are a bit more recent technology. We don't have quite the same guarantee regarding mechanical failures, bitrot, etc.
Since the whole purpose of this approach is to disconnect completely the storage, it means that the back-up disk will need to be reconnected and re-spun back to 7200RPMS at some point in the future. A small number out of all disk will fail and will not spin, due to various mechanical feature. A small number of the spinning disks will have suffered bitrot and will have corrupted.
Companies don't have the half-century long experience to make exact guarantee for Zzz years.
It's nothing horrible that can't be compensated with correct duplication and erasure coding. But it's still a bit less guaranteed.
Perhaps if he blows away the Tesla P100D (or whatever's current in their lineup at that time) on straightline acceleration, he'll get an obligatory number of sales from that chunk of the superrich that have to have all of the fastest toys.
And given how Dyson markets its over expensive and well-fucking-over-engineered fans, vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and vacuuming robots, that clealy seems to be the only market strategy on which Dyson focuses.
And given their pricing tendency, you can expect the cars to cost in the million price range. And thus selling the small number of cars you mentioned will be enough to cover their cost.
The rest of the planet can safely ignore their circus.
I just want someone to explain to me what the hell a digital motor is that they advertise all the time when I still see spinning analog motors in their vacuums.
It's market-speak buzzwords for "IC-driven AC motor".
They are all AC motor
- you got a spinning rotor in the middle, whose magnetic field can be static (e.g.: even a rare earth permanent magnet can do it).
- you got a stator on the outside that uses electro magnets.
You need to feed AC current to the stator, so the magnetic polarity of the electro magnet will change overtime, which will cause the rotor to turn.
In classical AC motors (market speak "analog") :
- you simply feed an AC current into the electro magnet (some industrial appliance in Europe even use the fact that you got tri-phase power plugs - you just put 3 electro magnet at 60 deg of each other and because of the phase shift between each live feed, you get automatically 50Hz spinning with almost no electrical wiring complexity).
If your pet has a small water fountain for drinking, it's likely that it uses this kind of AC motor in its pump (but only using a single 50/60Hz 12v AC feed).
The draw-back is that the most simple implementation only works best at a single motor RPM (3000 or 3600 RPMs in my above examples).
(So it works best for air vacuum pumps. I.e.: where the turbofan is free to spin at its optimal speed. Such simple wiring won't work best for cars where speed and power vary).
In IC-driven AC motors (market speak "digital") :
- you feed a high power DC current to an electronic chip. That chip will usually use PWM (or some similar approach) and will produce an ideally shaped AC current. The shape of this AC current (both the power, the frequency, and the phase going to each electromagnet) can be adapted to the current speed and to the amount of physical obstacles (friction/viscosity/whatever) the motor need to rotate against.
That is the kind of technology that goes into EV motors (like the Tesla) - because they need to be optimal over a very wide range of RPMs / horsepower of traction.
Speaking of water pumps, that's also the kind of things that you got into DDC Laing watercooling pumps in your computer (and thus it could adapt easily and optimaly to any kind of resistance in the tube you connected them to).
A "digital motor" in a Dyson fan blower is complete over engineering.
Yup in theory driving the FAN's AC motor with an IC makes them more powerful / tiny bit more efficient. But who the hell needs that much engineering into an accessory that basically just needs to stir the air around a bit ?
Yes, techno-geek reviewer on youtube will go nut when they analyse the "perfectness" of the AC feed going into the motor with their oscilloscope.
But at the end of the day, it's pretty much useless over-engineering.
A "digital motor" in an EV is a necessity, and there's already a ton of research being done in the field.
Basically, Dyson's PR/Marketing department is simply telling Tesla: "our engineers are going to be better than yours".
Given the kind of budget that Dyson is usually throwing on R&D and hiring the best engineers : yes, they might produce better motors.
But the motors will be only marginally better (because the rest of the EV field is also spending a lot on R&D already, there isn't much left for Dyson to improve) and will cost a metric-fuckton more than the nearest competitor.
Also, expect the car to be shaped like an empty doughnut for some weird bullshit aerodynamic reasons.
And conversly, given the current age,
where technologies such as VPNs and Tor exist,
what do they expect to actually work ?
Basically people will just browse to http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ instead of https://thepiratebay.org and completely ignore whatever restriction the local government is trying to put.
But the smart money is on this project utterly failing. There is a huge amount of technical and marketing expertise involved in designing something as complex as a car. If he's coming into this without involving a lot of people really experienced with all aspects of car development, the chances are really good that the project will be doomed to failure.
Common, it's Dyson that we're talking about.
The guy who takes the concept of "over-engineering", laugh at it and then turn the level up to 11.
The guy who cannot comprehend the concept of over-spending. (And that's both during design AND the price the customers are then expected to pay for)
The guy who utterly fails to understand why there is even a "budget" category, or what are the main points attracting customers to current tech.
We all know how this will end. (Just look at his fans and vacuum cleaners for a reference - case in point : their vacuuming robot is wrong on so many levels).
Dyson *will* successfully develop a new electric car.
With brand new motor and brand new battery techs.
Except that this new car will cost 10 millions £, will be extremely loud, and at the end of the day actually fulfils only marginally better the needs of the customer.
And due to its weird "designer" shape cannot even take most of the tunnels around your country.
And if the car is too different from existing designs, he's going to have a hell of a time convincing people to buy it.
That I totally agree.
I half expect the car to be sphere shaped.
(The other half expects the car to be shaped like an empty torus for weird aerodynamics reasons).
Basically people need a more or less cheap box to get around.
Expect Dyson to construct something that is more appropriate for some World Designer Expo.