I can't use profanity because my Facebook Friends are actual friends, acquaintances, family and stuff.
actual friends, family and stuff are also the people of whom you might not want to hurt feelings and opt to not outright tell everything which goes through your head ("you're ugly as shit", "you clothes/car/whatever is crap", "your idea is stupid and you should be burned in public in the town square for that", etc.) but where you would restrain yourself ("you've got personality", "well, it's original and has got some charm", "it's a surprising idea").
So again they are the people to which you would "lie" (in a fashion. You're not actively trying to outright deceive them, just not transmitting 100% of the information) which is what this study tries to point out.
Let's be serious here. Three hours? The last long drive I did, my only stops were fuel stops. I was going for about six hours without stopping for anything, and only stopping for fuel and to pee. Stopping every two hours would be incredibly frustrating.
If you want to kill yourself in a car-crash because of attention deficit due to over-tiredness because your concept of a well rested and alert driver is "15 minutes tank-and-pee pause between every block of 6 hours of non-stop driving", be my guest.
But remember:
To be eligible for a Darwin Award, you need to only take yourself by your own stupidity. You shouldn't maim any innocent by-stander.
So please try to crash into a tree next time you fail because of microsleep, instead of crashing into my car. (But I suspect that we leave on different continents and that I can be thankful for the Atlantic pond to prevent our paths to cross).
More seriously:
What you describe (blocks of 6 hours of driving, separated by 15 minutes breaks) is outright illegal for professional drivers here around. It is 6 hours of driving *total* (excluding the breaks) per work day, then a minimum of 4 hours of rest before the next work day[1] (I.e.: on a continuous 18 hours bus trips, there should be 2 drivers switching seats)
There is ton of research pointing that tiredness gets very important very quickly. By 6 hours of non-stop driving you might as well be drunk or high as a kite. (There are even studies that try to map level of tiredness and b.a.l. based on similar reduction of alertness/reactivity).
Humans are extremely bad at self-evaluating exhaustion, specially in simple monotonous repetitive task that aren't physically exhausting. If you indeed drive in batches of 6 hours, you certainly have had microsleep episodes.
But - at least until now - these eposides both:
went unnoticed (that's actually pretty normal. You can't consciously notice that you are unconscious)
and by sheer luck (or thanks to anti-collision technology available in your car[2]) nothing major did ever happen.
In other words, current research points out that No, you are not a good driver as you might think. You're instead a lucky driver (and/or have a good car).
For all purpose, there isn't a big use case for cars that can drive more 600 km in one go. Car *can* do, for the convenience of not needing to tank at each stop. But they are not that much necessary - cause the puny human meat at the driver seat can't reliabily drive safely for extended periods of time. You either need several puny humans to cycle between. Or you need much longer breaks within these 600km that the car can handle.
So:
cars like 60-to-100kWh Tesla, 44kWh model Zoes, 60kWh Opel Ampera/Chevrolet Bolt, etc. with their 250 to 500 km autonomy
combined with the ever growing network of fast charger
(and a big thank to Mennekes and Chademo for having a small set of widespread fast car-charging standards)
are already pretty much enough for most car needs with maybe only a few key exceptions (i.e.: alterning drivers for extremely long trip or people who are really a lot into the "suicide by tree" fad)
This is even more noticeable in the (slightly more) densely populate Europe which is a bit more conscious about its security (higher risk to crash into meaty humans instead of trees when there are more of them around instead of a dust desert), where big centers are close by (very often your travel destination is within a 300km drive anyway), and with a good electrical network with quite some power available (thanks to alpine dams, nukes, or renewable - depending on countries).
Of course, you could argue that all these are example of Nanny-state in our "evil-communist" socialist-leaning European coun
What range do you think EVs have on a single charge, anyway?
Between 100km and 150km per 20kWh worth of battery charge. Exact mileage depends on car model. (e.g.: Tesla use lighter than average material and are designed from the ground up for longer ranges. Other cars are simply "an electric motor replacing the ICE under the bonnet and batteries bolted wherever there's free place" quick conversion like the VW e-Golf and VW e-Up that VW hastily released in the wake of the diesel scandal, and might have lower mileages). Also depends on the driver (driving like an aggressive idiot at high speed on the highway, and you'll get a lower range than driving conservatively maybe a bit under the maximum speed limit).
I can drive upwards of 3 hours without a break.
Which is *definitely* not recommanded. Current recommendations here around in continental Europe is a break each 1 or 2 hours max. (e.g.: There are big public service campaigns to advise drivers to have at least a quick "turbo-nap" every once in a while when driving long distance)
But let's make the assumption that you are 2 drivers sharing the load, and that you'll switch midway (without charging the car, nor making any break longer than required to change seat - no the best experience, but hey).
With an average-priced EV, that's not even near possible.
Renault Zoe are currently the cheapest e-cars with a decent battery. (You can even get them for the price of an average priced ICE-car if you decide to rent the battery instead of buying it). (They are definitely after the same market as Tesla's upcoming model 3, except that Zoes have been on the street for quite some time, and Renault chose the opposite progression from Tesla, release progressively longer range vehicle while staying affordable - instead of long range vehicles while progressively releasing cheaper models)
The latest model has upgraded the battery to 45kWh, which should give you between 200km and 300km of range. (depending on the speed/aggressiveness of driving 130km vs 100km on highway vs. 80km on streets between cities).
That's definitely in near the 3 hours of your example (and by now, both drivers of our assumption should get a nap, or at least make a long break - enough to put quite some additionnal range back into the battery using standard 50kW chargers) For a car that cost in the general ballpark figure of ~30k USD (not some 100k+ USD Tesla Model S super car).
And all of the above aren't made up numbers, but my actual experience with Zoes. They are available at the local car-sharing company (though not the more recent 45kWh battery), and I've already driven quite a lot of trip with them. I can easy get 100km when I drive aggressively or 150km when much more conservative.
The current drawback I see, is that Renault doesn't have collision avoidances option available on their smaller cars like the Zoe. (unlike VW where - like lots of european constructors - for the last several years even the lowest entry-level model like Up comes with a LIDAR [a.k.a. "City Safety"] in standard configurations, or unlike all the noise that Tesla is making around their "Autopilot" since a couple of years ago).
If I understand it right, it's a GNU/Linux distro without a Linux kernel on top of a compatibility layer on Windows, right?
Yup, mostly(*).
So "GNU/Windows NT Kernel" is better than "Linux" - That actually one of the rare few occastion a typical "GNU/Linux" distro gets used without the Linux kernel part.
But because "Linux" has brand recognition, it's still used.
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(*): there's no separate compatibility layer (unlike things like Cygwin which are a user-mode compatibility layer that translates POSIX API-calls into Win32 calls - and thus enables soure compatibility). The NT-Kernel has a bizare peculiarity : it can export several different ABI's to usermode software - it has different "personnalities". - Win32 is just *one* of the set of ABI available. - A long time ago, that made it possible to run OS/2 software on Windows NT. - A little bit less longer time ago, Windows NT also had a "Unix" personality. - Now WSL is actually the NT kernel exhibiting a small subset of the ABI featured by the linux kernel - about the bare minimum to get a few basic user-mode software (e,.g.: the "GNU" part of "GNU/Linux") run unmodified.
These are straight ABI available from the NT-Kernel, not a mere Linux-to-Win32 API conversion like Cygwin.
e.g.: - Among other defaults Win32 has a poor multi-processing (forking is expensive). Cygwin application have to rely on that poorer cousin in order to provide multi-processing to POSIX. - The recent kernels of Windows NT intoduced pico-thread which are very cheap, weren't available in the Win32 API back when introduced, but where exposed through the "Linux-lite" API that is WSL in order to make a usefull multiprocessing.
On the other hand WSL is far from complete. There is tons of stuff that you can do on your GNU/Linux that you can't do with WSL (e.g.: filesystem drivers)
Trolley buses are - unfortunately - only widespread in the former soviet union and its client states
CH, here. The country has mostly been neutral during cold war and is far from being a client state. But bigger cities here love trolley and trams too.
Electricity is easily available (thanks to alpine dams)
And city centers are rather densely populated - and thus the network of bus stops is also dense (you don't need hundreds of km of wire just to link 2 bus stops)
(for some reason soviet government seriously loved trolley buses, they have even built a trolley bus line in Afghanistan, back then they were there)
I would say that electric motors are simpler, smaller, easier to install into a vehicle. And are easy to ship around. Whereas ICE are more a custom job that is vehicle specific.
Thus it's much easier for a Sovietic planned economy to make a 5-years plan to build a huge mega factory in one client state (e.g.: Bulgaria) and ship motors and install them into bus through the whole communist world.
I'm curious: Unload truck onto train, ship, unload train onto truck, deliver? or Drive truck onto flatbed railcar, ship, drive truck off railcar, deliver? For trucks that are separate tractor trailer, just the trailer on the flatbed.
The law doesn't specify anything. But it seems to me that for logistic reasons, the 3rd option you mention is the most popular : the trailer is a standardized contrainer that can be moved from the truck to the train without needing to lose time for unloading/reloading the merchandise.
For cost reasons, any consumer electronic device will usually be implemented on the cheapest possible SoC with the bare minimum of unused resources (eMMC, RAM, MIPS etc.)
Nowadays ROM chips with a custom firmware burned in cost too much (add maybe a 0.5$ per unit), firmware is flashed on built-in EEPROM inside the SoC.
In theory, most of modern-day widgets have field-upgradeable firmware.
In practice, no company bothers to do the necessary work, specially since by the time the firmware upgrade is necessary, the device has already been sold and the money has been earned. There is no big immediate advantage in providing upgrade. It's an eventual long term advantage for the end-user, but by then the end-user can only regret having spent the money on the gadget. (e.g.: Not exactly wireless DAB radio, but out of all the wireless bluetooth speakers I've seen, only Logitech/Ultimate Ears bothers to make regular updates that actually add new features. None of the DAB radio I've owned has ever bothered releasing a firmware upgrade, even if some did advertise the possibility)
For lots of music usage (again, anything beyond the handheld DAB/FM receiver*) the "bare minimum SoC" is already quite powerful. e.g.: bigger multi-media device need AAC decoding capabilities (to play music from USB sticks / MP3 players in USB-Storage mode, etc.) - That's about what is needed to move a DAB-enabled device to DAB+. e.g.: In Vehicle Infotainment have a fuckton more processing power (Some high end device are the equivalent of a big over-powered tablet / a small netbook), that's way more than enough for playing DAB+ (or even support OPUS).
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*: the handhelds tend to be a single chip with a hardware DAB receiver piping its data straigh into a MP2/MP3 hardware core. There's no real CPU. This kind chip is designed to be used as a DAB solution for media devices. (e.g.: combine it with a CD player and a few such other parts, and you can make a cheap all-in-one audio device)
But the micro-controller on this SoC can run a firmware that gives it limited stand-alone properties: it can handle a few bare simple menus and can be wired straight to an LCD with a couple of buttons.
Thus, this kind of chip can be also useful to make dead-cheap handheld radios. (example of such radio: Revo Pico+ - though it wasn't sold at a cheap price back then)
I happen to live in a populated city that brags about having a ton of electric/hydrogen fueled vehicles (Porto, Portugal),
CH here.
Long range public transportation: We have an extensive train network (all electric, thus mostly hydro-electric and nuke powered, with a little bit of solar and wind sprinkled in) (Thank the *Alps* for nearly perfectly clean hydroelectric - unlike tropical hydroelectric which tends to be giant glorified swamps) It covers most of the territory except for remote less populated area (and as they are less populated, the long-range public transportation using busses hardly makes a dent in the total energy tally)
Short range: Most big cities have a dense network of tramway and trolley buses (aerial electric power delivery makes much more sense in a densely packed area) also sometime metro/subs for some cities. They are also joined by (diesel) bus. But the electric propotion of short-range transportation is quite significant and hardly just for the show.
Private companies in public transportation / ride sharing: Most taxi fleets in big cities tend to rely on hybrid vehicle (lower gaz consumption makes operations cheaper) the rise of Uber (mostly privately owned car with classical ICE drives) is actually a step backward environmentally. (But as taking transportation instead of driving a car around is better anyway, the end tally might not be bad).
Private companies car sharing: The main car sharing operator in Switzerland (mobility) operates a mixed fleet featuring ICE (mostly), hybrid (fewer) and electric vehicle (only a few, usually available at sharing stations where high electrical power is available : eg.: parking near trainstation usually feature 1 or 2 Renault Zoé. But other places feature them too. Random example : EPFL institute). From that point of view we are less ecologically advanced than france, where the dominating car sharing companies tend to have all-electric fleets (e.g.: Autolib in Paris). Though there are smaller CH player with electric fleets (e.g.: ElectrEasy)
So globally, in Switzerland, the role played by electricity in public transportation (specially by public company like national trains and city public transportation) is really significant.
Also, regarding merchandise : Switzerland is peculiar in that transport of merchandise *across* the country is *forbidden in trucks*. Trucks can be used to deliver merchandise to/from and within cities. But if you want to transport merchandise long distance or across the country, it's mandatory to load it on trains. When driving on the highway, you're going to see way much less trucks compared to other European countries (e.g.: Italy, France, Spain...)
Last but not least a few interesting corner case :
I few touristic cities (mostly in the mountains like Zermatt and Saas Fee) have completely banned ICE engines within the city (with a few exceptions like firefighters, ambulances) Thus nearly the whole fleet is small electric glof-cart-like cars and taxis. Fun to see (even if completely insignificant statistically to the rest of the country).
And I think that's genuinely the point of this: it would be possible to run a whole cluster of compute nodes with VEGA GPUs, and have all the data within a single unified address space across the whole cluster.
Just throw in a few IOMMU to handle access rights, and a fabric like Infiniband, or some PCI-E based one.
For bonus point have the storage it self being memory mapped non-volatile RAM (X-Point, etc.) (But then you DO run out of address space - clusters tend to have data in the peta-byte range).
Even if some pages emit ultrasound - others will play sound and remind me to always mute.
And the default behaviour in firefox is to display a small "speaker" icon next the title of any tab that plays audio. You can cut the audio off simply by clicking on the icon. On android, the non-focused tabs don't even play audio by default (it's not possible to listen to music in a background tab).
Even if some PCs emits ultrasound, who will leave a mic on and run receiving sw? Not me, for sure.If this gets popular, muting the mic will be standard . ..
The thing is : YOU might not be in control of the mic (that does the recording). The whole point is locating YOUR laptop. So by definition, the mic that is doing the recording is on some other hardware.
- That could be hardware purposefully left to record. - That could be the smartphone of some other user who's a lot less carefully than you (has a mic and location service both available, and currently abused by some random JS ad) - That could be the government. (In some phone, the portion of the radio chipset that is not under your personal control is able to record audio and position. Happens in some Qualcom SoC, where the radio chips works as a kind of "north bridge" to the rest. If mandated correctly, the information services of a country could remotely start to eavesdrop on whatever the phone is hearing around - as long as the radio chip is within range of a cell tower).
Only a tiny minirity nerds were ever wanking their micropeens over modular phones.
Meanwhile, Fairphone 2 is still selling well.
The key point is that, through their "environmental-friendly" policy, they have managed to find a way to make modules also appealing to a larger audience (modules means easier to repair a phone by swapping a broken component instead of throwing it away whole) and not only to the 3 geeks that are salivating about the idea of creating their own custom module to tap into the available internal USB pogopins.
Thus they have found a way to make modularity commercially viable and even trendy (by being eco-friendly).
We were just as early adopters, but in an effort to give as many as possible the finger it will be exclusively DAB+. So if you bought a DAB radio it has both been born and died in less time than most FM radios have lived.
Depends on the type of radio receiver.
DAB and DAB+ are nearly exactly the same. Same modulation, same DAB emmiter data stream, same list of radio channel, same menu of available stations. Only once you select a station inside the list available at the emitter, if it's a DAB one, you'll get an MP2-compressed audio stream with some old data correction scheme, if it's a DAB+ one, the audio stream will be AAC with Reed-Solomon error correction.
If you radio is a very low power one, with a single chip that handles everything in hardware (a portable hand held radio that should work with a few AA batteries), yup the SoC won't work with DAB+ because it only has a MP2/3 audio decompression hardware acceleration.
If it's anything bigger that can also play MP3/AAC/OGG files from a USB stick or SD-Card, then it's already has all the capability necessary to play a DAB+ station from the list available at your emitter. It should be only a software/firmware update. If it's not availble, it's only the manufacturer's fault of being lazy / wanting you to rebuy new hardware.
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+
Lots of countries have upgraded to DAB+ since, you might be among the few remaining.
The actual upgrade is pretty simple : DAB and DAB+ are more or less the same. The only difference is that some of the channels can provide an audio stream using a better error correction (Reed-Solomon) and a better codec (AAC instead of MP2). All the rest (signal modulation and packing audio-streams from different radio channels, into a single digital radio emitter) is still exactly the same. (And thus an emitter can still feature over a signle frequency a mix of DAB and DAB+ radio channels, and a legacy DAB reciever can still play the DAB channels).
For anything but the simplest all-in-one low power SoC (e.g.: small hand-held radio with a single embed chip with a hardware MP2 decoder), the upgrade is purely a software one (a media device that is able to play music in MP3/OGG/AAC formats from a USB stick has already the necessary capability to play AAC encoded audio and could use DAB+).
But for some weird reasons, lots of users got scammed into buying newer hardware... thus upgrading from DAB to DAB+ would seem a costly operation. And I think that's why some region haven't switched to DAB+ yet and wait for new hardware to slowly replace the old hardware.
I believed DAB failed because it was no big audio improvement since most people don't have high quality car stereos or just don't care.
There's a huge improvement that isn't qualitative but quantitative.
Using DAB/DAB+ its possible to pack a fuckton more radio channels in the same amount of frequencies.
That plays a critical role in the densely populated region that is continental Europe, where you might cross a border every few kilometers - each country having its own national radios, etc. e.g.: In central europe, you have regions where Germany, France and Switzerland are all within reach of each others radio waves. And the last one has *4 fucking official nationnal language*
In other words, the FM radio frequencies are quite overcrowded. If you want to push yet another nationnal radio channel it's going to be difficult. Good luck if you're a small local indie radio - getting license for a FM frequency is going to be hell.
DAB makes all of this much more easy: it's much more roomy for additional channels. even if your car speakers cannot notice the higher quality sound, the availability of radio channels is still something you can notice.
In the analog TV shutdown many people didn't changed TV but purchased a STB. There's no way to do that in cars where most people listen to radio.
It's just about swapping the DIN radio module in your car - can even be done by a motivated end-users.
On the other hand, in expensive high-end autos that have a whole infotainment center directly built in, that's indeed more complicated. Either you need an extra player (that you connect with the front AUX port, over bluetooth, or connected to the back AUX/CD-Loader or handsfree connector) - i.e.: the in-car equivalent of a STB(*) Or you need to upgrade-swap the radio module, which is going to be much more expensive and complicated because instead of a DIN standard it's some custom solution, which is proprietary to the car manufacturer... and that's hoping that the manufacturer actually has an upgrade available.
(*) : for technical reasons (catching traffic info over FM/DAB, some standalone GPS boxes have FM/DAB capability in addition to some MP3 player. So it might be possible that not even an extra box is needed).
the internet allows even more radiostations than DAB...
...but requires a working Internet connection. Please take notice that the summary speaks about Norway. A country that is in Europe, and not even in the EU. Europe is not a single country, but a lot of different countries, each with its local cellular service providers. As soon as you travel abroad, you're roaming, and internet connection can get quite expensive. Whereas DAB and FM are just available for free from the air.
Also :
- FM (RDS TMC) and DAB (TPEG) have very clear standard for emitting traffic informations, which - at least in Europe - is supported by the vast majority of hardware (in-vehicle infotainment, standalone GPS receivers, etc.) There isn't such a clear widely supported standard on internet. Google can provide a traffic overlay on their Maps service/app, but there's no standard way for that information to be propagated to your car's computer or your tomtom. (And again, there's going to be a lot of people use offline maps in their car or using a standalone device, because streaming data from the internet while not it your country costs a lot in Europe, and thus using Google Maps for driving direction isn't that much practical. - Not only less features, but also requires you to download maps in advance using their fugly clumsy interface. at which point a standalone device starts to sound much better).
- FM and DAB also have a standard way to do to temporarily switch channels for some critical/emergency announcement (interrupt the radio you are listening to announce that there's an accident ahead on the highway you're driving on and you need to be careful to avoid the mess on the road. Or that because of the snow, there's a barrage of snow-plows driving at 30 km/h on the same highway where you're driving 130 km/h. You can't overtake them and you need to adapt your speed to avoid colliding). This standard is supported by nearly any in-car radio for the past 20 years (i.e.: even old FM radios that might not be able to take advantage of all the other information available on the RDS channel can at least interrupt your music for an announcement). It even works while other media sources are playing (if you're listening to music on an USB stick, modern cars will pause their own media player, have you listen to the radio announcement, then resume your music). Even works over bluetooth (with the car emitting "pause" and "play" commands over bluetooth before/after the announcement, if the bluetooth player supports it).
As far as I know, Spotifiy on its own won't interrupt you for anything but advertisement (on free accounts). I doesn't support any traffic announcement. (and it would be problematic, because it would need GPS awareness and again costly data roaming). You still need the car being able to catch FM/DAB information to be able to interrupt the spotify playing on your tablet.
- And that's the practical implication. Then there's the matter of taste. Some people acutally enjoy listening to radio. Because of the music program, because of the talking heads, because of the news, etc. which currently aren't provided by internet streaming alternatives like spotify. Only provided by web radios - ie.: radio that stream also on the internet - ie.: provide over costly internet connection what they also provide for free over the air with DAB.
everybody with highschool education can build a receiver from scrap parts for it, for DAB, not so much.
Yup, it's not the same concept of "scrapt parts" (you're referring to electronic component lying around: resistors, transistors, condos, etc.) (I'm referring on the kind of scraps I have around : RaspPis, Arduinos, etc.) but it's still quite close to what a modern geek might have lying around. Even if QAM / QSPK are much more complicated than FM, it's still possible to hack some at home, and is much more relevant in the modern world (Except for analog broadcast radio and a few legacy handheld radio "walkie-talkie", who the hell gives a damn about Frequency modulation nowadays ?)
- Nope, there are also lots of city bus which are electric. These are quite popular in densely populated European city centers. (And as electricity production in Europe relies a lot less on burning fossils, these are definitely emitting a lot less).
- Also, as explained even in the summary : big vehicles like buses have much more stringent limitations in most European jurisdictions. So if you take a diesel-powered car, that perfectly following regulation, and a diesel-powered bus, that also perfectly follows regulation, the bus' diesel motor has a good chance of producing a lot less emissions (and also costing more and being more complexe on one hand, but on the other hand benefiting of being larger, and thus under less physical space constraints and less needs for compromises).
Yes, I fully understand that the problem faced when trying to save privacy are complex social ones.
I'm just pointing that, unlike what the above poster is saying, even from technical point of view, Snapchat's Silly Face are idiotic and un-interesting.
"Finding faces" used to by a technically interesting challenge 10 years ago. (And the first real-time camera-mapped avatars invented in the late 90s / early 2000s were *where* the new technological development was happening). (Snapchat's Silly Faces isn't anything new or technically interesting. It's just the same kind of technology like 10-20 years ago, except that, thanks to a lot of Moore's law - it doesn't fit in a whole datacenter, like Facebook's creepy face recognition at its beginning - nor in a TV studio's bit workstation, as real-time avatar did - but fits inside the smartphone in your pocket. And now with the processing power to run image filters at those coordinates, rather than simple 3D mesh avatars)
"NOT Finding Faces" is what is currently technically interesting for geeks.
(Note: I leave on the European side of the Atlantic pond. Here around we tend to have functional public transportation)
Simple test: everyday I board a train, I see tons of iOS and Android-powered tablets. A few laptops. And very seldom, once in a blue moon, I might see a Windows convertible hybrid.
Looks like, indeed, the general population doesn't seem to be that much interested into Windows powered hybrids - except for a couple of guys with weird requirement. (I've seen more Fairphones than that. Hell, I've probably even spotted more *Jolla phones*). (And I say that as a fully professed nerd with weird hardware requirement).
I think it's mix of, as you mention "Nobody cares about an 12" tablet " and as I mentioned above "I want all my apps here". In short, the in- / ability to run Android Apps completely out-weights any extra features mentioned by the AC above. Like: stylus, bigger screen, more GHz and bits (most people's reaction : "WTF are those numbers?"), Intel CPU (average joe's reaction :...doesn't give a damn as long as Facebook/e-mail/Chrome/Firefox/Spotify/Netflix/WhatsApp/SnapChat/Instagram etc. all run on it)
Then as, long as it packs their usual entertainment, the only thing people care about is price.
That explains the huge amount of "100$-150$" price range NoName chinese tablets (all featuring multiple windows, that nobody seems to be using anyway) that seems to have flooded the market. While at the same time, there is no flood of "powerful windows-running samsung hybrids - featuring stylus !".
If there's a real big winner of the current market trends, it's Mediatek (and other makers of dead cheap ARM SoC that can power tablet that basically cost the price of their display pannel).
Except nerds know that snapchat {...} implement it in a chat-application. And nerds would be interested in the technological aspects {...} at least the nerds slashdot was originally aimed at.
10 years ago, some/.er might have been interested in automatic matching a "feature mesh" over a photo with some OpenCV powered face recognition software. (So that any face edit meme that gets suddenly popular on something awful can quickly be implemented with a short script and rolled to snapchat end users with minimal originallity).
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals! Crowd:[in unison] Yes! We're all individuals! Brian: You're all different! Crowd:[in unison] Yes, we are all different! Man in crowd: I'm not... Crowd: Shhh!
Yup, it's a complete lack of originality.
Firing up GIMP (or Photoshop or whatever) to quickly make an original edit based on an idea that you just had (no matter if the result is a bit goofy) : that's funny, creative and something that *needs* to be encouraged in kids.
Snapchat making an automatic filter, and thousands of people posting millions of the exact same silly face using the exact same automatic filter, that's a complete lack of originality. It's not "childish", its boring. And most people are fed up with it.
After decades of/. geeks announcing the coming of the "Year of the Linux Desktop !", any time soon ! 2017 has finally brought us a new meme : It's going to be the "Year of the Windows smartphone/tablet !" any moment now !
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Seriously : Microsoft has completely and definitely lost this battle ages ago, about the time that Google's Android and Apple's iOS acheived a critical mass in their respective apps online stores. They are now the dominant eco-systems, on what has been becoming the most used platforms around.
And unlike all the other Linux alternatives on portable devices (e.g.: Jolla's Sailfish OS) that can also run Android apps (in this example, using the official commercial Alien Dalvik, or the community SFDroid) and thus tap into one of the dominant apps eco-system, Microsoft nearly completely failed at these attempts (at least they managed to save something that was salvageable and give "Windows Service for Linux", a.k.a. "Bash on Windows" a.k.a. GNU/Windows) and is left with a platform that no end user is interested in using, because there's nearly no apps on it, because no developer is interested to develop on an extra 3rd platform that currently has no user base at all.
Hey, Microsoft, how is it to be at the receiving end of the "network effect" that you've been abusing for so many years ?
Library works okay for standard protocols that are supported by the hardware (say SPI). Library works okay also for simply tuning on or of the pins to control relays.
Problem starts when you have a complex high speed digital protocol. (bit banging).
That's a bit complex to get right on a RPi. 3 wire progammable/adressable LEDs stripes are a notorious example of something that can be messy and where signal might get droped. 4-wire work perfectly well (the 2 extra wires speak SPI, RPi supports it at the hardware level). 3-wrires have their own specific protole. This would require precise control of the timing on the flipping of the GPIO pins. Which is a bit complex to achieve in a multi-tasking non hard RT environment like linux. (It's not impossible, but writing drivers that remains stable for a long time require a bit of skills. The same kind of skill as bit banging through the parallel port did require on PC hardware).
Meanwhile, "precisely controlling the timing of the flipping of the GPIO pins" is the raison-d'être of Arduino. You're as close to the metal asyou can get. There's no "background task" that risks stealing cycle and messing timings. You (or more likely, your compiler) controls everything that happens at the cycle level. That's why interfacing weird unusual digital protocols with an Arduino is much simpler.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't use profanity because my Facebook Friends are actual friends, acquaintances, family and stuff.
actual friends, family and stuff are also the people of whom you might not want to hurt feelings and opt to not outright tell everything which goes through your head
("you're ugly as shit", "you clothes/car/whatever is crap", "your idea is stupid and you should be burned in public in the town square for that", etc.)
but where you would restrain yourself
("you've got personality", "well, it's original and has got some charm", "it's a surprising idea").
So again they are the people to which you would "lie" (in a fashion. You're not actively trying to outright deceive them, just not transmitting 100% of the information) which is what this study tries to point out.
Let's be serious here. Three hours? The last long drive I did, my only stops were fuel stops. I was going for about six hours without stopping for anything, and only stopping for fuel and to pee. Stopping every two hours would be incredibly frustrating.
If you want to kill yourself in a car-crash because of attention deficit due to over-tiredness because your concept of a well rested and alert driver is "15 minutes tank-and-pee pause between every block of 6 hours of non-stop driving", be my guest.
But remember :
More seriously :
It is 6 hours of driving *total* (excluding the breaks) per work day, then a minimum of 4 hours of rest before the next work day[1]
(I.e.: on a continuous 18 hours bus trips, there should be 2 drivers switching seats)
For all purpose, there isn't a big use case for cars that can drive more 600 km in one go.
Car *can* do, for the convenience of not needing to tank at each stop.
But they are not that much necessary - cause the puny human meat at the driver seat can't reliabily drive safely for extended periods of time.
You either need several puny humans to cycle between. Or you need much longer breaks within these 600km that the car can handle.
So :
are already pretty much enough for most car needs with maybe only a few key exceptions (i.e.: alterning drivers for extremely long trip or people who are really a lot into the "suicide by tree" fad)
This is even more noticeable in the (slightly more) densely populate Europe which is a bit more conscious about its security (higher risk to crash into meaty humans instead of trees when there are more of them around instead of a dust desert), where big centers are close by (very often your travel destination is within a 300km drive anyway), and with a good electrical network with quite some power available (thanks to alpine dams, nukes, or renewable - depending on countries).
Of course, you could argue that all these are example of Nanny-state in our "evil-communist" socialist-leaning European coun
What range do you think EVs have on a single charge, anyway?
Between 100km and 150km per 20kWh worth of battery charge.
Exact mileage depends on car model.
(e.g.: Tesla use lighter than average material and are designed from the ground up for longer ranges.
Other cars are simply "an electric motor replacing the ICE under the bonnet and batteries bolted wherever there's free place" quick conversion like the VW e-Golf and VW e-Up that VW hastily released in the wake of the diesel scandal, and might have lower mileages).
Also depends on the driver (driving like an aggressive idiot at high speed on the highway, and you'll get a lower range than driving conservatively maybe a bit under the maximum speed limit).
I can drive upwards of 3 hours without a break.
Which is *definitely* not recommanded.
Current recommendations here around in continental Europe is a break each 1 or 2 hours max.
(e.g.: There are big public service campaigns to advise drivers to have at least a quick "turbo-nap" every once in a while when driving long distance)
But let's make the assumption that you are 2 drivers sharing the load, and that you'll switch midway (without charging the car, nor making any break longer than required to change seat - no the best experience, but hey).
With an average-priced EV, that's not even near possible.
Renault Zoe are currently the cheapest e-cars with a decent battery.
(You can even get them for the price of an average priced ICE-car if you decide to rent the battery instead of buying it).
(They are definitely after the same market as Tesla's upcoming model 3, except that Zoes have been on the street for quite some time, and Renault chose the opposite progression from Tesla, release progressively longer range vehicle while staying affordable - instead of long range vehicles while progressively releasing cheaper models)
The latest model has upgraded the battery to 45kWh, which should give you between 200km and 300km of range. (depending on the speed/aggressiveness of driving 130km vs 100km on highway vs. 80km on streets between cities).
That's definitely in near the 3 hours of your example (and by now, both drivers of our assumption should get a nap, or at least make a long break - enough to put quite some additionnal range back into the battery using standard 50kW chargers)
For a car that cost in the general ballpark figure of ~30k USD (not some 100k+ USD Tesla Model S super car).
And all of the above aren't made up numbers, but my actual experience with Zoes.
They are available at the local car-sharing company (though not the more recent 45kWh battery), and I've already driven quite a lot of trip with them.
I can easy get 100km when I drive aggressively or 150km when much more conservative.
The current drawback I see, is that Renault doesn't have collision avoidances option available on their smaller cars like the Zoe.
(unlike VW where - like lots of european constructors - for the last several years even the lowest entry-level model like Up comes with a LIDAR [a.k.a. "City Safety"] in standard configurations,
or unlike all the noise that Tesla is making around their "Autopilot" since a couple of years ago).
If I understand it right, it's a GNU/Linux distro without a Linux kernel on top of a compatibility layer on Windows, right?
Yup, mostly(*).
So "GNU/Windows NT Kernel" is better than "Linux" - That actually one of the rare few occastion a typical "GNU/Linux" distro gets used without the Linux kernel part.
But because "Linux" has brand recognition, it's still used.
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(*): there's no separate compatibility layer (unlike things like Cygwin which are a user-mode compatibility layer that translates POSIX API-calls into Win32 calls - and thus enables soure compatibility).
The NT-Kernel has a bizare peculiarity : it can export several different ABI's to usermode software - it has different "personnalities".
- Win32 is just *one* of the set of ABI available.
- A long time ago, that made it possible to run OS/2 software on Windows NT.
- A little bit less longer time ago, Windows NT also had a "Unix" personality.
- Now WSL is actually the NT kernel exhibiting a small subset of the ABI featured by the linux kernel - about the bare minimum to get a few basic user-mode software (e,.g.: the "GNU" part of "GNU/Linux") run unmodified.
These are straight ABI available from the NT-Kernel, not a mere Linux-to-Win32 API conversion like Cygwin.
e.g.:
- Among other defaults Win32 has a poor multi-processing (forking is expensive). Cygwin application have to rely on that poorer cousin in order to provide multi-processing to POSIX.
- The recent kernels of Windows NT intoduced pico-thread which are very cheap, weren't available in the Win32 API back when introduced, but where exposed through the "Linux-lite" API that is WSL in order to make a usefull multiprocessing.
On the other hand WSL is far from complete. There is tons of stuff that you can do on your GNU/Linux that you can't do with WSL (e.g.: filesystem drivers)
Then you could use either ReactOS in your VM, or run Wine straight in your userspace.
And again there are also companies supporting *that*.
(e.g.: CrossOver pays developers)
So *there is* company-sponsored efforts to be able to run windows programs in a GNU/LInux or Android/Linux environment.
Trolley buses are - unfortunately - only widespread in the former soviet union and its client states
CH, here. The country has mostly been neutral during cold war and is far from being a client state.
But bigger cities here love trolley and trams too.
Electricity is easily available (thanks to alpine dams)
And city centers are rather densely populated - and thus the network of bus stops is also dense (you don't need hundreds of km of wire just to link 2 bus stops)
(for some reason soviet government seriously loved trolley buses, they have even built a trolley bus line in Afghanistan, back then they were there)
I would say that electric motors are simpler, smaller, easier to install into a vehicle. And are easy to ship around.
Whereas ICE are more a custom job that is vehicle specific.
Thus it's much easier for a Sovietic planned economy to make a 5-years plan to build a huge mega factory in one client state (e.g.: Bulgaria) and ship motors and install them into bus through the whole communist world.
I'm curious:
Unload truck onto train, ship, unload train onto truck, deliver?
or
Drive truck onto flatbed railcar, ship, drive truck off railcar, deliver?
For trucks that are separate tractor trailer, just the trailer on the flatbed.
The law doesn't specify anything.
But it seems to me that for logistic reasons, the 3rd option you mention is the most popular :
the trailer is a standardized contrainer that can be moved from the truck to the train without needing to lose time for unloading/reloading the merchandise.
For cost reasons, any consumer electronic device will usually be implemented on the cheapest possible SoC with the bare minimum of unused resources (eMMC, RAM, MIPS etc.)
Nowadays ROM chips with a custom firmware burned in cost too much (add maybe a 0.5$ per unit), firmware is flashed on built-in EEPROM inside the SoC.
In theory, most of modern-day widgets have field-upgradeable firmware.
In practice, no company bothers to do the necessary work, specially since by the time the firmware upgrade is necessary, the device has already been sold and the money has been earned. There is no big immediate advantage in providing upgrade. It's an eventual long term advantage for the end-user, but by then the end-user can only regret having spent the money on the gadget.
(e.g.: Not exactly wireless DAB radio, but out of all the wireless bluetooth speakers I've seen, only Logitech/Ultimate Ears bothers to make regular updates that actually add new features. None of the DAB radio I've owned has ever bothered releasing a firmware upgrade, even if some did advertise the possibility)
For lots of music usage (again, anything beyond the handheld DAB/FM receiver*) the "bare minimum SoC" is already quite powerful.
e.g.: bigger multi-media device need AAC decoding capabilities (to play music from USB sticks / MP3 players in USB-Storage mode, etc.) - That's about what is needed to move a DAB-enabled device to DAB+.
e.g.: In Vehicle Infotainment have a fuckton more processing power (Some high end device are the equivalent of a big over-powered tablet / a small netbook), that's way more than enough for playing DAB+ (or even support OPUS).
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*: the handhelds tend to be a single chip with a hardware DAB receiver piping its data straigh into a MP2/MP3 hardware core. There's no real CPU.
This kind chip is designed to be used as a DAB solution for media devices.
(e.g.: combine it with a CD player and a few such other parts, and you can make a cheap all-in-one audio device)
But the micro-controller on this SoC can run a firmware that gives it limited stand-alone properties: it can handle a few bare simple menus and can be wired straight to an LCD with a couple of buttons.
Thus, this kind of chip can be also useful to make dead-cheap handheld radios.
(example of such radio: Revo Pico+ - though it wasn't sold at a cheap price back then)
I happen to live in a populated city that brags about having a ton of electric/hydrogen fueled vehicles (Porto, Portugal),
CH here.
Long range public transportation:
We have an extensive train network (all electric, thus mostly hydro-electric and nuke powered, with a little bit of solar and wind sprinkled in) (Thank the *Alps* for nearly perfectly clean hydroelectric - unlike tropical hydroelectric which tends to be giant glorified swamps)
It covers most of the territory except for remote less populated area (and as they are less populated, the long-range public transportation using busses hardly makes a dent in the total energy tally)
Short range:
Most big cities have a dense network of tramway and trolley buses (aerial electric power delivery makes much more sense in a densely packed area) also sometime metro/subs for some cities.
They are also joined by (diesel) bus. But the electric propotion of short-range transportation is quite significant and hardly just for the show.
Private companies in public transportation / ride sharing:
Most taxi fleets in big cities tend to rely on hybrid vehicle (lower gaz consumption makes operations cheaper)
the rise of Uber (mostly privately owned car with classical ICE drives) is actually a step backward environmentally. (But as taking transportation instead of driving a car around is better anyway, the end tally might not be bad).
Private companies car sharing:
The main car sharing operator in Switzerland (mobility) operates a mixed fleet featuring ICE (mostly), hybrid (fewer) and electric vehicle (only a few, usually available at sharing stations where high electrical power is available : eg.: parking near trainstation usually feature 1 or 2 Renault Zoé. But other places feature them too. Random example : EPFL institute).
From that point of view we are less ecologically advanced than france, where the dominating car sharing companies tend to have all-electric fleets (e.g.: Autolib in Paris).
Though there are smaller CH player with electric fleets (e.g.: ElectrEasy)
So globally, in Switzerland, the role played by electricity in public transportation (specially by public company like national trains and city public transportation) is really significant.
Also, regarding merchandise :
Switzerland is peculiar in that transport of merchandise *across* the country is *forbidden in trucks*.
Trucks can be used to deliver merchandise to/from and within cities.
But if you want to transport merchandise long distance or across the country, it's mandatory to load it on trains.
When driving on the highway, you're going to see way much less trucks compared to other European countries (e.g.: Italy, France, Spain...)
Last but not least a few interesting corner case :
I few touristic cities (mostly in the mountains like Zermatt and Saas Fee) have completely banned ICE engines within the city (with a few exceptions like firefighters, ambulances)
Thus nearly the whole fleet is small electric glof-cart-like cars and taxis.
Fun to see (even if completely insignificant statistically to the rest of the country).
Fixed the title for you.
And I think that's genuinely the point of this:
it would be possible to run a whole cluster of compute nodes with VEGA GPUs,
and have all the data within a single unified address space across the whole cluster.
Just throw in a few IOMMU to handle access rights, and a fabric like Infiniband, or some PCI-E based one.
For bonus point have the storage it self being memory mapped non-volatile RAM (X-Point, etc.)
(But then you DO run out of address space - clusters tend to have data in the peta-byte range).
Even if some pages emit ultrasound - others will play sound and remind me to always mute.
And the default behaviour in firefox is to display a small "speaker" icon next the title of any tab that plays audio.
You can cut the audio off simply by clicking on the icon.
On android, the non-focused tabs don't even play audio by default (it's not possible to listen to music in a background tab).
Even if some PCs emits ultrasound, who will leave a mic on and run receiving sw? Not me, for sure.If this gets popular, muting the mic will be standard . . .
The thing is : YOU might not be in control of the mic (that does the recording).
The whole point is locating YOUR laptop. So by definition, the mic that is doing the recording is on some other hardware.
- That could be hardware purposefully left to record.
- That could be the smartphone of some other user who's a lot less carefully than you (has a mic and location service both available, and currently abused by some random JS ad)
- That could be the government. (In some phone, the portion of the radio chipset that is not under your personal control is able to record audio and position. Happens in some Qualcom SoC, where the radio chips works as a kind of "north bridge" to the rest.
If mandated correctly, the information services of a country could remotely start to eavesdrop on whatever the phone is hearing around - as long as the radio chip is within range of a cell tower).
Only a tiny minirity nerds were ever wanking their micropeens over modular phones.
Meanwhile, Fairphone 2 is still selling well.
The key point is that, through their "environmental-friendly" policy, they have managed to find a way to make modules also appealing to a larger audience
(modules means easier to repair a phone by swapping a broken component instead of throwing it away whole)
and not only to the 3 geeks that are salivating about the idea of creating their own custom module to tap into the available internal USB pogopins.
Thus they have found a way to make modularity commercially viable and even trendy (by being eco-friendly).
We were just as early adopters, but in an effort to give as many as possible the finger it will be exclusively DAB+. So if you bought a DAB radio it has both been born and died in less time than most FM radios have lived.
Depends on the type of radio receiver.
DAB and DAB+ are nearly exactly the same.
Same modulation, same DAB emmiter data stream, same list of radio channel, same menu of available stations.
Only once you select a station inside the list available at the emitter, if it's a DAB one, you'll get an MP2-compressed audio stream with some old data correction scheme, if it's a DAB+ one, the audio stream will be AAC with Reed-Solomon error correction.
If you radio is a very low power one, with a single chip that handles everything in hardware (a portable hand held radio that should work with a few AA batteries), yup the SoC won't work with DAB+ because it only has a MP2/3 audio decompression hardware acceleration.
If it's anything bigger that can also play MP3/AAC/OGG files from a USB stick or SD-Card, then it's already has all the capability necessary to play a DAB+ station from the list available at your emitter.
It should be only a software/firmware update. If it's not availble, it's only the manufacturer's fault of being lazy / wanting you to rebuy new hardware.
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+
Lots of countries have upgraded to DAB+ since, you might be among the few remaining.
The actual upgrade is pretty simple : DAB and DAB+ are more or less the same. The only difference is that some of the channels can provide an audio stream using a better error correction (Reed-Solomon) and a better codec (AAC instead of MP2). All the rest (signal modulation and packing audio-streams from different radio channels, into a single digital radio emitter) is still exactly the same. (And thus an emitter can still feature over a signle frequency a mix of DAB and DAB+ radio channels, and a legacy DAB reciever can still play the DAB channels).
For anything but the simplest all-in-one low power SoC (e.g.: small hand-held radio with a single embed chip with a hardware MP2 decoder), the upgrade is purely a software one (a media device that is able to play music in MP3/OGG/AAC formats from a USB stick has already the necessary capability to play AAC encoded audio and could use DAB+).
But for some weird reasons, lots of users got scammed into buying newer hardware... thus upgrading from DAB to DAB+ would seem a costly operation. And I think that's why some region haven't switched to DAB+ yet and wait for new hardware to slowly replace the old hardware.
I believed DAB failed because it was no big audio improvement since most people don't have high quality car stereos or just don't care.
There's a huge improvement that isn't qualitative but quantitative.
Using DAB/DAB+ its possible to pack a fuckton more radio channels in the same amount of frequencies.
That plays a critical role in the densely populated region that is continental Europe, where you might cross a border every few kilometers - each country having its own national radios, etc.
e.g.: In central europe, you have regions where Germany, France and Switzerland are all within reach of each others radio waves. And the last one has *4 fucking official nationnal language*
In other words, the FM radio frequencies are quite overcrowded. If you want to push yet another nationnal radio channel it's going to be difficult. Good luck if you're a small local indie radio - getting license for a FM frequency is going to be hell.
DAB makes all of this much more easy: it's much more roomy for additional channels.
even if your car speakers cannot notice the higher quality sound, the availability of radio channels is still something you can notice.
In the analog TV shutdown many people didn't changed TV but purchased a STB. There's no way to do that in cars where most people listen to radio.
It's just about swapping the DIN radio module in your car - can even be done by a motivated end-users.
On the other hand, in expensive high-end autos that have a whole infotainment center directly built in, that's indeed more complicated.
Either you need an extra player (that you connect with the front AUX port, over bluetooth, or connected to the back AUX/CD-Loader or handsfree connector) - i.e.: the in-car equivalent of a STB(*)
Or you need to upgrade-swap the radio module, which is going to be much more expensive and complicated because instead of a DIN standard it's some custom solution, which is proprietary to the car manufacturer... and that's hoping that the manufacturer actually has an upgrade available.
(*) : for technical reasons (catching traffic info over FM/DAB, some standalone GPS boxes have FM/DAB capability in addition to some MP3 player. So it might be possible that not even an extra box is needed).
the internet allows even more radiostations than DAB...
...but requires a working Internet connection. Please take notice that the summary speaks about Norway. A country that is in Europe, and not even in the EU.
Europe is not a single country, but a lot of different countries, each with its local cellular service providers.
As soon as you travel abroad, you're roaming, and internet connection can get quite expensive.
Whereas DAB and FM are just available for free from the air.
Also :
- FM (RDS TMC) and DAB (TPEG) have very clear standard for emitting traffic informations, which - at least in Europe - is supported by the vast majority of hardware (in-vehicle infotainment, standalone GPS receivers, etc.)
There isn't such a clear widely supported standard on internet. Google can provide a traffic overlay on their Maps service/app, but there's no standard way for that information to be propagated to your car's computer or your tomtom.
(And again, there's going to be a lot of people use offline maps in their car or using a standalone device, because streaming data from the internet while not it your country costs a lot in Europe, and thus using Google Maps for driving direction isn't that much practical. - Not only less features, but also requires you to download maps in advance using their fugly clumsy interface. at which point a standalone device starts to sound much better).
- FM and DAB also have a standard way to do to temporarily switch channels for some critical/emergency announcement (interrupt the radio you are listening to announce that there's an accident ahead on the highway you're driving on and you need to be careful to avoid the mess on the road. Or that because of the snow, there's a barrage of snow-plows driving at 30 km/h on the same highway where you're driving 130 km/h. You can't overtake them and you need to adapt your speed to avoid colliding).
This standard is supported by nearly any in-car radio for the past 20 years (i.e.: even old FM radios that might not be able to take advantage of all the other information available on the RDS channel can at least interrupt your music for an announcement). It even works while other media sources are playing (if you're listening to music on an USB stick, modern cars will pause their own media player, have you listen to the radio announcement, then resume your music). Even works over bluetooth (with the car emitting "pause" and "play" commands over bluetooth before/after the announcement, if the bluetooth player supports it).
As far as I know, Spotifiy on its own won't interrupt you for anything but advertisement (on free accounts). I doesn't support any traffic announcement. (and it would be problematic, because it would need GPS awareness and again costly data roaming).
You still need the car being able to catch FM/DAB information to be able to interrupt the spotify playing on your tablet.
- And that's the practical implication.
Then there's the matter of taste. Some people acutally enjoy listening to radio. Because of the music program, because of the talking heads, because of the news, etc. which currently aren't provided by internet streaming alternatives like spotify.
Only provided by web radios - ie.: radio that stream also on the internet - ie.: provide over costly internet connection what they also provide for free over the air with DAB.
everybody with highschool education can build a receiver from scrap parts for it, for DAB, not so much.
RTL-SDR would like to disagree with you.
Yup, it's not the same concept of "scrapt parts" (you're referring to electronic component lying around: resistors, transistors, condos, etc.) (I'm referring on the kind of scraps I have around : RaspPis, Arduinos, etc.) but it's still quite close to what a modern geek might have lying around.
Even if QAM / QSPK are much more complicated than FM, it's still possible to hack some at home, and is much more relevant in the modern world (Except for analog broadcast radio and a few legacy handheld radio "walkie-talkie", who the hell gives a damn about Frequency modulation nowadays ?)
I'm ruining your recursive joke but :
- Nope, there are also lots of city bus which are electric. These are quite popular in densely populated European city centers. (And as electricity production in Europe relies a lot less on burning fossils, these are definitely emitting a lot less).
- Also, as explained even in the summary : big vehicles like buses have much more stringent limitations in most European jurisdictions.
So if you take a diesel-powered car, that perfectly following regulation,
and a diesel-powered bus, that also perfectly follows regulation,
the bus' diesel motor has a good chance of producing a lot less emissions
(and also costing more and being more complexe on one hand, but on the other hand benefiting of being larger, and thus under less physical space constraints and less needs for compromises).
You're quoting the same "Life of Brian" quote that everybody who complains about other peoples' lack of originality use.
I think the word you're looking for is "Meta".
Yes, I fully understand that the problem faced when trying to save privacy are complex social ones.
I'm just pointing that, unlike what the above poster is saying, even from technical point of view, Snapchat's Silly Face are idiotic and un-interesting.
"Finding faces" used to by a technically interesting challenge 10 years ago.
(And the first real-time camera-mapped avatars invented in the late 90s / early 2000s were *where* the new technological development was happening).
(Snapchat's Silly Faces isn't anything new or technically interesting. It's just the same kind of technology like 10-20 years ago, except that, thanks to a lot of Moore's law - it doesn't fit in a whole datacenter, like Facebook's creepy face recognition at its beginning - nor in a TV studio's bit workstation, as real-time avatar did - but fits inside the smartphone in your pocket. And now with the processing power to run image filters at those coordinates, rather than simple 3D mesh avatars)
"NOT Finding Faces" is what is currently technically interesting for geeks.
(Note: I leave on the European side of the Atlantic pond. Here around we tend to have functional public transportation)
Simple test: everyday I board a train, I see tons of iOS and Android-powered tablets. A few laptops. And very seldom, once in a blue moon, I might see a Windows convertible hybrid.
Looks like, indeed, the general population doesn't seem to be that much interested into Windows powered hybrids - except for a couple of guys with weird requirement.
(I've seen more Fairphones than that. Hell, I've probably even spotted more *Jolla phones*).
(And I say that as a fully professed nerd with weird hardware requirement).
I think it's mix of, as you mention "Nobody cares about an 12" tablet " and as I mentioned above "I want all my apps here". ...doesn't give a damn as long as Facebook/e-mail/Chrome/Firefox/Spotify/Netflix/WhatsApp/SnapChat/Instagram etc. all run on it)
In short, the in- / ability to run Android Apps completely out-weights any extra features mentioned by the AC above. Like: stylus, bigger screen, more GHz and bits (most people's reaction : "WTF are those numbers?"), Intel CPU (average joe's reaction :
Then as, long as it packs their usual entertainment, the only thing people care about is price.
That explains the huge amount of "100$-150$" price range NoName chinese tablets (all featuring multiple windows, that nobody seems to be using anyway) that seems to have flooded the market.
While at the same time, there is no flood of "powerful windows-running samsung hybrids - featuring stylus !".
If there's a real big winner of the current market trends, it's Mediatek (and other makers of dead cheap ARM SoC that can power tablet that basically cost the price of their display pannel).
And, by the way, there's a real Linux Foundation project for In-Vehicle Information (IVI) linux distributions.
They provide core functionnality, which can then subsequently be customized by vendors.
Except nerds know that snapchat {...} implement it in a chat-application. And nerds would be interested in the technological aspects {...} at least the nerds slashdot was originally aimed at.
10 years ago, some /.er might have been interested in automatic matching a "feature mesh" over a photo with some OpenCV powered face recognition software.
(So that any face edit meme that gets suddenly popular on something awful can quickly be implemented with a short script and rolled to snapchat end users with minimal originallity).
Nowadays, the interests of most /.er is in how *NOT* to have their face detected by the apps.
Common where have you been hidden during the last 10 Chaos Computing Club Congresses ???
Yup, it's a complete lack of originality.
Firing up GIMP (or Photoshop or whatever) to quickly make an original edit based on an idea that you just had (no matter if the result is a bit goofy) : that's funny, creative and something that *needs* to be encouraged in kids.
Snapchat making an automatic filter,
and thousands of people posting millions of the exact same silly face using the exact same automatic filter,
that's a complete lack of originality.
It's not "childish", its boring. And most people are fed up with it.
After decades of /. geeks announcing the coming of the "Year of the Linux Desktop !", any time soon !
2017 has finally brought us a new meme : It's going to be the "Year of the Windows smartphone/tablet !" any moment now !
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Seriously : Microsoft has completely and definitely lost this battle ages ago, about the time that Google's Android and Apple's iOS acheived a critical mass in their respective apps online stores.
They are now the dominant eco-systems, on what has been becoming the most used platforms around.
And unlike all the other Linux alternatives on portable devices (e.g.: Jolla's Sailfish OS) that can also run Android apps (in this example, using the official commercial Alien Dalvik, or the community SFDroid) and thus tap into one of the dominant apps eco-system,
Microsoft nearly completely failed at these attempts (at least they managed to save something that was salvageable and give "Windows Service for Linux", a.k.a. "Bash on Windows" a.k.a. GNU/Windows) and is left with a platform that no end user is interested in using, because there's nearly no apps on it, because no developer is interested to develop on an extra 3rd platform that currently has no user base at all.
Hey, Microsoft, how is it to be at the receiving end of the "network effect" that you've been abusing for so many years ?
Library works okay for standard protocols that are supported by the hardware (say SPI).
Library works okay also for simply tuning on or of the pins to control relays.
Problem starts when you have a complex high speed digital protocol.
(bit banging).
That's a bit complex to get right on a RPi. 3 wire progammable/adressable LEDs stripes are a notorious example of something that can be messy and where signal might get droped. 4-wire work perfectly well (the 2 extra wires speak SPI, RPi supports it at the hardware level).
3-wrires have their own specific protole. This would require precise control of the timing on the flipping of the GPIO pins.
Which is a bit complex to achieve in a multi-tasking non hard RT environment like linux. (It's not impossible, but writing drivers that remains stable for a long time require a bit of skills. The same kind of skill as bit banging through the parallel port did require on PC hardware).
Meanwhile, "precisely controlling the timing of the flipping of the GPIO pins" is the raison-d'être of Arduino.
You're as close to the metal asyou can get. There's no "background task" that risks stealing cycle and messing timings.
You (or more likely, your compiler) controls everything that happens at the cycle level.
That's why interfacing weird unusual digital protocols with an Arduino is much simpler.