The only bigger company of significance which is _not_ member of AOM is apple, who suprise suprise sits at the MPEG table and makes bucks with their H.265 patents.
Which also explain why they insist of using AAC for everything audio, despite the tremendous success and performance of Opus - the previous similar success story of company collaboration (Xiph and Skype) to provide a standard to the IETF.
(Opus is currently used by Skype, WhatsApp, etc. - basically if it's on the web today, it probably uses Opus as an audio codec).
(I really wish IETF and AOMedia similar succes for their NetVC initiative/AV1 codec.
It is also why Vorbis (audio) is much more successful than Theora (video). Both are patent-free formats from xiph.org.
That's 1 of the reason. But other reasons are in play:
- Vorbis was released back at a time when music decoding was still an important task for low-power embed devices. And MP3-hardware decoding cheap where available for cheap. By the time most PDA/Smartphones/Tablet had enough power to decode audio on CPU without any difficulties, other better competitor were starting to appear: things like AAC (which are not free and patent encumbered). Meaning Vorbis wasn't competitive anymore.
Vorbis still saw quite some use as a audio/soundtrack codec for video games. (It just simply did attract much attention the role it played into this position).
- Vorbis itself has been superseeded. Opus is the successor, partly developped by the same Xiph guys, partly developped based on technology donated by Skype. The result is a codec that beats the crap out of anything else (except for some very special corner cases at a tiny bandwidth that isn't relevant on the internet). Including out of AAC. It's royalty free, not patent encumbered with available opensource code. It's established as an official standard for web audio by IETF. This it is widely use by tons of modern applications: Skype (obviously), WhatsApp, etc.
So the main reason that Vorbis isn't successful these days, is because Opus is.
Now keep in mind that IETF has a video codec work group called NetVC, and that AOMedia (Alliance for Openmedia) is working to provide them with codec AV1 ant that alliance includes the same Xiph guys, but also other codec makes (Google [VP10], Cisco [Thor]), browser makers (Google, Mozilla, Microsoft) content providers (Google [Youtube], Netflix) and hardware makers (ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia)
There's a high chance that the same will happen in the video world, with AV1 taking everything just like Opus for the audio.
The IETF has a working group to produce a new gen video codec "NetVC" (Designed to be easy for wide adoptions, as the previous efforts of the IETF like Opus for audio).
The main candidate is by a group called "AOMedia" (association for openmedia), working on AV1 (AOMedia's Video codec 1).
The association includes: - Google (of Youtube fame) : They are using their current development as a base for AV1 (what would have become VP10 if there wasn't this whole NetVC story). - Xiph (of Vorbis and Opus fame, with also contributions toward Flac, Speex, etc.) : They are developing a very interesting project called Daala, and they ended up also contributing the innovation done for Daala into AV1. - Cisco : They gave what they have developed for their Thor codec also into AV1.
Netflix has also joined the AOMedia and they are investing resources into it. Same with several browser makers (including Mozilla).
With all the people involved: - you know there's some interesting performance coming (given the brains involved here, given past successes like Opus, and given the promising results of research projects like Daala). - given that 2 top content providers like Google (Youtube) and Netflix are on board, there's a high chance of seeing deployment of the new codec. - given that browser makers like Google (chrome), Mozilla, and Microsoft (Edge) are on board, there's a high chance of seeing browser support for the new codec. - given that hardware chip maker like ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc. are on board there's going to be hardware decoding support.
(Adobe is on board too, so browser support is guaranteed for the Widevine DRM plug-in required by Netflix' licensors. Not that it matters that much, because that part of HTML5 Video is already defined and deployed everywhere, except maybe with Firefox on Linux which is a bit delayed)
But you know that this looks promision, and maybe same time next year, we'd be reading summaries along the lines of "Netflix and Google find AV1 20% more efficient than HEVC/H.265" "And also cheaper, royalty-free and widely supported"
As for the Ars Technica op-ed, urging SpaceX to "focus" on NASA's priorities, I suspect that Elon will still reveal his plans for the MCT at the upcoming Int'l Astronautical Conference, {...} And I think he will probably take some of the advice from Ars... perhaps announcing that MCT will be put on the "back burner" for a while, so that they can get Crew Dragon and Falcon Heavy flying ASAP.
(Disclaimer [with McCoy's voice]: I am a Doctor, not a Rocket Scientist)
Okay let's spend a few minutes thinking about Mars colonisation.
An actual colonisation will require slightly more than "simply" putting a probe one Mars. (Not that putting a probe there is an easy feat by itself, as attested by past failures. Hence the quotes)
Colonisation would require sending tons of equipement in advance to wait for the colon at their future landing site. (Basically anything that they can built from raw local material, or grow themselves in a farm) (Think the landing site as depicted in the "Martian") That's quite some cargo, much more than what a "tiny" probe.
Then - once the landing site is ready to receive them equipment-wise - you also need to ship the colons themselves. Again you're not just launching one single guy (Yuri Gagarin's style) you'll be launching a whole crew. And unlike the Apollo missions to the moon, this crew isn't there for a "short" ride (that spans a couple of days) meaning that they could basically be okay all by themselves with only basic life-support (metaphorically: a ride on a car, where you just pack some snack). This crew is going to be travel for several months, requiring a much complex and bigger habitat (metaphorically: a ride on the trans-syberian train - a whole hotel on rails). (Think the interplanetary ships depicted in harder sci-fi like 2001 Space Odyssey, etc.) That's again quite a big ship.
(Also lots of other ancillary equipement might need to be shipped. E.g.: communication relay satellites at Earth's and Mars' L4 and L5 point to relay data and messages when the planets aren't close and the sun's in the way)
All the above are going to weight quite a lot. And are going to require some fuel for all the manoeuvres required to shift from Earth's to Mars' orbits.
If you hope to kick them all out of Earth's gravity well in one single go and straight to Mars from there, you're going to hit the rocket equation really hard. (Moving all the fuck tons of payload over the whole course is going to require extremely powerful rockets and gargantuan amounts of fuel, which in turn add to the weight and requires even more bazillions of fuel).
So unless there's some miraculous revolutions in term of space-propulsion (like suddenly the emDrive getting well understood, confirming to be very effective, scaling well, and usable even for take-off and landing. And this coupled with the research in polywell-style fusors giving us extremely compact and efficient fusion reactors to power said mega-huge emDrive) (or material engineering jumping suddenly so much forward that a space elevator gets built within a decade), the next best probable course of action is to slowly put all the necessary stuff in orbit step by step, and slowly build a "trans-orbital ferry ship" in orbit. (Think assembling the ISS - only not so big). Then once enough content have been put out of earth gravity well, have the "space ferry" do a trip to mars orbit, drop part of its payload, then come back for more refilling/reloading, then again. Use the ferry multiple time on multiple trips (or even assemble a couple of such "space ferries" in earth's orbit) and you can transport everything you need to mars in several goes. By the time it's finally the turn to bring astronauts, the "space ferry" technology would have been tested enough to be usable to transport the people and their habitat.
For the above to succeed, you don't need 1 single ultra-massive "mars-ca
Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.
Except that the chair is a physical object requiring a transfer of a physical object. There's no way to have "chairness" without having physical chairs moved around.
To keep your metaphor, the current situation is that for historical reasons, they have a different payment model: they ask to pay each time you sit down on a chair. They'll happily provide you a chair for free, even an expensive one that would be worth 1500$ of a handscrafting. But all their chairs come with a contract stating that you must pay 10 cents each time you put your ass them.
(And if you think of it, it's not necessarily that weird: movie theaters have been basically selling you tickets to the privilege of coming an siting on their chairs, with the selling point being that there's a movie projected on a wall in front of the chairs).
And now they complain that their business (again: their business is not the creation of the chair itself, but the collecting a tax on the use of chairs) is losing money, because evil pirates have learned to home-build their own chairs using planks, more recently beer crates, and nowadays people are 3D-printing their own designs).
The metaphore isn't perfect, because in the case of recorded-media, the *designs* of chair would all come from the same person. (Works a little bit better in the case of printed media/online journals: par of their competition is due to simply readers prefering to look at blogs for free instead of paying for quality journalism. They would prefere to reuse a beer crate that they already have laying around ratter than pay the 10c tax per sitting, even if that means that the 1500$ worth chair won't get re-imbursed).
And these 10c per sitting are really close to what is happening with digital media.
Back in historical times, when the music/etc, industries all started developing, the act of distributing the content was a very difficult and expensive part of the process: you needing to produce physical media, you needed logistics to move around said physical media, you needed physical outlets with employee to sell that physical media, etc. so it made sense back then to extract money to cover the whole pipeline at the point of distribution of content: the price of the disc doesn't only cover the physical object, the but the whole pipeline, starting from money that will be spent to pay the artists for the act of creation, all the way to the shop paying its employee through the difference between the bulk price they get for the discs and what they write on the shelf.
But slowly, the ability of home-recording first, and then later the ease to pass around digital media, specially thanks to internet, has made the whole distribution chain irrelevant. The thing where money is asked (the right for you to get a copy that you can play) is literally the cheapest and simplest step of the pipeline (as proven multiple times in recent history by sharing sites or software) - we are metaphorically doing the equivalent of asking 10c for the act of sitting. The problem is that there are other steps (act of creation) that require money (artists need to eat), but don't get that money directly but used to get money with a processus that isn't relevant anymore: somewhere, there's a guy still spending his work to make 1500$ chairs, but as collecting 10c per sitting is as stupid as it sounds, this chair maker isn't getting paid anymore. Because on one hand people prefer to sit on empty beer crates (people reading free blogs instead of press) and other people simply push a button on their 3D printer to make themselves an exact copy of the 1500$ chair that he spent hours making and will never get paid for it).
So right now we are finding different ways to make money for digital content.
Yup, we're slowly starting to try to invent the concept of selling actual
He basically wants the right to secretly dig a tunnel under your home, sneak in while you're not there, steal whatever they want, and leave without anyone knowing it. Except in your phone.
Even worse: he want the tunnels being pre-dug (= "backdoors").
You know how in Switzerland every house has a mandatory under-ground shelter ?
What he wants is every single house in the USA having a mandatory underground tunnel that leads to a nearby police station. A *secret* tunnel that you're forbidden to know about when you buy your house. That's what an encryption backdoor is the equivalent of : a mandatory secret back-door built in every house in the USA.
And with the automation and international connection that is available on the internet, the real-world situation is even worse than this putative mandatory tunnel. (Now the metaphor is getting a bit harder...)
It would be as if the police station had an nearly infinite amount of low-ranking police personal that could devote their entire time to travel the tunnel each day, sneak into your house every single day, and take a picture of you naked in your shower. And not only you personnally, but though every tunnel, available in every single home built on US soil under US building code. Each fucking day.
But said local police station lacks trained and experienced detective to do anything useful out of the photos/objects/proofs brought back from by the agents.
And meanwhile, all the people living outside of the USA are completely immune to it because their local building code either don't mandate the tunnel (and thus, the US police agents can't even use this tunnel network to peak into the homes of ISIS terrorists, although that was the main selling point of the tunnel network when it was voted in) Or mandate an entirely different type of tunnel that the US police has never heard off (and leaves some part of the US population at risk, because they buy and install a port-a-potty from China, and never realise that these come with tunnels leading directly into their chinese secret police).
All the while the Russia mafia has trained an incredibly huge army of burglars to roam the US (and Chinese) networks of secret tunnels, stealing as much as possible from every house they happen to reach. And even sometimes using your own house as a base of operation to commit crimes while you're away for work. (botnets).
At the end of the operation, maybe 1 single terrorist happens to get caught due to random chance. And maybe due to the fact that he was bragging that he is a terrorist the whole day in the middle of the street ( = wasn't even using encryption at all. Just plain text SMS.) At the same time there will be millions of damage due to stolen property through the tunnels network. ( = just have a look at the massive data leaks that you have *today* when hacker still go through the long round about route of actually hacking into servers. Now think how much more damage would be done when the hack don't actually even bother to hack, but just leverage the backdoors that are mandated by the various governments)
: a device that steers a ship, aircraft, or spacecraft in place of a person
Note the "in place of a person".
Note also the "device that steers" (it more or less keeps a trajectory fro the plane/ship, or in the case of cars like BMW, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, etc. it keeps a lane).
Not "device that handle entirely automatically the complete travel from point A to point B" (that would be an *AUTONOMOUS* car, like Google's, some subs in big cities, busses by other startups. Or simply horses and donkeys).
Cars' driving assistance like Tesla's Autopilot actually behave exactly like the autopilot in a plane or on a ship. You just need to actually know what an autopilot actually does.
I am actually following the "silly wire drone interceptor" discussion (a.k.a: admit you always wanted to build yourself a "Spiderman Gun" !)
If you have problems typing your story on the phone, try using a keyboard (I have an original Think Outside keyboard left from my PalmOS days, that still works perfectly with my current Jolla Phone - Nowadays, the foldable you get from Geyes on Amazon are of slightly less good quality).
externally-powered microUSB OTG hub is another solution that works with any USB keyboard you have around.
So you send ballots to everyone, even those who have no desire to vote, and have not bothered to study any of the issues at all because of that. Why should they be voting if they really care so little about the process?
Surprisingly, that's exactly how things work in some democracies, specially in direct democracies where population is always voting on everything (e.g.: Switzerland).
People un-interested in voting generally throw away the ballot. (Though probably there are few trying to find way around the - relatively simple - voter identification, and try to cast illegally an extra vote)
But such widespread diffusion of ballots is necessary in a country which votes every couple of months instead of every couple of year.
I miss the old Apple where products actually worked
You mean like the first iPhone, that had a battery that barely held a couple of hours, and certainly not to the end of the day ?
---
At the time they released their crap, I had : - an old EPOC-running Ericsson stupid phone. With which I could go on vacations *without* taking a charger. (Similar to all the Nokia that people still have, lost somewhere at the bottom of a drawer. Still in working order. With the battery still at ~30%) - paired over bluetooth to a PalmOS 5.x running PDA, that could do anything that the iPhone did back then (web, e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes) and more (ssh, and other 3rd party apps), while holding charge for 1-2 days of heavy use, or up to a week of light use. - and I was complaining loudly a lot, because since the switch from m68k to ARM processor, battery life had massively sank (the previous PDA could hold for a week of normal use, and I could safely go on vacation without a charger), and I found ludicrous to need to buy a power-sledge for my newer device.
Apple didn't announce products once they were good. Apple announced product as soon as Jobs could bluff his way through an impressive demo (while needing to remember the exact order of clicks/taps to avoid the product crashing on scene like Gates' demos)
It's nice and shiny and expensive today, and it's supposed to continue being nice and shiny and expensive in the future.
(Unlike fashion where, after a couple of months, the clothes are just good to be thrown away and you certainly wouldn't like to risk be seen with things on you which are "so last season" !)
Whereas, with the current hardware in smartwatch (similar to circa when Apple introduced the world to a smartphone that can only handle charge for a couple of hours and needs to be constantly docked), current smartwatch will be completely worthless in a couple of months. You still need to wait a couple of years until Apple's smartwatch are at the point where their current phones are (sure there's going to be an even better out eventually, but for most people, their current device works for everything they need most of the time, so why bother changing ?)
- That explain why Apple (and other smartphone manufacturers) has jumped so soon on the smartwatch bandwagon. It's not only to have a piece of the Pebble's cake, it's also that they finally have a new product that they can again force their sheep-customers to rebuy every year.
- That means that Apple can't yet partner with jewelry makers. Their customer want long-term value storage. Something that they can buy now and that will still hold value a couple of years later. Whereas a potential Apple Jewel would cost a lot today, but in a few years down the line it would be just an expensive platic/metal trinket attached to a somewhat valuable bracelet.
(And that's not only my opinion. That is the actual market analysis of a couple of swiss luxury watches makers who have looked into it)
The only way a jewelry smartwatch could be popular now, is if the jewelry make sold the bracelet as the primary product, with the possibility to upgrade the electronic timepiece as model generations come and go.
That might be possible with a manufacturer like pebble where the form-factor seems more or less stable.
- gaz (petrol) doesn't explode (unlike what Holywood has taught you), it just burns. To make it explode you need the perfect mix of oxygen. Hence the complicated fine mechanical components in a internal combustion engine (pistons, manifolds, etc.) Fun fact: you could in theory make anything that burns explode by making a correct mix with oxygen: - a big block of wood just burns. Saw dust suspended in the air burns explosively - grain might burn if dry enough. But you can actually make bombs out of flour suspended in the air and the one that every chemistry and fireman know: - gaz (methane/buthane) at the gaz burner just burns. (hence the name, duh). On the other hand, a roomful of gaz (gaz + air mix) + spark....
The reason why we use gaz (petrol) inside most cars is due to energy efficiency. But you could make explosion out of anything BUT NEED TO MIX AIR FOR IT TO WORK.
- On the other hand : Lithium is highly reactive. (Well the whole point of a rechargeable battery's chemistry is to have a lot of electrons that you can easily move around [=easily make red-ox reactions]...) It has a nasty tendency to explode (if you over-charge, if you undercharge too much before recharging, if you draw too much current, if you charge too much current, if you overheat, if you puncture, if.... well basically if you look at it the wrong way).
Luckily that's why nearly all modern lithium batteries have built-in electronics (a.k.a.: "battery manager") to control and protect them. (That's what the third pad in addition to "+" and "-" on smartphone batteries is: it's a data channel to communicate with the built-in protection and get some extra informations, like temperature).
Well "nearly all".../. and Youtube kindly remembers for you a certain batch of Sony laptop batteries with faulty built-in managers that had several laptops burst into flames. Fast forward a few years later and we see again the same faulty batteries with the cheapest and shittiest "hover board" self-balancing boards out of China.
That's one of the major fallacies in Oatmeal's strip about his new Tesla car (but yeah he's a cartoonist, not a chemist): the gaz in the tank of a ice-powered car is *theoretically* a lot less dangerous than the lithium in an electric car's humongous battery. (there's no explosive liquid stored anywhere near the balls of an ICE driver. The electric-car driver is the one sitting above a big mass of lithium no matter how far away is the sun that was used to charge the battery).
Luckily in practice, Tesla isn't like the shady Chinese companies making craptastic batteries mentioned above. They do the necessary design to make the battery secure and in *practice* their car aren't explosive (despite all the bad mouthing around the 2-3 fires reported).
But to go back to the subject of the discussion and my above post : well that's why Tesla's 100kWh battery cost so much more. battery are expensive, because of all the above. Want more gaz ? Just make a bigger jug to store the gaz. At worst, if its catch fire, it's going just to burn a little while longer. That's it. Want more electricity ? be ready to pay a lot, battery are complex and you need complex electronics to regulate the electricity that goes in during charging or that goes out to power to motor, because if you don't you're in for quite some fireworks (see Sony laptop batteries and Chinese self-balancing board maker for what happens when you fail to do your homework).
So modern car batteries in practice aren't dangerous, but that comes at a price.
(That's also why I'm highly doubting about the Chinese car manufacturer mentioned here on/. that wanted to make electric cars for free/paid by the ads. To make the batteries that cheap, some very dangerous compromises might have been made).
I think they just re-invented geo-caching, only with books.
(and PockemonGo itself is just virtual geo-caching, only leveraging Nintendo's brand recognition to bring it to the masses, Apple-style.)
in north-european countries, anonymous book exchanges seem quite popukar. there was a book-shelf in the middle of a small plaza near where i was living back in Germany. each day I passed in front of it, the contents seemed to change.
this Belgian teacher has mainly managed to make it popular with the kids by leveraging the PockemonGo craze. nice job!
Best of all, the Time based OTP algorithm is open and well known, which means there are tons of other implementation beside google's, most of them similarly free/gratis, and a lot of them free/libre.
Isn't OPUS mainly developed for speech applications in mind?
It was mainly developed for *internet* in mind. (main key-points where extremely low latency, and possibility to deploy everywhere due to lack of patents).
1 of the (lower bandwidth) algorithm available to OPUS is more voice optimized. OPUS can smoothly switch between available algorithms based on available bandwidth. There are tuning parameters that can optimize more for human voice, or more generic sound.
At high bandwidth (>192kbps according to some ABXing done at Hydrogen audio) OPUS "sounds lossless" for complex music, etc. (not only human speach). OPUS still caps at 20kHz sounds by filtering, so it's useless for dogs or bats (but perfectly enough for humans).
Meaning, it's not lossless either and behaves much like aptX.
The common point with aptX: - extremely low latency
The differences are: - OPUS is an open standard, aptX is proprietary and patented (- OPUS also scales better at lower bitrate, it could be still perfectly usable for speech as a low bandwidth headset)
For lossless, there's FLAC.
Yup. In the "best of the world", upcoming Bluetooth 5.0 should mandate for a special mode where FLAC is used to compress most of the audio, but could optionnally degrade to lossy high bandwidth OPUS, whenever FLAC exceeds maximal allowed bandwidth. (just the way aptX works now, but with free and open standards).
Or an OPUS 2.0 could feature an extra "lossless" algorithm in its sleeve (with basically most of FLAC rolled in).
But in theory you could combine with other indicators. Group togher with all the other "Depression could be predicted based on your behaviour on XyZ social network" studies that have been mentioned here on/. lately. Then you can have an even smaller cohort of "potentially depressed social netowrk users".
And you could target them for prevention. Instead of displaying ads, you could display public service announcement (about services that exist to support depressed people, etc.) You could actively contact them (either through real human operator, or even chatbot. Or maybe FB/Instagram/etc. could send a trigger to the phone's on board Siri/OkGoogle/Cortana/etc. assistant) - there are short series of question that can reliably assess depression and pin point those who should be encouraged to seek professional care.
Or, because the thing is happening in the US, you could data mine the shit out of this. You could bombard the user with fuck-tons of ads for fluoxetine (Prozac (tm) ). The health insurance company could take the opportunity to kick their client before they get to costly. The boss can fire the employee before they get too unproductive, but right after they've lost any will to fight back. Databases will get hacked/leaked/doxed in attempt to blackmail the people. Violent religious extremist organisations could leverage leaked database to try to find potentially suicidal people to whom quickly to sell a flag right before the person acts so the organisation can acknowledge the suicide. And the NSA can spy on all of the above, just because they can.
Mozilla has their own password manager as part of their sync service.
And if you don't trust them, you can even sync using your own home server (I think I remember that you need WebDAV for that.)
And that one works *also* on Linux.
And in addition to a password manager, you should enable 2 factors on anything critical: Your banks, e-mail address that you use for password recovery, OAuth and OpenID providers that you use to log elsewehere (like Google or Facebook), etc.
This seems perfectly sensible to somebody making a media player, but for smartphones it means you have to come up with something else to do with your UI tones and notifications and whatnot (because you can't mix them into the mp3 stream without decoding and re-encoding, defeating the purpose of mp3 passthrough).
Or, the sound server/mixer in the phone could switch from MP3/AAC passthrough to mix-and-reecode whenever there are multiple streams, and switch back to passthrough once the music is the only remaining sound.
(As far as I know, pulse audio should be able to do it. It's already able to do with sample (only resampling and mixing audio if multiple channels, otherwise switching back to the music's sample rate if supported by the hardware), and is already used in several lesser known smartphone OS: as far back as the openmoko, and more recently in Palm/HP's webOS, and currently in Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Phone. I suspect that Windows' sound mixing service should in theory be able to do it too...)
SBC was the first implemented because it's computationally trivial and royalty-free.
Speaking of which, FLAC and OPUS are royalty-free nowadays, and OPUS is even a IETF standard. Bluetooth should consider introducing them to Bluetooth...
I'm not sure it would have been practical to encode mp3 in real-time on a featurephone in 2004.
Trivially possible, but it would have required a MP3 *codec* core, instead of a purely MP3 decoding hardware core as done back then, which would have risen the cost of the SoC and thus of the feature phone. So nobody did it to stay competitive.
Anyway, the limiting factor of BT audio quality is the codec, not the radio. AptX is ~384Kbps for 16-bit stereo, and BT4.0 has a raw capacity on the order of 25Mpbs.
Correct me, if I'm wrong, but 25Mpbs figure is basically using AMP - Alternative MAC/PHY. Or in other words, using Bluetooth over a 802.11 transport (i.e.: over a Wifi transport). That means the headset needs to have a more energy consuming "+HS" variant of bluetooth 3.0 that also features this "over Wifi" part. (The same way that the low energy of Bluetooth 4.0 LE is bluetooth over WiBee)
This could mean shorter battery life on the wireless headsets.
It's not abnormal The battery, not the motor, is the most expensive part in an electric car.
There are electric car makers who sell you only an empty car, and rent you the battery. e.g.: Renault's Zoé These cars are rather cheap. (And in case of the Zoé, Renault have stated that: - they DON'T do remote kills, even if they technically own the battery - in fact they don't do any DRM on the battery - you could in theory stop paying the battery, bring it back, and refit the car with something else (yup, they are open to the idea of 3rd party battery market that is eventually going to appear as e-cars get more popular) ) (Disclaimer: there are Zoé in pool of cars at the local car-sharing company that I often drive).
To over-simplify to the point of carricature :
In a gaz-powered car: - The motor is a horribly complex high-precision mechanical piece with thousands of precise components, gearbox and transmission system, etc... - The tank is basically a huge jerrycan, with a simple cap at one end to top up, and a glorified faucet at the other end to bring fuel into the car. (Yup I'm over simplifying but you got the picture).
In an electical car: - The motor is basically just a huge coil almost directly connected to the wheel (well, not quite. There's a fixed ratio gearbox), and that's about it. It just spins faster or slower depending on needs, no complex transmission in play. - The energy storage is an awfully complex beast: complex (and explosive) chemistry in the battery that requires either custom parts or in Tesla's case a complex grid of thousands of simple common off-the-shelf 18650 elements, with a very complex battery manager to charge and top up the energy storage while keeping the longevity of the battery, and a high power circuit to convert the battery output into what high AC current is precisely needed at the time by the motor.
So yeah, take the energy storage out of the equation, and the rest of the electric car is cheap.
Or in a different perspective: adding 10% more energy to the storage is a complex task, that is going to cost a lot if you pay the battery upfront (like in Teslas) It's not like extending the range 10% in a gaz powered car (where it's basically about increasing the the "glorified jerrycan" about ~10%) It's more like extending the power or efficiency of a gaz powered car (where it would need an entirely new and better mottor, which is also going to cost a lot).
I don't think you can call it patent trolling when Android is a direct competitor to a line of business they've continuously had for a couple of decades
Microsoft didn't as much had "competitors" and they didn't "had a business line for a couple of decades", as much as they've "continuously struggled, trying unsuccessfully to get a foot in a market that they don't even properly understand".
Nowadays, when Microsoft tries to do something out of their Windows 10 Phone, they've in practice lost to iOS and Android. Back then, in the Windows Mobile era, Nokia's Symbian and Blackberry were the dominant platforms. Back before, in the Windows CE era, Palm's PalmOS was the better platform.
They never actually owned the market.
And somebody who : - is abusing their patent portfolio to get a share of the dominant in a marker that they can't conquest - for something as trivial as exFAT (hey, it's just like fat, except with an allocation bitmap instead) or LFN (hey, lets invent filenames that are longer than 8.3, and call them something like VFAT) - which is actually mandatory for some industry standard (SDXC is simply SDHC with mandatory exFAT. Other wise you can trivially plug a 256 GB SDXC card into a "up 32 GB only SDHC" reader as long as you either install a FUSE driver for exFAT or reformat the card into something that your OS can read - like UDF - but there is no physical difference between SDXC and SDHC (unlike the older plain SD)) that qualifies as a patent troll in my book.
You're missing the fact that Apple does a really good job on some things, like interfaces.
I'm not missing it. I'm simply not considering them the best at doing efficient interface. They are good at making them nice looking. They are very good at making them skeumorphic so user don't seem lost to new functionality. But they are not that good at UI in general. They usually need to dumb things down to an abyssimal level, just so to make things understandable to joe-6-pack. (which is enough to sell tons of shit, so why try harder ?) As opposed to make an interface that can also be picked quite quickly by joe 6 pack, but don't stand in the way of more advanced users.
The iPhone didn't do as much as previous smartphones, but it was a lot easier to get it to do what it did.
Depends on your point of reference.
- Microsoft Windows CE/Mobile, whatever it was called back then had an absolute craptastic interface. So yeah, there's no way that Apple could NOT do better with iOS.
- PalmOS was already a much older interface for PDA (and smartphones, starting with some Handsrping Visors and later Palm Centro), that already had everything iPhone had on offer, except for multitouch scrooling/zooming (its touch screen wasn't *capacitive*, so no 2-finger gestures) and for virtual keyboard only as a 2ndary input method (main input method was "Graffiti": scribling special gestures. kind of simplified alphabet. keyboard was an alternative mode) (later centro model featured a physical keyboard, which was caried over to webOS devices py Palm/HP).
It did feature a main launch screen with apps, supported 3rd party apps, had standard tools for the era (calendar, address book, notes taking, etc.)
iOS looked no more than a rehash of what already existed on the better devices.
The smartphone market is completely dominated by the iPhone and Androids, and Google copied a lot of Apple UI for Android.
Except for some limited gestures introduced by Apple, both are quite similar to what was already available in PalmOS, or before that in Apple's own Newton, or before that on EPOC (symbian's grandpa). Or the first GNU/Linux attempts on PDA back then (Zaurus). etc.
In fact, Apple failed to innovate badly.
There are OS contemporary to iOS like Palm's own webOS, which at least tried to innovate and make multitasking easy to use (their stack of cards metaphor, with gestures).
Slashdot Mirror
The only bigger company of significance which is _not_ member of AOM is apple, who suprise suprise sits at the MPEG table and makes bucks with their H.265 patents.
Which also explain why they insist of using AAC for everything audio,
despite the tremendous success and performance of Opus - the previous similar success story of company collaboration (Xiph and Skype) to provide a standard to the IETF.
(Opus is currently used by Skype, WhatsApp, etc. - basically if it's on the web today, it probably uses Opus as an audio codec).
(I really wish IETF and AOMedia similar succes for their NetVC initiative/AV1 codec.
It is also why Vorbis (audio) is much more successful than Theora (video). Both are patent-free formats from xiph.org.
That's 1 of the reason.
But other reasons are in play:
- Vorbis was released back at a time when music decoding was still an important task for low-power embed devices.
And MP3-hardware decoding cheap where available for cheap.
By the time most PDA/Smartphones/Tablet had enough power to decode audio on CPU without any difficulties, other better competitor were starting to appear: things like AAC (which are not free and patent encumbered).
Meaning Vorbis wasn't competitive anymore.
Vorbis still saw quite some use as a audio/soundtrack codec for video games. (It just simply did attract much attention the role it played into this position).
- Vorbis itself has been superseeded.
Opus is the successor, partly developped by the same Xiph guys, partly developped based on technology donated by Skype.
The result is a codec that beats the crap out of anything else (except for some very special corner cases at a tiny bandwidth that isn't relevant on the internet).
Including out of AAC.
It's royalty free, not patent encumbered with available opensource code.
It's established as an official standard for web audio by IETF.
This it is widely use by tons of modern applications: Skype (obviously), WhatsApp, etc.
So the main reason that Vorbis isn't successful these days, is because Opus is.
Now keep in mind that IETF has a video codec work group called NetVC,
and that AOMedia (Alliance for Openmedia) is working to provide them with codec AV1
ant that alliance includes the same Xiph guys, but also other codec makes (Google [VP10], Cisco [Thor]), browser makers (Google, Mozilla, Microsoft) content providers (Google [Youtube], Netflix) and hardware makers (ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia)
There's a high chance that the same will happen in the video world, with AV1 taking everything just like Opus for the audio.
Speaking of which (HTML5 Video and Netflix):
The IETF has a working group to produce a new gen video codec "NetVC" (Designed to be easy for wide adoptions, as the previous efforts of the IETF like Opus for audio).
The main candidate is by a group called "AOMedia" (association for openmedia), working on AV1 (AOMedia's Video codec 1).
The association includes:
- Google (of Youtube fame) : They are using their current development as a base for AV1 (what would have become VP10 if there wasn't this whole NetVC story).
- Xiph (of Vorbis and Opus fame, with also contributions toward Flac, Speex, etc.) : They are developing a very interesting project called Daala, and they ended up also contributing the innovation done for Daala into AV1.
- Cisco : They gave what they have developed for their Thor codec also into AV1.
Netflix has also joined the AOMedia and they are investing resources into it.
Same with several browser makers (including Mozilla).
With all the people involved:
- you know there's some interesting performance coming (given the brains involved here, given past successes like Opus, and given the promising results of research projects like Daala).
- given that 2 top content providers like Google (Youtube) and Netflix are on board, there's a high chance of seeing deployment of the new codec.
- given that browser makers like Google (chrome), Mozilla, and Microsoft (Edge) are on board, there's a high chance of seeing browser support for the new codec.
- given that hardware chip maker like ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc. are on board there's going to be hardware decoding support.
(Adobe is on board too, so browser support is guaranteed for the Widevine DRM plug-in required by Netflix' licensors. Not that it matters that much, because that part of HTML5 Video is already defined and deployed everywhere, except maybe with Firefox on Linux which is a bit delayed)
But you know that this looks promision,
and maybe same time next year, we'd be reading summaries along the lines of "Netflix and Google find AV1 20% more efficient than HEVC/H.265" "And also cheaper, royalty-free and widely supported"
As for the Ars Technica op-ed, urging SpaceX to "focus" on NASA's priorities, I suspect that Elon will still reveal his plans for the MCT at the upcoming Int'l Astronautical Conference, {...} And I think he will probably take some of the advice from Ars... perhaps announcing that MCT will be put on the "back burner" for a while, so that they can get Crew Dragon and Falcon Heavy flying ASAP.
(Disclaimer [with McCoy's voice]: I am a Doctor, not a Rocket Scientist)
Okay let's spend a few minutes thinking about Mars colonisation.
An actual colonisation will require slightly more than "simply" putting a probe one Mars.
(Not that putting a probe there is an easy feat by itself, as attested by past failures. Hence the quotes)
Colonisation would require sending tons of equipement in advance to wait for the colon at their future landing site.
(Basically anything that they can built from raw local material, or grow themselves in a farm)
(Think the landing site as depicted in the "Martian")
That's quite some cargo, much more than what a "tiny" probe.
Then - once the landing site is ready to receive them equipment-wise - you also need to ship the colons themselves.
Again you're not just launching one single guy (Yuri Gagarin's style) you'll be launching a whole crew.
And unlike the Apollo missions to the moon, this crew isn't there for a "short" ride (that spans a couple of days) meaning that they could basically be okay all by themselves with only basic life-support (metaphorically: a ride on a car, where you just pack some snack). This crew is going to be travel for several months, requiring a much complex and bigger habitat (metaphorically: a ride on the trans-syberian train - a whole hotel on rails).
(Think the interplanetary ships depicted in harder sci-fi like 2001 Space Odyssey, etc.)
That's again quite a big ship.
(Also lots of other ancillary equipement might need to be shipped. E.g.: communication relay satellites at Earth's and Mars' L4 and L5 point to relay data and messages when the planets aren't close and the sun's in the way)
All the above are going to weight quite a lot.
And are going to require some fuel for all the manoeuvres required to shift from Earth's to Mars' orbits.
If you hope to kick them all out of Earth's gravity well in one single go and straight to Mars from there, you're going to hit the rocket equation really hard.
(Moving all the fuck tons of payload over the whole course is going to require extremely powerful rockets and gargantuan amounts of fuel, which in turn add to the weight and requires even more bazillions of fuel).
So unless there's some miraculous revolutions in term of space-propulsion (like suddenly the emDrive getting well understood, confirming to be very effective, scaling well, and usable even for take-off and landing. And this coupled with the research in polywell-style fusors giving us extremely compact and efficient fusion reactors to power said mega-huge emDrive) (or material engineering jumping suddenly so much forward that a space elevator gets built within a decade),
the next best probable course of action is to slowly put all the necessary stuff in orbit step by step, and slowly build a "trans-orbital ferry ship" in orbit.
(Think assembling the ISS - only not so big). Then once enough content have been put out of earth gravity well, have the "space ferry" do a trip to mars orbit, drop part of its payload, then come back for more refilling/reloading, then again.
Use the ferry multiple time on multiple trips (or even assemble a couple of such "space ferries" in earth's orbit) and you can transport everything you need to mars in several goes. By the time it's finally the turn to bring astronauts, the "space ferry" technology would have been tested enough to be usable to transport the people and their habitat.
For the above to succeed, you don't need 1 single ultra-massive "mars-ca
Now for the $1500 chair he may not expect it to sell over night but he will sell it at some point and recoup his time that he put into it.
Except that the chair is a physical object requiring a transfer of a physical object. There's no way to have "chairness" without having physical chairs moved around.
To keep your metaphor, the current situation is that for historical reasons, they have a different payment model:
they ask to pay each time you sit down on a chair. They'll happily provide you a chair for free, even an expensive one that would be worth 1500$ of a handscrafting. But all their chairs come with a contract stating that you must pay 10 cents each time you put your ass them.
(And if you think of it, it's not necessarily that weird: movie theaters have been basically selling you tickets to the privilege of coming an siting on their chairs, with the selling point being that there's a movie projected on a wall in front of the chairs).
And now they complain that their business (again: their business is not the creation of the chair itself, but the collecting a tax on the use of chairs) is losing money, because evil pirates have learned to home-build their own chairs using planks, more recently beer crates, and nowadays people are 3D-printing their own designs).
The metaphore isn't perfect, because in the case of recorded-media, the *designs* of chair would all come from the same person.
(Works a little bit better in the case of printed media/online journals: par of their competition is due to simply readers prefering to look at blogs for free instead of paying for quality journalism. They would prefere to reuse a beer crate that they already have laying around ratter than pay the 10c tax per sitting, even if that means that the 1500$ worth chair won't get re-imbursed).
And these 10c per sitting are really close to what is happening with digital media.
Back in historical times, when the music/etc, industries all started developing, the act of distributing the content was a very difficult and expensive part of the process: you needing to produce physical media, you needed logistics to move around said physical media, you needed physical outlets with employee to sell that physical media, etc.
so it made sense back then to extract money to cover the whole pipeline at the point of distribution of content:
the price of the disc doesn't only cover the physical object, the but the whole pipeline, starting from money that will be spent to pay the artists for the act of creation, all the way to the shop paying its employee through the difference between the bulk price they get for the discs and what they write on the shelf.
But slowly, the ability of home-recording first, and then later the ease to pass around digital media, specially thanks to internet, has made the whole distribution chain irrelevant. The thing where money is asked (the right for you to get a copy that you can play) is literally the cheapest and simplest step of the pipeline (as proven multiple times in recent history by sharing sites or software) - we are metaphorically doing the equivalent of asking 10c for the act of sitting.
The problem is that there are other steps (act of creation) that require money (artists need to eat), but don't get that money directly but used to get money with a processus that isn't relevant anymore: somewhere, there's a guy still spending his work to make 1500$ chairs, but as collecting 10c per sitting is as stupid as it sounds, this chair maker isn't getting paid anymore. Because on one hand people prefer to sit on empty beer crates (people reading free blogs instead of press) and other people simply push a button on their 3D printer to make themselves an exact copy of the 1500$ chair that he spent hours making and will never get paid for it).
So right now we are finding different ways to make money for digital content.
Yup, we're slowly starting to try to invent the concept of selling actual
He basically wants the right to secretly dig a tunnel under your home, sneak in while you're not there, steal whatever they want, and leave without anyone knowing it. Except in your phone.
Even worse: he want the tunnels being pre-dug (= "backdoors").
You know how in Switzerland every house has a mandatory under-ground shelter ?
What he wants is every single house in the USA having a mandatory underground tunnel that leads to a nearby police station. A *secret* tunnel that you're forbidden to know about when you buy your house.
That's what an encryption backdoor is the equivalent of : a mandatory secret back-door built in every house in the USA.
And with the automation and international connection that is available on the internet, the real-world situation is even worse than this putative mandatory tunnel.
(Now the metaphor is getting a bit harder...)
It would be as if the police station had an nearly infinite amount of low-ranking police personal that could devote their entire time to travel the tunnel each day, sneak into your house every single day, and take a picture of you naked in your shower. And not only you personnally, but though every tunnel, available in every single home built on US soil under US building code. Each fucking day.
But said local police station lacks trained and experienced detective to do anything useful out of the photos/objects/proofs brought back from by the agents.
And meanwhile, all the people living outside of the USA are completely immune to it because their local building code either don't mandate the tunnel (and thus, the US police agents can't even use this tunnel network to peak into the homes of ISIS terrorists, although that was the main selling point of the tunnel network when it was voted in)
Or mandate an entirely different type of tunnel that the US police has never heard off (and leaves some part of the US population at risk, because they buy and install a port-a-potty from China, and never realise that these come with tunnels leading directly into their chinese secret police).
All the while the Russia mafia has trained an incredibly huge army of burglars to roam the US (and Chinese) networks of secret tunnels, stealing as much as possible from every house they happen to reach. And even sometimes using your own house as a base of operation to commit crimes while you're away for work. (botnets).
At the end of the operation, maybe 1 single terrorist happens to get caught due to random chance. And maybe due to the fact that he was bragging that he is a terrorist the whole day in the middle of the street ( = wasn't even using encryption at all. Just plain text SMS.)
At the same time there will be millions of damage due to stolen property through the tunnels network.
( = just have a look at the massive data leaks that you have *today* when hacker still go through the long round about route of actually hacking into servers. Now think how much more damage would be done when the hack don't actually even bother to hack, but just leverage the backdoors that are mandated by the various governments)
: a device that steers a ship, aircraft, or spacecraft in place of a person
Note the "in place of a person".
Note also the "device that steers" (it more or less keeps a trajectory fro the plane/ship, or in the case of cars like BMW, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, etc. it keeps a lane).
Not "device that handle entirely automatically the complete travel from point A to point B" (that would be an *AUTONOMOUS* car, like Google's, some subs in big cities, busses by other startups. Or simply horses and donkeys).
Cars' driving assistance like Tesla's Autopilot actually behave exactly like the autopilot in a plane or on a ship. You just need to actually know what an autopilot actually does.
Common, this guy is basically inventing a "Spiderman Gun".
Think of the the views his demo could get on Youtube !!!
I am actually following the "silly wire drone interceptor" discussion (a.k.a: admit you always wanted to build yourself a "Spiderman Gun" !)
If you have problems typing your story on the phone, try using a keyboard (I have an original Think Outside keyboard left from my PalmOS days, that still works perfectly with my current Jolla Phone - Nowadays, the foldable you get from Geyes on Amazon are of slightly less good quality).
externally-powered microUSB OTG hub is another solution that works with any USB keyboard you have around.
So you send ballots to everyone, even those who have no desire to vote, and have not bothered to study any of the issues at all because of that. Why should they be voting if they really care so little about the process?
Surprisingly, that's exactly how things work in some democracies, specially in direct democracies where population is always voting on everything (e.g.: Switzerland).
People un-interested in voting generally throw away the ballot.
(Though probably there are few trying to find way around the - relatively simple - voter identification, and try to cast illegally an extra vote)
But such widespread diffusion of ballots is necessary in a country which votes every couple of months instead of every couple of year.
They're often inferior spec-wise unless you go to the top of the line models that are generally overpriced
Which by the way is also the case of any non-beige box PC...
(Self-built hardware is the king !)
and all you're really getting is OSX which isn't that great.
Compared to what ?
To Linux ? Yeah sure. (OSX is the "bargain bin" of Unix, but with a nice coat of paint).
To the craptastic clusterfuck called Windows 10 ? Your mileage may vary...
I miss the old Apple where products actually worked
You mean like the first iPhone, that had a battery that barely held a couple of hours, and certainly not to the end of the day ?
---
At the time they released their crap, I had :
- an old EPOC-running Ericsson stupid phone. With which I could go on vacations *without* taking a charger.
(Similar to all the Nokia that people still have, lost somewhere at the bottom of a drawer. Still in working order. With the battery still at ~30%)
- paired over bluetooth to a PalmOS 5.x running PDA, that could do anything that the iPhone did back then (web, e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes) and more (ssh, and other 3rd party apps), while holding charge for 1-2 days of heavy use, or up to a week of light use.
- and I was complaining loudly a lot, because since the switch from m68k to ARM processor, battery life had massively sank (the previous PDA could hold for a week of normal use, and I could safely go on vacation without a charger), and I found ludicrous to need to buy a power-sledge for my newer device.
Apple didn't announce products once they were good. Apple announced product as soon as Jobs could bluff his way through an impressive demo (while needing to remember the exact order of clicks/taps to avoid the product crashing on scene like Gates' demos)
The thing is, jewelry usually is durable.
It's nice and shiny and expensive today, and it's supposed to continue being nice and shiny and expensive in the future.
(Unlike fashion where, after a couple of months, the clothes are just good to be thrown away and you certainly wouldn't like to risk be seen with things on you which are "so last season" !)
Whereas, with the current hardware in smartwatch (similar to circa when Apple introduced the world to a smartphone that can only handle charge for a couple of hours and needs to be constantly docked), current smartwatch will be completely worthless in a couple of months.
You still need to wait a couple of years until Apple's smartwatch are at the point where their current phones are (sure there's going to be an even better out eventually, but for most people, their current device works for everything they need most of the time, so why bother changing ?)
- That explain why Apple (and other smartphone manufacturers) has jumped so soon on the smartwatch bandwagon. It's not only to have a piece of the Pebble's cake, it's also that they finally have a new product that they can again force their sheep-customers to rebuy every year.
- That means that Apple can't yet partner with jewelry makers. Their customer want long-term value storage. Something that they can buy now and that will still hold value a couple of years later. Whereas a potential Apple Jewel would cost a lot today, but in a few years down the line it would be just an expensive platic/metal trinket attached to a somewhat valuable bracelet.
(And that's not only my opinion. That is the actual market analysis of a couple of swiss luxury watches makers who have looked into it)
The only way a jewelry smartwatch could be popular now, is if the jewelry make sold the bracelet as the primary product, with the possibility to upgrade the electronic timepiece as model generations come and go.
That might be possible with a manufacturer like pebble where the form-factor seems more or less stable.
Complex and explosive chemisty?
That's it, no more batteries for me.
I'll stick to safe and simple combustion.
I know you joke but:
- gaz (petrol) doesn't explode (unlike what Holywood has taught you), it just burns.
To make it explode you need the perfect mix of oxygen. Hence the complicated fine mechanical components in a internal combustion engine (pistons, manifolds, etc.)
Fun fact: you could in theory make anything that burns explode by making a correct mix with oxygen:
- a big block of wood just burns. Saw dust suspended in the air burns explosively
- grain might burn if dry enough. But you can actually make bombs out of flour suspended in the air
and the one that every chemistry and fireman know:
- gaz (methane/buthane) at the gaz burner just burns. (hence the name, duh). On the other hand, a roomful of gaz (gaz + air mix) + spark....
The reason why we use gaz (petrol) inside most cars is due to energy efficiency. But you could make explosion out of anything BUT NEED TO MIX AIR FOR IT TO WORK.
- On the other hand :
Lithium is highly reactive. (Well the whole point of a rechargeable battery's chemistry is to have a lot of electrons that you can easily move around [=easily make red-ox reactions]...)
It has a nasty tendency to explode (if you over-charge, if you undercharge too much before recharging, if you draw too much current, if you charge too much current, if you overheat, if you puncture, if.... well basically if you look at it the wrong way).
Luckily that's why nearly all modern lithium batteries have built-in electronics (a.k.a.: "battery manager") to control and protect them.
(That's what the third pad in addition to "+" and "-" on smartphone batteries is: it's a data channel to communicate with the built-in protection and get some extra informations, like temperature).
Well "nearly all"... /. and Youtube kindly remembers for you a certain batch of Sony laptop batteries with faulty built-in managers that had several laptops burst into flames.
Fast forward a few years later and we see again the same faulty batteries with the cheapest and shittiest "hover board" self-balancing boards out of China.
That's one of the major fallacies in Oatmeal's strip about his new Tesla car (but yeah he's a cartoonist, not a chemist):
the gaz in the tank of a ice-powered car is *theoretically* a lot less dangerous than the lithium in an electric car's humongous battery.
(there's no explosive liquid stored anywhere near the balls of an ICE driver. The electric-car driver is the one sitting above a big mass of lithium no matter how far away is the sun that was used to charge the battery).
Luckily in practice, Tesla isn't like the shady Chinese companies making craptastic batteries mentioned above.
They do the necessary design to make the battery secure and in *practice* their car aren't explosive (despite all the bad mouthing around the 2-3 fires reported).
But to go back to the subject of the discussion and my above post :
well that's why Tesla's 100kWh battery cost so much more. battery are expensive, because of all the above.
Want more gaz ? Just make a bigger jug to store the gaz. At worst, if its catch fire, it's going just to burn a little while longer. That's it.
Want more electricity ? be ready to pay a lot, battery are complex and you need complex electronics to regulate the electricity that goes in during charging or that goes out to power to motor, because if you don't you're in for quite some fireworks (see Sony laptop batteries and Chinese self-balancing board maker for what happens when you fail to do your homework).
So modern car batteries in practice aren't dangerous, but that comes at a price.
(That's also why I'm highly doubting about the Chinese car manufacturer mentioned here on /. that wanted to make electric cars for free/paid by the ads.
To make the batteries that cheap, some very dangerous compromises might have been made).
I think they just re-invented geo-caching, only with books.
(and PockemonGo itself is just virtual geo-caching, only leveraging Nintendo's brand recognition to bring it to the masses, Apple-style.)
in north-european countries, anonymous book exchanges seem quite popukar. there was a book-shelf in the middle of a small plaza near where i was living back in Germany. each day I passed in front of it, the contents seemed to change.
this Belgian teacher has mainly managed to make it popular with the kids by leveraging the PockemonGo craze. nice job!
Best of all, the Time based OTP algorithm is open and well known, which means there are tons of other implementation beside google's, most of them similarly free/gratis, and a lot of them free/libre.
Isn't OPUS mainly developed for speech applications in mind?
It was mainly developed for *internet* in mind.
(main key-points where extremely low latency, and possibility to deploy everywhere due to lack of patents).
1 of the (lower bandwidth) algorithm available to OPUS is more voice optimized.
OPUS can smoothly switch between available algorithms based on available bandwidth.
There are tuning parameters that can optimize more for human voice, or more generic sound.
At high bandwidth (>192kbps according to some ABXing done at Hydrogen audio) OPUS "sounds lossless" for complex music, etc. (not only human speach).
OPUS still caps at 20kHz sounds by filtering, so it's useless for dogs or bats (but perfectly enough for humans).
Meaning, it's not lossless either and behaves much like aptX.
The common point with aptX:
- extremely low latency
The differences are:
- OPUS is an open standard, aptX is proprietary and patented
(- OPUS also scales better at lower bitrate, it could be still perfectly usable for speech as a low bandwidth headset)
For lossless, there's FLAC.
Yup. In the "best of the world", upcoming Bluetooth 5.0 should mandate for a special mode where FLAC is used to compress most of the audio, but could optionnally degrade to lossy high bandwidth OPUS, whenever FLAC exceeds maximal allowed bandwidth. (just the way aptX works now, but with free and open standards).
Or an OPUS 2.0 could feature an extra "lossless" algorithm in its sleeve (with basically most of FLAC rolled in).
But in theory you could combine with other indicators. /. lately.
Group togher with all the other "Depression could be predicted based on your behaviour on XyZ social network" studies that have been mentioned here on
Then you can have an even smaller cohort of "potentially depressed social netowrk users".
And you could target them for prevention.
Instead of displaying ads, you could display public service announcement (about services that exist to support depressed people, etc.)
You could actively contact them (either through real human operator, or even chatbot. Or maybe FB/Instagram/etc. could send a trigger to the phone's on board Siri/OkGoogle/Cortana/etc. assistant) - there are short series of question that can reliably assess depression and pin point those who should be encouraged to seek professional care.
Or, because the thing is happening in the US, you could data mine the shit out of this.
You could bombard the user with fuck-tons of ads for fluoxetine (Prozac (tm) ).
The health insurance company could take the opportunity to kick their client before they get to costly.
The boss can fire the employee before they get too unproductive, but right after they've lost any will to fight back.
Databases will get hacked/leaked/doxed in attempt to blackmail the people.
Violent religious extremist organisations could leverage leaked database to try to find potentially suicidal people to whom quickly to sell a flag right before the person acts so the organisation can acknowledge the suicide.
And the NSA can spy on all of the above, just because they can.
Mozilla has their own password manager as part of their sync service.
And if you don't trust them, you can even sync using your own home server (I think I remember that you need WebDAV for that.)
And that one works *also* on Linux.
And in addition to a password manager, you should enable 2 factors on anything critical: Your banks, e-mail address that you use for password recovery, OAuth and OpenID providers that you use to log elsewehere (like Google or Facebook), etc.
This seems perfectly sensible to somebody making a media player, but for smartphones it means you have to come up with something else to do with your UI tones and notifications and whatnot (because you can't mix them into the mp3 stream without decoding and re-encoding, defeating the purpose of mp3 passthrough).
Or, the sound server/mixer in the phone could switch from MP3/AAC passthrough to mix-and-reecode whenever there are multiple streams, and switch back to passthrough once the music is the only remaining sound.
(As far as I know, pulse audio should be able to do it. It's already able to do with sample (only resampling and mixing audio if multiple channels, otherwise switching back to the music's sample rate if supported by the hardware), and is already used in several lesser known smartphone OS: as far back as the openmoko, and more recently in Palm/HP's webOS, and currently in Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Phone.
I suspect that Windows' sound mixing service should in theory be able to do it too...)
SBC was the first implemented because it's computationally trivial and royalty-free.
Speaking of which, FLAC and OPUS are royalty-free nowadays, and OPUS is even a IETF standard. Bluetooth should consider introducing them to Bluetooth...
I'm not sure it would have been practical to encode mp3 in real-time on a featurephone in 2004.
Trivially possible, but it would have required a MP3 *codec* core, instead of a purely MP3 decoding hardware core as done back then, which would have risen the cost of the SoC and thus of the feature phone. So nobody did it to stay competitive.
Anyway, the limiting factor of BT audio quality is the codec, not the radio. AptX is ~384Kbps for 16-bit stereo, and BT4.0 has a raw capacity on the order of 25Mpbs.
Correct me, if I'm wrong, but 25Mpbs figure is basically using AMP - Alternative MAC/PHY. Or in other words, using Bluetooth over a 802.11 transport (i.e.: over a Wifi transport).
That means the headset needs to have a more energy consuming "+HS" variant of bluetooth 3.0 that also features this "over Wifi" part.
(The same way that the low energy of Bluetooth 4.0 LE is bluetooth over WiBee)
This could mean shorter battery life on the wireless headsets.
aptX isn't exactly lossless.
It switches between lossless and lossy while trying to fit within bandwidth constrain.
Also, the codec is proprietary to Qualcomm.
IETF has already issued an open codec that beats most of its competition: OPUS.
It's not abnormal
The battery, not the motor, is the most expensive part in an electric car.
There are electric car makers who sell you only an empty car, and rent you the battery.
e.g.: Renault's Zoé
These cars are rather cheap.
(And in case of the Zoé, Renault have stated that:
- they DON'T do remote kills, even if they technically own the battery
- in fact they don't do any DRM on the battery
- you could in theory stop paying the battery, bring it back, and refit the car with something else (yup, they are open to the idea of 3rd party battery market that is eventually going to appear as e-cars get more popular) )
(Disclaimer: there are Zoé in pool of cars at the local car-sharing company that I often drive).
To over-simplify to the point of carricature :
In a gaz-powered car:
- The motor is a horribly complex high-precision mechanical piece with thousands of precise components, gearbox and transmission system, etc...
- The tank is basically a huge jerrycan, with a simple cap at one end to top up, and a glorified faucet at the other end to bring fuel into the car.
(Yup I'm over simplifying but you got the picture).
In an electical car:
- The motor is basically just a huge coil almost directly connected to the wheel (well, not quite. There's a fixed ratio gearbox), and that's about it. It just spins faster or slower depending on needs, no complex transmission in play.
- The energy storage is an awfully complex beast: complex (and explosive) chemistry in the battery that requires either custom parts or in Tesla's case a complex grid of thousands of simple common off-the-shelf 18650 elements, with a very complex battery manager to charge and top up the energy storage while keeping the longevity of the battery, and a high power circuit to convert the battery output into what high AC current is precisely needed at the time by the motor.
So yeah, take the energy storage out of the equation, and the rest of the electric car is cheap.
Or in a different perspective: adding 10% more energy to the storage is a complex task, that is going to cost a lot if you pay the battery upfront (like in Teslas)
It's not like extending the range 10% in a gaz powered car (where it's basically about increasing the the "glorified jerrycan" about ~10%)
It's more like extending the power or efficiency of a gaz powered car (where it would need an entirely new and better mottor, which is also going to cost a lot).
It's a bit complicated.
Once it hits 88MPH, the clock sometimes measures as low as -60 years.
Once the clock was even show the lowest point of -70 years, but it was after getting hit by ligthning.
But mileage is shitty, it eats 1.21 jigowatts.
I don't think you can call it patent trolling when Android is a direct competitor to a line of business they've continuously had for a couple of decades
Microsoft didn't as much had "competitors" and they didn't "had a business line for a couple of decades", as much as they've "continuously struggled, trying unsuccessfully to get a foot in a market that they don't even properly understand".
Nowadays, when Microsoft tries to do something out of their Windows 10 Phone, they've in practice lost to iOS and Android.
Back then, in the Windows Mobile era, Nokia's Symbian and Blackberry were the dominant platforms.
Back before, in the Windows CE era, Palm's PalmOS was the better platform.
They never actually owned the market.
And somebody who :
- is abusing their patent portfolio to get a share of the dominant in a marker that they can't conquest
- for something as trivial as exFAT (hey, it's just like fat, except with an allocation bitmap instead) or LFN (hey, lets invent filenames that are longer than 8.3, and call them something like VFAT)
- which is actually mandatory for some industry standard (SDXC is simply SDHC with mandatory exFAT. Other wise you can trivially plug a 256 GB SDXC card into a "up 32 GB only SDHC" reader as long as you either install a FUSE driver for exFAT or reformat the card into something that your OS can read - like UDF - but there is no physical difference between SDXC and SDHC (unlike the older plain SD))
that qualifies as a patent troll in my book.
You're missing the fact that Apple does a really good job on some things, like interfaces.
I'm not missing it. I'm simply not considering them the best at doing efficient interface.
They are good at making them nice looking.
They are very good at making them skeumorphic so user don't seem lost to new functionality.
But they are not that good at UI in general. They usually need to dumb things down to an abyssimal level, just so to make things understandable to joe-6-pack. (which is enough to sell tons of shit, so why try harder ?)
As opposed to make an interface that can also be picked quite quickly by joe 6 pack, but don't stand in the way of more advanced users.
The iPhone didn't do as much as previous smartphones, but it was a lot easier to get it to do what it did.
Depends on your point of reference.
- Microsoft Windows CE/Mobile, whatever it was called back then had an absolute craptastic interface. So yeah, there's no way that Apple could NOT do better with iOS.
- PalmOS was already a much older interface for PDA (and smartphones, starting with some Handsrping Visors and later Palm Centro), that already had everything iPhone had on offer, except for multitouch scrooling/zooming (its touch screen wasn't *capacitive*, so no 2-finger gestures) and for virtual keyboard only as a 2ndary input method (main input method was "Graffiti": scribling special gestures. kind of simplified alphabet. keyboard was an alternative mode) (later centro model featured a physical keyboard, which was caried over to webOS devices py Palm/HP).
It did feature a main launch screen with apps, supported 3rd party apps, had standard tools for the era (calendar, address book, notes taking, etc.)
iOS looked no more than a rehash of what already existed on the better devices.
The smartphone market is completely dominated by the iPhone and Androids, and Google copied a lot of Apple UI for Android.
Except for some limited gestures introduced by Apple, both are quite similar to what was already available in PalmOS, or before that in Apple's own Newton, or before that on EPOC (symbian's grandpa). Or the first GNU/Linux attempts on PDA back then (Zaurus). etc.
In fact, Apple failed to innovate badly.
There are OS contemporary to iOS like Palm's own webOS, which at least tried to innovate and make multitasking easy to use (their stack of cards metaphor, with gestures).