Yeah, I bought my Atari 800 without a cassette deck, but with a BASIC language cartridge - it was loads of fun to type programs in from scratch every time you switched the power on. Oh, and when I did get the cassette deck, I found that I could type (short) programs in almost as fast as loading them from cassette (longer programs would get tiring to type that fast continuously), and I was also nearly as accurate: a 1K program had about a 10% chance of having an error during loading, a 1% chance of an un-detected error. Scale up to 30K programs and you were lucky if you ever got them to load.
I agree that remote access to a Pi is a great thing - I VNC into my Pis more often than I connect monitors and keyboards - so I've got a X desktop to work with.
I do admit that the Pi is probably easier to program from a console with vi or a similar editor than using sluggish graphical environments, but it all depends on what you're trying to do - if your application is suited to a command line interface, then definitely stay there, but if you want to display images... it's probably worth the patience to deal with the GUI.
I wouldn't call it useless - most people who aspire to learn computer programming at least have a TV (aka HDMI input monitor), if you're willing to scrounge a little, most people will give away old keyboards and mice.
I do think the network connection is essential for a proper learning device and am surprised that the zero lacks a proper one. Sure, you can connect a $10 USB hub and $15 WiPi to your $5 Pi Zero (lest we forget, with a $10 miniSD card in it) and then you just need to either transport this pile of hackery to an internet cafe or pay $50 per month for internet connectivity for your "$5" computer...
What the Pi is is expendable - you're not going to "mess up" mom or dad's pc by messing around on your Pi. If the Pi Zero continues at $5 a pop, you can play around with various configurations and keep them all available in parallel. You can also dabble with a soldering iron and not sweat it - back in 1984 when I took a soldering iron to my Atari 800 (which cost approximately 400 hours of washing dishes to acquire ~= one year at my part time job), lots of people thought I had huge brass ones. Today, a Pi costs approximately 20 minutes of minimum wage labor in many cities, hardware hacking is no longer something to worry about - if you don't like the way the solder flowed on one board, you can just get another and try again - show off the one that came out the best and keep the others to recycle into new hacking projects.
The persistence of the I/O header strikes me as a central feature of "Pi-ness". The makers consistently refer back to personal computers from the 1980s and 90s as their inspiration, that they want to do that but cheaper - but they also have this I/O header as a central recurring feature. I hacked the board connector pins in my Atari 800 to mount an internal amplifier and speaker that carried the TV sound, but it was in no way "friendly" to such hacking - same goes for the Apple II and Commodore 64. Not only is the Pi two orders of magnitude more affordable than those 8 bit computers and three orders of magnitude more powerful, it is infinitely friendlier to digital I/O hacking. Earlier posters lamented the lack of analog I/O, which I think is what the hats/shields are for - though more SPI or I2C ports on the header wouldn't be a bad thing...
I am disappointed by the lack of ethernet in the Pi Zero, but understand how some applications may not need it. I'm hoping there's another low cost variant in the future that's POE powered, perhaps stripped of all other basic I/O besides the ethernet, SD card slot, and ubiquitous header. HDMI and USB could be added when needed via a daughter card.
When I graduated college, I was already hip to the fact that Nuclear was a non-starter from a political standpoint. I took a job interview with the NRC, mostly for the free plane trip to Atlanta, and they fed me a line about "modern designs" "ready to start building any day now," in 1990... yeah, and your current crop of plant inspectors are the kids that believed that crap back then.
So, politically, we're afraid of the mighty atom to the point that we accept chemical poisoning, strip mining, ash ponds overflowing into rivers, drowning polar bears, etc. instead. I did have some hope a few years ago when a group of "Greens for Nuclear Power" went public with some decent documentary film PR about how they used to support Greenpeace, but have since done the math and realize that Nuclear Power is the way out from the greenhouse problem... but they are still too few and too poorly funded to sway policy.
Take an actual look at the cancer statistics, it's not because Houstonians live so long that they finally get cancer, it's taking them earlier than almost anywhere else you might choose to live:
I live in Florida, so, yeah, I like my air conditioning. And, on the whole, modern medicine is a good thing - even when taken with the drawbacks of modern life. On the other hand, living in a so-called backwards place isn't nearly as bad as being in a modern society stripped of the good stuff, like poverty can do.
Funny thing about "modern education" and "healthcare" - if you live on a "primitive" island without all the challenges of "modern" western civilization, you don't really need that education, or even healthcare.
Micro-example: 1990 I toured east Germany for a few weeks, the food was primitive and dull, the facilities were entirely lacking, and I had no problems whatsoever. The following week, I went to Dusseldorf, and within 12 hours in the city contracted a case of blood poisioning - which their modern hospital readily treated. If I had gotten that blood poisioning in the east, I would have been screwed - but: I didn't, and the odds of contracting that kind of disease were probably a thousand times lower outside the "big modern city."
Another one: Houston has the best cancer treatment center - arguably in the world. They also have some of the highest cancer rates....
Recycle may also be a euphemism for "dispose of responsibly" - landfills full of lithium probably aren't a good idea, we're already "medicating nature" with wastewater contaminated by pharmaceutical lithium.
Hopefully with cheaper oil, Germany is scaling back its coal production. Fear of Fukushima has done more environmental damage with the resurgence of coal than all the nuclear power accidents put together.
Price will be at a disadvantage until production has scaled up. Personally, I like having a more linear voltage dropoff with discharge - you can always switch the voltage up to whatever you need, and if you are discharging near capability limits - unless this is a drag cycle, you are going to have disappointing time to full discharge.
Shooting in the dark here - do the individual batteries make the larger pack more serviceable / recyclable? Packing the lithium into larger solid cells may also create problems with cooling / leak containment, etc. I'm sure there's more than a couple of whitepapers on the the topic out there.
Multi-ton passenger and cargo jets are piloted by people who care (usually a great deal) whether or not they land safely. If a drone has a landing that it will not fly away from without a major overhaul, who really cares? The people that get hit when it returns to the ground, for starters.
Mass transit sounds like a quick way to lose any anonymity you thought you had - what metro station isn't completely covered with video surveillance? I think it's even becoming common on metro buses and some taxi cabs. Walking in a city? How many cameras cover the sidewalks? Wearing a mask only gets you recognized more quickly.
The weight and fuel payload are entirely relevant when establishing the legal status of flying - if you're willing to hang your butt up in the sky with 5 gallons of gasoline or less (and certain restrictions on airframe, etc.), you are legally allowed to fly with no license or training whatsoever. The difference with drones is that the pilots literally have no skin in the game, and Amazon will doubtless be attempting to implement a "pilotless, fully automated" system so that any liability gets contested by their billions dollar backed legal team.
I'm sorry, I don't care what altitude you assign this thing - "under 55lbs" of airframe and high-energy density battery zipping along fast enough to cover 20 miles on a single charge doesn't sound like a lot of fun when it makes "accidental contact" with anything I care about.
My wife's Windows 7 laptop (purchased 4 years ago, never auto-updated) is presently offering to upgrade itself to Windows 10.
Even if you don't "upgrade 7 to 10," they'll be "patching" 7 until it has got all the worst aspects of 10 in it. Just like they made "XP" so secure that it no longer runs on many of the platforms it was originally sold on.
If you count being whisked away to dwell in an underground bunker "think tank" for your remaining years as "profit," then, yeah, these guys are in the cat-bird seat.
Back in antiquity, I had to "register" to get a "bikes on trains" permit to carry my bike on the metro. It was a nominal $5 fee (covered the cost of the photograph) and a royal pain to go to the downtown office to get the permit, but the whole point was to educate the permitee about the dos and don'ts of carrying your bike on the metro. Then, whenever somebody it being a bonehead with their bike on the metro, the officials can say either: a) "You need to have a permit to do that, go get it." saving themselves all effort at education on-the-spot, or b) "I see you have a permit, but you obviously didn't pay attention to the training." and possibly revoke the permit on-the-spot, forcing the ex-permitee to jump more hoops to get it reinstated.
Hunting and fishing licenses are a similar game, though their fees are higher, and annual. The presumption is that you will learn what you're supposed to know as a licensee - though, in practice, they're mostly just an annual fee.
Registering drones, like registering handguns, will give some traceability to the bits of electronic junk that get lost in hard to get to locations inside state/national parks, and on other people's private land. It might make some operators a little more careful and a little more aware of the impacts their toy can have. I don't think it's much about keeping them out of the flightpath of commercial airliners, I think it is about making the owners more accountable for less serious bone-headdedness.
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Yeah, I bought my Atari 800 without a cassette deck, but with a BASIC language cartridge - it was loads of fun to type programs in from scratch every time you switched the power on. Oh, and when I did get the cassette deck, I found that I could type (short) programs in almost as fast as loading them from cassette (longer programs would get tiring to type that fast continuously), and I was also nearly as accurate: a 1K program had about a 10% chance of having an error during loading, a 1% chance of an un-detected error. Scale up to 30K programs and you were lucky if you ever got them to load.
I agree that remote access to a Pi is a great thing - I VNC into my Pis more often than I connect monitors and keyboards - so I've got a X desktop to work with.
I do admit that the Pi is probably easier to program from a console with vi or a similar editor than using sluggish graphical environments, but it all depends on what you're trying to do - if your application is suited to a command line interface, then definitely stay there, but if you want to display images... it's probably worth the patience to deal with the GUI.
I wouldn't call it useless - most people who aspire to learn computer programming at least have a TV (aka HDMI input monitor), if you're willing to scrounge a little, most people will give away old keyboards and mice.
I do think the network connection is essential for a proper learning device and am surprised that the zero lacks a proper one. Sure, you can connect a $10 USB hub and $15 WiPi to your $5 Pi Zero (lest we forget, with a $10 miniSD card in it) and then you just need to either transport this pile of hackery to an internet cafe or pay $50 per month for internet connectivity for your "$5" computer...
What the Pi is is expendable - you're not going to "mess up" mom or dad's pc by messing around on your Pi. If the Pi Zero continues at $5 a pop, you can play around with various configurations and keep them all available in parallel. You can also dabble with a soldering iron and not sweat it - back in 1984 when I took a soldering iron to my Atari 800 (which cost approximately 400 hours of washing dishes to acquire ~= one year at my part time job), lots of people thought I had huge brass ones. Today, a Pi costs approximately 20 minutes of minimum wage labor in many cities, hardware hacking is no longer something to worry about - if you don't like the way the solder flowed on one board, you can just get another and try again - show off the one that came out the best and keep the others to recycle into new hacking projects.
The persistence of the I/O header strikes me as a central feature of "Pi-ness". The makers consistently refer back to personal computers from the 1980s and 90s as their inspiration, that they want to do that but cheaper - but they also have this I/O header as a central recurring feature. I hacked the board connector pins in my Atari 800 to mount an internal amplifier and speaker that carried the TV sound, but it was in no way "friendly" to such hacking - same goes for the Apple II and Commodore 64. Not only is the Pi two orders of magnitude more affordable than those 8 bit computers and three orders of magnitude more powerful, it is infinitely friendlier to digital I/O hacking. Earlier posters lamented the lack of analog I/O, which I think is what the hats/shields are for - though more SPI or I2C ports on the header wouldn't be a bad thing...
I am disappointed by the lack of ethernet in the Pi Zero, but understand how some applications may not need it. I'm hoping there's another low cost variant in the future that's POE powered, perhaps stripped of all other basic I/O besides the ethernet, SD card slot, and ubiquitous header. HDMI and USB could be added when needed via a daughter card.
Hoarding real-estate and luxury goods while consuming mass quantities of energy (private jet travel, for instance) is dissipating capital.
Focusing $44 Billion on specific programs can make a difference.
I'd be happy receiving 1% of 1% of the distribution.
When I graduated college, I was already hip to the fact that Nuclear was a non-starter from a political standpoint. I took a job interview with the NRC, mostly for the free plane trip to Atlanta, and they fed me a line about "modern designs" "ready to start building any day now," in 1990... yeah, and your current crop of plant inspectors are the kids that believed that crap back then.
So, politically, we're afraid of the mighty atom to the point that we accept chemical poisoning, strip mining, ash ponds overflowing into rivers, drowning polar bears, etc. instead. I did have some hope a few years ago when a group of "Greens for Nuclear Power" went public with some decent documentary film PR about how they used to support Greenpeace, but have since done the math and realize that Nuclear Power is the way out from the greenhouse problem... but they are still too few and too poorly funded to sway policy.
Take an actual look at the cancer statistics, it's not because Houstonians live so long that they finally get cancer, it's taking them earlier than almost anywhere else you might choose to live:
http://statecancerprofiles.can...
http://www.texasmonthly.com/ar...
I live in Florida, so, yeah, I like my air conditioning. And, on the whole, modern medicine is a good thing - even when taken with the drawbacks of modern life. On the other hand, living in a so-called backwards place isn't nearly as bad as being in a modern society stripped of the good stuff, like poverty can do.
Funny thing about "modern education" and "healthcare" - if you live on a "primitive" island without all the challenges of "modern" western civilization, you don't really need that education, or even healthcare.
Micro-example: 1990 I toured east Germany for a few weeks, the food was primitive and dull, the facilities were entirely lacking, and I had no problems whatsoever. The following week, I went to Dusseldorf, and within 12 hours in the city contracted a case of blood poisioning - which their modern hospital readily treated. If I had gotten that blood poisioning in the east, I would have been screwed - but: I didn't, and the odds of contracting that kind of disease were probably a thousand times lower outside the "big modern city."
Another one: Houston has the best cancer treatment center - arguably in the world. They also have some of the highest cancer rates....
Recycle may also be a euphemism for "dispose of responsibly" - landfills full of lithium probably aren't a good idea, we're already "medicating nature" with wastewater contaminated by pharmaceutical lithium.
Down, but certainly not out - and definitely not out as fast as it would have been with continued nuclear use and development.
https://carboncounter.wordpres...
http://www.greenbiz.com/articl...
http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Naviga...
https://eu.boell.org/sites/def...
Russian has the very complex metallurgy, science, support, academics, computer applications to ensure all such projects will work.
But, I'm not very impressed with their ability to control pollution... and by extension: dust.
Hopefully with cheaper oil, Germany is scaling back its coal production. Fear of Fukushima has done more environmental damage with the resurgence of coal than all the nuclear power accidents put together.
...
They'll save a ridiculous amount of money by not building a megarocket like we insist on.
...
Nothing says "big phallus" like a Saturn V.
These are not the same carriers purchased twenty years ago - look at the available tech that they can now stuff into one.
20 years ago, I paid $3000 for a 133MHz computer, with 64MB of RAM. Today, I can buy a 3GHz computer, with 4GB of RAM, for $300.
How much thrust does that produce? Payload capacity to orbit?
Price will be at a disadvantage until production has scaled up. Personally, I like having a more linear voltage dropoff with discharge - you can always switch the voltage up to whatever you need, and if you are discharging near capability limits - unless this is a drag cycle, you are going to have disappointing time to full discharge.
Shooting in the dark here - do the individual batteries make the larger pack more serviceable / recyclable? Packing the lithium into larger solid cells may also create problems with cooling / leak containment, etc. I'm sure there's more than a couple of whitepapers on the the topic out there.
Multi-ton passenger and cargo jets are piloted by people who care (usually a great deal) whether or not they land safely. If a drone has a landing that it will not fly away from without a major overhaul, who really cares? The people that get hit when it returns to the ground, for starters.
Mass transit sounds like a quick way to lose any anonymity you thought you had - what metro station isn't completely covered with video surveillance? I think it's even becoming common on metro buses and some taxi cabs. Walking in a city? How many cameras cover the sidewalks? Wearing a mask only gets you recognized more quickly.
The weight and fuel payload are entirely relevant when establishing the legal status of flying - if you're willing to hang your butt up in the sky with 5 gallons of gasoline or less (and certain restrictions on airframe, etc.), you are legally allowed to fly with no license or training whatsoever. The difference with drones is that the pilots literally have no skin in the game, and Amazon will doubtless be attempting to implement a "pilotless, fully automated" system so that any liability gets contested by their billions dollar backed legal team.
I'm sorry, I don't care what altitude you assign this thing - "under 55lbs" of airframe and high-energy density battery zipping along fast enough to cover 20 miles on a single charge doesn't sound like a lot of fun when it makes "accidental contact" with anything I care about.
My wife's Windows 7 laptop (purchased 4 years ago, never auto-updated) is presently offering to upgrade itself to Windows 10.
Even if you don't "upgrade 7 to 10," they'll be "patching" 7 until it has got all the worst aspects of 10 in it. Just like they made "XP" so secure that it no longer runs on many of the platforms it was originally sold on.
If you count being whisked away to dwell in an underground bunker "think tank" for your remaining years as "profit," then, yeah, these guys are in the cat-bird seat.
How about a kayaker to a cargo ship captain?
Back in antiquity, I had to "register" to get a "bikes on trains" permit to carry my bike on the metro. It was a nominal $5 fee (covered the cost of the photograph) and a royal pain to go to the downtown office to get the permit, but the whole point was to educate the permitee about the dos and don'ts of carrying your bike on the metro. Then, whenever somebody it being a bonehead with their bike on the metro, the officials can say either: a) "You need to have a permit to do that, go get it." saving themselves all effort at education on-the-spot, or b) "I see you have a permit, but you obviously didn't pay attention to the training." and possibly revoke the permit on-the-spot, forcing the ex-permitee to jump more hoops to get it reinstated.
Hunting and fishing licenses are a similar game, though their fees are higher, and annual. The presumption is that you will learn what you're supposed to know as a licensee - though, in practice, they're mostly just an annual fee.
Registering drones, like registering handguns, will give some traceability to the bits of electronic junk that get lost in hard to get to locations inside state/national parks, and on other people's private land. It might make some operators a little more careful and a little more aware of the impacts their toy can have. I don't think it's much about keeping them out of the flightpath of commercial airliners, I think it is about making the owners more accountable for less serious bone-headdedness.