1 year ago: The Boring Company? This is just vaporware that won't go anywhere. Wake me up when it's a real company doing real projects. These Elon sycophants are intolerable.
Today: The Boring Company is bidding on a real project? God, who cares. These Elon fanboys are obnoxious.
10 years from now: Jesus, enough with the headlines about a new hyperloop tunnel opening. Nobody cares anymore. These Elon fanboys are obnoxious.
HDR+ in a cameraphone is like saying a 4K screen is better than a 720p one for playing 720p video.
No it's like saying a 4k screen is better than a 720p one for 4k video.
HDR+ increases the dynamic range of the sensor. The 3 most important metrics of an image are: Dynamic range\Noise (check), Color Rendition and Sharpness. Cameraphones are already plenty sharp, nearly all of the top camera phones shoot DNG uncompressed RAW and now they're implementing improved HDR modes to extended the dynamic range.
I own an 8k RED camera but almost all the photos I take are on my smartphone because the image is reasonably good. If I had one request for smartphone sensors it would be "more dynamic range" aka HDR+.
That however is in direct opposition to the idea that bitcoin is reliable as a store of wealth.
This is the heart of the problem with bitcoin. It is only useful as a currency if it is stable in value. If it were stable in value, most of the get-rich-quick hype would disappear.
"Bring me solutions, not problems." (Did he realize that's a line that only the villains say in movies?) Then nearly fired because things failed in more-or-less the way I expected.
We operate on this philosophy. It's a good philosophy when it's embraced correctly. What it should mean is that you should be actively looking for solutions not just problems. It's useful to point out problems, but you're 10x more valuable if you can also quickly or on the spot start working alternatives.
"No, that will fail because of XYZ, but if we do UVW it will accomplish the same goal."
This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete. I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.
You're looking at the wrong aspect of testing. Yes you set a hypothesis, but you also have to actively look for "potential sources of error" when designing your experiment. If you're testing whether a ball of a greater mass will fall faster than a ball of lesser mass you need to identify what confounding variables might exist. If you drop a feather and drop a bowling ball but the feather drops slower you need to "attempt to disprove the conclusion" by rigorously soliciting potential confounding variables.
Elon's 'First Principles' is to start from physics. "1) How many newtons does it take to put a rocket into orbit? 2) What's the average conversion ratio of kerosene -> newtons force? 3) What's the volume of that many tons of kerosene and oxygen? 4) How many kgs of aluminum would be necessary to make a tank that can hold that volume?"
With $X of Kerosene, $Y Oxygen, $Z aluminum the minimum bound price of a rocket = $(X+Y+Z) = $minPrice. If you then "attempt to disprove the conclusion" then someone experienced in rocket motors will say "there are exotic materials $U that are also necessary and will substantially impact price." Someone else experienced in air frame design will say "You need to account for carbon fiber manufacturing which costs $V per kg of carbon fiber." etc...
You aren't attempting to prove a negative, you are attempting to isolate ignored confounding variables.
The tradeoff is between the bad old days of hardware locked licenses or just as bad managing a license server. We have quite a bit of software that was a huge pain in the ass to move between computers or else had to connect to our vpn just to function. Connecting to the internet every few days is a small price to pay to simplify licensing and offer more flexibility in deployment.
You prefered the days of USB dongles, license servers and an inability to rent per-minute licenses? I for one didn't I ask companies to add internet connection based licensing, I'm so sick and tired of managing FlexLM servers, replacement dongles and paying $1,000 a year when we desparately need it for 60 minutes.
It's not over engineering because A) it matters where the engine explodes. T+1s is way worse than T+50. I'm not even sure if it can safely clear the pad on 8 engines. B) There are performance costs. In the car of CRS1 NASA required spacex to abort a secondary payload and on a reusable GTO launch it probably wouldn't have enough fuel to land which would turn a reusable launch into an expendable launch without the commiserate price increase passed on to the customer.
I've driven in snow that blocked up all my sensors though too. I once had to open my door and follow the white line on the road outside the door to navigate while someone watched for tail lights ahead at 5mph for an hour. Having GPS + Radar guidance would have been invaluable. Radar would have seen through the snow no problem and GPS could have kept me on the road.
Like audio fingerprinting this isn't a cryptographically accurate hash but more like a song fingerprint in that it only takes a small segment of the image for recognition.
Of course the real abuse would be to take a picture of the Eiffel tower and watch everyone's uploads fail for a few hours.
In a game of go a player has 19x19 (361) possible moves (spaces) per interval (turn).
Starcraft not only has a far larger board with the average 1v1 map being ~130x130 (16,900) possible moves (spaces) per interval (turn).
So just based on the board size the computer already has to calculate nearly 50x as many positions.
Now for those positions instead of 1 single move possible per space (place one token), you have multiple units.
Assuming we have 20 units and if we view Unit.Selected = [bool] as a variable for each unit then we have 2^20 (1,048,576) possible selections of those units. * multiple actions per unit (burrow, move, attack etc.) = let's say 3 million possible actions.
So for every AI frame\tick you've got 3m * 16,900 possible moves = ~ 45,000,000,000 moves in starcraft per turn vs 350 moves in Go. But it gets worse. A good starcraft player can make a move every let's say 2 seconds. For a game lasting 20 minutes that's 600 iterations\ticks\frames vs roughly 200 in Go.
Lastly the AI doesn't even know what the opponent is doing. Without a scouting unit the AI also has to infer everything that is happening based on a small fraction of the information it can know. So it has to strategize based on limited data unlike go where the whole board is visible.
So just random choices an AI could make is like 45B^650 compared to like 200^200 for Go. So while it's not realistic to compute Go like we computed chess, it's a whole 'nother level for Starcraft.
Sure in a handful of areas but for 70% of people living in the US an electric car is cleaner than nearly all hybrids. http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...
You have to look at the energy trends over the entire life of the car, those MPG equivalent ratings have gone up year after year as new cleaner power plants come on line. Maybe for the next 3-4 years a hybrid has a narrow edge but for the next 6 years your power source will get cleaner while a hybrid remains in the same spot.
One of the really nice things about an EV is that you can shift between generators without lock-in to any single fuel source. If huge natural gs reserves are unlocked you can power your vehicle on natural gas. If solar comes out cheaper you can run on solar. If you do run on coal, you're still relatively clean
Well, I"m not sure that they aren't doing both. For instance I'm uncertain of what a quote like this means: "The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found."
Twice the program's objective... for now or for long term operations? It's a bit like Trump taking credit for cutting the unit cost of F-35s when all the contractor did was update their numbers to the latest ones which take into account the higher volume (lower unit cost) .
The F35 is still way over budget, but it's also still very early in production. The early units will of course cost more. And they might be over budget and repair rates might be under the targets, but if we're using costs and maintenance goals for a mature product not the initial production runs then we're getting a distorted picture of where they are.
It would be like complaining that a software product is requiring 10x more developer time during the beta than was budgeted for... during its maintenance phase. Of course the release candidate testing phase you will be way over the long term maintenance budget's estimates. I want to know where costs should be right now in the lifecycle.
Important to note that there is one more huge cost saving and that is being able to increase inventory without building another production line. I think their factory is nearing capacity at this point so reusability means they can continue to expand without having to invest in a lot of capex to build or expand their factory. (Which also frees up space for BFR which drives down future costs.)
Blue Origin is burning a lot of cash right now just to build their manufacturing capabilities.
Throw it away, Reboot it, Buy that software, Replace that finicky ___. Don't be the "hero" who spends 3 days debugging something which can be replaced for $500.
"Working" doesn't mean it's secure and maintained. E.g. Equifax didn't replace one of their ad tracking scripts and as a result were delivering malware when the company serving it went bust and forfeited their domains.
Yes, sounds like a joke but it happens. But you don't hear that from the Linux guru.
You should far more often. I've seen this absurdity so many times where an admin spends 2 days hunting for the perfect fix when a 1am reboot would cause nearly no disruption.
it's still pretty hard to to outfit a single host (virtualized or not) with 2TB of memory, much less 6TB and much less a 4 CPU+ host with 6TB that is a "desktop".
Windows Pro Workstation is essentially just a license to sell to Windows Pro users who were buying Windows Server. We've run a few monster machines before with 4 sockets and lots of RAM for complicated 3D simulations and rendering. They required Windows Server. It was a bit of a PITA because by default it's configured to be a server, not a workstation so everything insanely locked down and has iffy driver compatibility with video cards etc.
Yes this isn't a price increase for Windows Pro Workstation users, this is a price drop. If you wanted to run a system with more than 2 CPUs you previously had to buy Windows Server which starts at substantially more.
Windows Phones were great. They just had fewer users so they got fewer apps so they had fewer apps so they go fewer apps so they had fewer users... etc.
Windows Phone will be back because phone/pc/laptop/ar is an arbitrary distinction. In 5 years you'll have a computing device and augmented reality vision which creates your screen. The same people who mock Microsoft's mobile ambitions also mocked their Surface product line... which is now a multi billion dollar business. Windows Phone will be the same. They've tried to out-android android and failed. But they'll succeed by being a full computer that happens to also function as a phone.
Phones are dumb. Just watching someone squinting, hunched over a smartphone shows how bad the whole idea is on principle. It's the best of terrible options but Microsoft has nearly completed their OS which runs legacy Win32 applications like Photoshop, UWP 'tablet\phone' type apps, supports LTE\Cellular calling and can be used with Mouse and Keyboard, Touch or AR hand gestures.
Android is nice and all, but for most usage I want an Augmented Reality OS which throws up a giant 30" screen in front of me and lets me just use a touchpad in my palm as if it was a laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
How many weeks did that last?
1 year ago: The Boring Company? This is just vaporware that won't go anywhere. Wake me up when it's a real company doing real projects. These Elon sycophants are intolerable.
Today: The Boring Company is bidding on a real project? God, who cares. These Elon fanboys are obnoxious.
10 years from now: Jesus, enough with the headlines about a new hyperloop tunnel opening. Nobody cares anymore. These Elon fanboys are obnoxious.
HDR+ in a cameraphone is like saying a 4K screen is better than a 720p one for playing 720p video.
No it's like saying a 4k screen is better than a 720p one for 4k video.
HDR+ increases the dynamic range of the sensor. The 3 most important metrics of an image are: Dynamic range\Noise (check), Color Rendition and Sharpness. Cameraphones are already plenty sharp, nearly all of the top camera phones shoot DNG uncompressed RAW and now they're implementing improved HDR modes to extended the dynamic range.
I own an 8k RED camera but almost all the photos I take are on my smartphone because the image is reasonably good. If I had one request for smartphone sensors it would be "more dynamic range" aka HDR+.
That however is in direct opposition to the idea that bitcoin is reliable as a store of wealth.
This is the heart of the problem with bitcoin. It is only useful as a currency if it is stable in value. If it were stable in value, most of the get-rich-quick hype would disappear.
"Bring me solutions, not problems." (Did he realize that's a line that only the villains say in movies?) Then nearly fired because things failed in more-or-less the way I expected.
We operate on this philosophy. It's a good philosophy when it's embraced correctly. What it should mean is that you should be actively looking for solutions not just problems. It's useful to point out problems, but you're 10x more valuable if you can also quickly or on the spot start working alternatives.
"No, that will fail because of XYZ, but if we do UVW it will accomplish the same goal."
This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete. I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.
You're looking at the wrong aspect of testing. Yes you set a hypothesis, but you also have to actively look for "potential sources of error" when designing your experiment. If you're testing whether a ball of a greater mass will fall faster than a ball of lesser mass you need to identify what confounding variables might exist. If you drop a feather and drop a bowling ball but the feather drops slower you need to "attempt to disprove the conclusion" by rigorously soliciting potential confounding variables.
Elon's 'First Principles' is to start from physics.
"1) How many newtons does it take to put a rocket into orbit? 2) What's the average conversion ratio of kerosene -> newtons force?
3) What's the volume of that many tons of kerosene and oxygen?
4) How many kgs of aluminum would be necessary to make a tank that can hold that volume?"
With $X of Kerosene, $Y Oxygen, $Z aluminum the minimum bound price of a rocket = $(X+Y+Z) = $minPrice. If you then "attempt to disprove the conclusion" then someone experienced in rocket motors will say "there are exotic materials $U that are also necessary and will substantially impact price." Someone else experienced in air frame design will say "You need to account for carbon fiber manufacturing which costs $V per kg of carbon fiber." etc...
You aren't attempting to prove a negative, you are attempting to isolate ignored confounding variables.
The tradeoff is between the bad old days of hardware locked licenses or just as bad managing a license server. We have quite a bit of software that was a huge pain in the ass to move between computers or else had to connect to our vpn just to function. Connecting to the internet every few days is a small price to pay to simplify licensing and offer more flexibility in deployment.
You prefered the days of USB dongles, license servers and an inability to rent per-minute licenses? I for one didn't I ask companies to add internet connection based licensing, I'm so sick and tired of managing FlexLM servers, replacement dongles and paying $1,000 a year when we desparately need it for 60 minutes.
It's not over engineering because A) it matters where the engine explodes. T+1s is way worse than T+50. I'm not even sure if it can safely clear the pad on 8 engines. B) There are performance costs. In the car of CRS1 NASA required spacex to abort a secondary payload and on a reusable GTO launch it probably wouldn't have enough fuel to land which would turn a reusable launch into an expendable launch without the commiserate price increase passed on to the customer.
And when IE was doing this, the standards weren't well established or even broad enough to cover most website features.
HTML5 was only ratified a couple years ago. Most of what HTML5 standardized was being done adhoc by all the browsers in the form of DHTML etc.
I've driven in snow that blocked up all my sensors though too. I once had to open my door and follow the white line on the road outside the door to navigate while someone watched for tail lights ahead at 5mph for an hour. Having GPS + Radar guidance would have been invaluable. Radar would have seen through the snow no problem and GPS could have kept me on the road.
Like audio fingerprinting this isn't a cryptographically accurate hash but more like a song fingerprint in that it only takes a small segment of the image for recognition.
Of course the real abuse would be to take a picture of the Eiffel tower and watch everyone's uploads fail for a few hours.
what makes Starcraft stand out?
In a game of go a player has 19x19 (361) possible moves (spaces) per interval (turn).
Starcraft not only has a far larger board with the average 1v1 map being ~130x130 (16,900) possible moves (spaces) per interval (turn).
So just based on the board size the computer already has to calculate nearly 50x as many positions.
Now for those positions instead of 1 single move possible per space (place one token), you have multiple units.
Assuming we have 20 units and if we view Unit.Selected = [bool] as a variable for each unit then we have 2^20 (1,048,576) possible selections of those units. * multiple actions per unit (burrow, move, attack etc.) = let's say 3 million possible actions.
So for every AI frame\tick you've got 3m * 16,900 possible moves = ~ 45,000,000,000 moves in starcraft per turn vs 350 moves in Go. But it gets worse. A good starcraft player can make a move every let's say 2 seconds. For a game lasting 20 minutes that's 600 iterations\ticks\frames vs roughly 200 in Go.
Lastly the AI doesn't even know what the opponent is doing. Without a scouting unit the AI also has to infer everything that is happening based on a small fraction of the information it can know. So it has to strategize based on limited data unlike go where the whole board is visible.
So just random choices an AI could make is like 45B^650 compared to like 200^200 for Go. So while it's not realistic to compute Go like we computed chess, it's a whole 'nother level for Starcraft.
Sure in a handful of areas but for 70% of people living in the US an electric car is cleaner than nearly all hybrids. http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...
You have to look at the energy trends over the entire life of the car, those MPG equivalent ratings have gone up year after year as new cleaner power plants come on line. Maybe for the next 3-4 years a hybrid has a narrow edge but for the next 6 years your power source will get cleaner while a hybrid remains in the same spot.
One of the really nice things about an EV is that you can shift between generators without lock-in to any single fuel source. If huge natural gs reserves are unlocked you can power your vehicle on natural gas. If solar comes out cheaper you can run on solar. If you do run on coal, you're still relatively clean
Kerosene from Coal is about $3 a gallon. Kerosene is $1.50 a gallon.
Far more economical to just power Electric cars from coal.
NBN is already agnostic on the delivery method. And cell towers still need a fiber backbone.
Well, I"m not sure that they aren't doing both. For instance I'm uncertain of what a quote like this means: "The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found."
Twice the program's objective... for now or for long term operations? It's a bit like Trump taking credit for cutting the unit cost of F-35s when all the contractor did was update their numbers to the latest ones which take into account the higher volume (lower unit cost) .
The F35 is still way over budget, but it's also still very early in production. The early units will of course cost more. And they might be over budget and repair rates might be under the targets, but if we're using costs and maintenance goals for a mature product not the initial production runs then we're getting a distorted picture of where they are.
It would be like complaining that a software product is requiring 10x more developer time during the beta than was budgeted for... during its maintenance phase. Of course the release candidate testing phase you will be way over the long term maintenance budget's estimates. I want to know where costs should be right now in the lifecycle.
Important to note that there is one more huge cost saving and that is being able to increase inventory without building another production line. I think their factory is nearing capacity at this point so reusability means they can continue to expand without having to invest in a lot of capex to build or expand their factory. (Which also frees up space for BFR which drives down future costs.)
Blue Origin is burning a lot of cash right now just to build their manufacturing capabilities.
Throw it away, Reboot it, Buy that software, Replace that finicky ___. Don't be the "hero" who spends 3 days debugging something which can be replaced for $500.
"Working" doesn't mean it's secure and maintained. E.g. Equifax didn't replace one of their ad tracking scripts and as a result were delivering malware when the company serving it went bust and forfeited their domains.
Yes, sounds like a joke but it happens. But you don't hear that from the Linux guru.
You should far more often. I've seen this absurdity so many times where an admin spends 2 days hunting for the perfect fix when a 1am reboot would cause nearly no disruption.
In my Head Canon I've always assumed he had a heart attack from the rocket launch.
it's still pretty hard to to outfit a single host (virtualized or not) with 2TB of memory, much less 6TB and much less a 4 CPU+ host with 6TB that is a "desktop".
Windows Pro Workstation is essentially just a license to sell to Windows Pro users who were buying Windows Server. We've run a few monster machines before with 4 sockets and lots of RAM for complicated 3D simulations and rendering. They required Windows Server. It was a bit of a PITA because by default it's configured to be a server, not a workstation so everything insanely locked down and has iffy driver compatibility with video cards etc.
Yes this isn't a price increase for Windows Pro Workstation users, this is a price drop. If you wanted to run a system with more than 2 CPUs you previously had to buy Windows Server which starts at substantially more.
Windows Phones were great. They just had fewer users so they got fewer apps so they had fewer apps so they go fewer apps so they had fewer users... etc.
Windows Phone will be back because phone/pc/laptop/ar is an arbitrary distinction. In 5 years you'll have a computing device and augmented reality vision which creates your screen. The same people who mock Microsoft's mobile ambitions also mocked their Surface product line... which is now a multi billion dollar business. Windows Phone will be the same. They've tried to out-android android and failed. But they'll succeed by being a full computer that happens to also function as a phone.
Phones are dumb. Just watching someone squinting, hunched over a smartphone shows how bad the whole idea is on principle. It's the best of terrible options but Microsoft has nearly completed their OS which runs legacy Win32 applications like Photoshop, UWP 'tablet\phone' type apps, supports LTE\Cellular calling and can be used with Mouse and Keyboard, Touch or AR hand gestures.
Android is nice and all, but for most usage I want an Augmented Reality OS which throws up a giant 30" screen in front of me and lets me just use a touchpad in my palm as if it was a laptop.