"no one gives a shit about your stuff" - This isn't really true. Archaeologists/anthropologists' wet dream is finding ephemera from family life - from eras where it's rare, precisely because nobody gave a shit about it _AT THE TIME_ and didn't preserve it.
Skylab came out of a set of proposals that included exactly this kind of "wet" (because formerly full of fuel) habitat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
H2O2 is also an excellent ingredient in homebrew explosives and incendiaries, to the point that concentrated forms of it are highly regulated, even to the ludicrous level that in some countries they have discussed banning hair bleach containing peroxide. Even in the US, solutions more concentrated than (I think) about 5-6% H2O2 are not legal without special permits. Good luck transporting barrels of the pure stuff.
Storing energy chemically is very, very energy-dense and efficient. A rechargeable battery has to carry all its reagents in a sealed canister, and it has to have a fully reversible cell chemistry, which makes for relatively poorer energy density and a great deal of design complexity. A hydrogen-fueled vehicle only needs to carry fuel; the oxidizer is in the air all around (yes, I realize atmospheric source of O2 isn't good for fuel cells, but it's fine for H2-based internal combustion engines). What's wrong with a gas-station-style distribution network, by the way? No different from a charging station network, and a gas station style distribution involves a great deal less energy loss due to line resistance for electrical distribution. Hydrogen, unlike (say) methane or petroleum, can be piped around with little or no fear of what happens if the pipe is ruptured - at worst, it's a fire hazard, but it's not an environmental hazard because the leaking gas will rise and disperse.
Sure, the energy equation for extracting hydrogen isn't awesome (though I suspect if you ACTUALLY boil down ALL the inefficiencies in the electric-car-based-on-LiIon-batteries equation, the actual "joules in to miles traveled" ratio likely favors hydrogen by a long shot). But who cares if the source is, for example, solar, wave, hydro or wind energy from a station close to the sea, which also happens to be a great source of non-potable (therefore not competing with human drinking needs) water?
yeah... obv the phone *has* an audio ADC anyway to handle the microphone, so it *could* feed the FM signal in through that. I guess it depends on the individual phone design (spare mixer pins, for example) as to whether they route it this way.
I just looked at the datasheet for the WiFi/BT/FM chip (well, module really) in an Android device I work with - it's an older device based on an OMAP processor - and that chip does in fact feed out the FM audio in analog.
It depends on the chipset in use. For example, I work with a device (sort of a smartphone) that uses a single integrated baseband/WiFi/BT/FM SoC (single ARM core, old tech) - and the FM stuff is disabled in this application by blowing polyfuses at manufacture. No amount of software can turn it back on. I'm looking at a phone right now in my hand that has an integrated AP/baseband SoC, and uses an external BT/WiFi/FM chip. That chip uses strapping resistors and software commands to enable/disable the various modules.
Because as an intentional radiator, the FCC filings for the device will show exactly what emissions the device is making, and at what frequency and power level. And if it's emitting something that isn't in its type approval, any monkey with a scanner can detect that, and the FCC can and will lower the hammer of Thor onto the manufacturer's corporate scrotum (translation: huge, per-unit-sold fines).
Isn't the actual reason for this that the FM received audio is never in the digital domain, so couldn't be sent to BT unless it was fed into an ADC somewhere? My understanding is that the FM tuner audio output is an analog line fed into the analog amp/mixer chain that feeds the headphone jack.
Not to mention that FM radio is possibly going away ish in favor of digital broadcasts (of course, this has been happening forever... http://www.radioworld.com/arti... )
Sure, many integrated WiFi/BT chipsets also include an FM receiver. But turning it on, in a phone that wasn't shipped with it turned on, is not just a software matter. With the LO powered up, you'll need to repeat conducted and radiated emissions tests. And if the phone wasn't intended to be shipped with the radio enabled, the necessary passives to connect it to the earphone jack as an antenna likely won't be on the PCB. And in the case of Apple, since they absolutely never intended to use the FM capability, I'd be amazed if the relevant pads from the WiFi package are even led out to traces.
People, particularly at large corporations, who don't actually have a business plan, a finite budget, a deadline, or even a concrete conviction that a product or technology will take off always use five years as their time horizon, because that's the definition of a long term plan that doesn't require any detailed planning or elucidation of intermediate deliverables. Five years is another way of saying "probably not on my watch, but I've been told you should be made excited about this because we're mining it for PR right now even if we never mass-produce a product of this type". This is not cynicism, it's simple fact. There's no difference between saying "five years" and "20 years" in such a case.
The average age of a vehicle on US roads is 11.4 years ish and climbing. Self driving cars, like home automation, are "five years away from changing the world" and likely always will be; definitely still will be in five years. Minor aspects of functionality originally developed for self-driving applications will become mainstream piecemeal, but we're decade(s) away from self-driving cars being mainstream.
This is unlikely. He's a white collar criminal of the purest sort. It's extremely likely that he'll get probation, at most. Or exoneration. What it really boils down to is: who has he burned? The question of whether he'll see some time behind actual real bars hinges on whether the people behind the prosecution (not necessarily the SEC, btw - the SEC is merely the complainant...) have a grudge. This could easily be political, too - if he gets convicted, people in the State and Federal Government up to and including Obama step up and say "bad man, we fixed it, love us".
The bigger challenge is seeing that they don't re-reverse when the heat is off and think they can now get away with it once fewer people are paying attention.
They may never issue another firmware upgrade for these particular hubs; simply, the next version of the hub will be marketed as "for Friends of Our Wallet Certified Partners Only" and will be incompatible to non-partner devices from the get-go. It is absolutely conceivable that this was truly a UX decision - trying to tamp down the level of complaints from consumers who bought third-party bulbs that don't quite work right. However the fact is that this is a nascent (many might say, unnecessary luxury) market and people who buy this stuff are almost exclusively bleeding edge technology buffs and tinkerers, or people who simply throw a blank check at an integrator and say "make it work". The latter category of people isn't generating these support calls, because their integrators buy the expensive bulbs to avoid tech support, and the former category - which is the enthusiast category that could grow these devices into the mainstream - demands interop.
Mmm, actually I'd go one stronger than that and suggest you never, ever enable any of the network connectivity features - don't attach it to your WiFi network, don't plug an Ethernet cable into it. The OSes and apps on those things are completely security unverified, and several of them have been proven to send very nasty quantities of information gleaned from your local network activities back to home base (besides serving you up advertising).
It runs Netflix today. A year from now when Netflix has some new encryption protocol or codec, good luck finding a firmware update from the TV manufacturer.
Smart TVs are this whole argument all over again. They UNIVERSALLY suck compared to using a third party set top box, or using a content thrower/receiver like Chromecast and having a real, non-adware-infested, regularly-updated app on your smartphone or tablet. A good TV is a dumb screen that shows nice pictures and makes nice sound. The market for good TVs is saturated and prices have been driven down because there's not much difference between a $300 TV and a $600 TV of the same nominal specs, so TV manufacturers are trying to slice off a wedge of the set-top-box profits by essentially integrating a (really, really shitty) set-top box into their TVs.
Sure, I wasn't arguing with you on the question "is a tablet with zero battery life still useful as a tablet", I was stating that even if he put the tablet in a safe and only used it once a year, the battery will *still* die, because its lifespan is capped, regardless of how much or little he's using it. You can shorten the lifespan of a Li-poly battery significantly. You can't lengthen it significantly:)
For some reason the tech industry feels that double digit growth is sustainable, and the only indication of success.
Absolutely - and, since this belief is never true because it would also require a double digit growth in personal disposable income, the tech industry is constantly under pressure to create new product categories of things people don't want, so that this new category can have a temporary growth spurt. 3D TV and smartwatches are two recent examples.
At one time there were "home computers". These were basically appliances. You inserted the cartridge or diskette for the program you wanted
Eh, not many people would agree with that characterization of "home computers" (in the sense that it was meant in the 1980s, which your mention of cartridges implies). Most people who owned a home computer in that era learned at least a little BASIC, and pretty much all of them learned at least some "command line" skills (even if the "command line" in question was using the BASIC interpreter in direct mode).
This. Plus, corporates often *lease* their computers so they get a hardware refresh every two years, service plans baked into the lease cost, etc etc. Leases wouldn't show up as sales. I'd be pretty astonished if you could point me to a Fortune 100 (hell, even a Fortune 500) that has standardized on Surface as their mobile computer of choice.
When was I away from an outlet for more than 3 hours? Pretty much any time I'm flying, which is more or less once a week, and if am not in a class of service that has power outlets at the seat. While for many (most?) people laptops have become the new desktop, it's still true that there are people who spend significant time away from mains power.
ISTM that Apple is offering finance options (basically) on their phones now because the carriers are all making "we don't want to subsidize devices any more" noises, and the market for premium priced flagship devices from any vendor is unsustainable at its current size unless _someone_ is offering what amounts to low-interest financing. As a sidebar, it's also why Apple is very keen to have an embedded carrier-neutral SIM in its phones - because if you're on contract to *Apple*, not your cell carrier, then you'll want the same carrier mobility that your friend with a $200 unlocked phone has.
That whole change of subsidy philosophy on the carriers' part could very easily make a sea change in the hardware market. Even the people who can afford to drop $650 on a premium phone upfront experience sticker shock, especially since there are now many very credible phones on the market, unlocked, for $200 or less. It may be that we're going to see a combination of "purchase me on an instalment plan offered by the hardware vendor" a la Apple, plus a significant contraction of the flagship phone market in favor of devices in the middle of the price spectrum. Similarly to the PC market, not everybody actually *needs* a high end flagship, and if the "how much do I have to extract from my wallet to walk out of the store with a new phone" question gets rearranged with a much higher sticker on the flagship vs. midrange, more people may contemplate that fact before plunking down cash.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but we're talking about a hypothetical future where the knowledge of how to decode a JPEG has vanished, so...
"no one gives a shit about your stuff" - This isn't really true. Archaeologists/anthropologists' wet dream is finding ephemera from family life - from eras where it's rare, precisely because nobody gave a shit about it _AT THE TIME_ and didn't preserve it.
Skylab came out of a set of proposals that included exactly this kind of "wet" (because formerly full of fuel) habitat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
H2O2 is also an excellent ingredient in homebrew explosives and incendiaries, to the point that concentrated forms of it are highly regulated, even to the ludicrous level that in some countries they have discussed banning hair bleach containing peroxide. Even in the US, solutions more concentrated than (I think) about 5-6% H2O2 are not legal without special permits. Good luck transporting barrels of the pure stuff.
Sure, the energy equation for extracting hydrogen isn't awesome (though I suspect if you ACTUALLY boil down ALL the inefficiencies in the electric-car-based-on-LiIon-batteries equation, the actual "joules in to miles traveled" ratio likely favors hydrogen by a long shot). But who cares if the source is, for example, solar, wave, hydro or wind energy from a station close to the sea, which also happens to be a great source of non-potable (therefore not competing with human drinking needs) water?
yeah... obv the phone *has* an audio ADC anyway to handle the microphone, so it *could* feed the FM signal in through that. I guess it depends on the individual phone design (spare mixer pins, for example) as to whether they route it this way. I just looked at the datasheet for the WiFi/BT/FM chip (well, module really) in an Android device I work with - it's an older device based on an OMAP processor - and that chip does in fact feed out the FM audio in analog.
It depends on the chipset in use. For example, I work with a device (sort of a smartphone) that uses a single integrated baseband/WiFi/BT/FM SoC (single ARM core, old tech) - and the FM stuff is disabled in this application by blowing polyfuses at manufacture. No amount of software can turn it back on. I'm looking at a phone right now in my hand that has an integrated AP/baseband SoC, and uses an external BT/WiFi/FM chip. That chip uses strapping resistors and software commands to enable/disable the various modules.
Because as an intentional radiator, the FCC filings for the device will show exactly what emissions the device is making, and at what frequency and power level. And if it's emitting something that isn't in its type approval, any monkey with a scanner can detect that, and the FCC can and will lower the hammer of Thor onto the manufacturer's corporate scrotum (translation: huge, per-unit-sold fines).
Quite a few BT (and BT/WiFi) speakers give you a hardwired analog in option as well, though it's obviously not a NECESSARY feature, as you point out.
Isn't the actual reason for this that the FM received audio is never in the digital domain, so couldn't be sent to BT unless it was fed into an ADC somewhere? My understanding is that the FM tuner audio output is an analog line fed into the analog amp/mixer chain that feeds the headphone jack.
Remember that thing you plug into the butt of your phone every day or so, to charge it? Yes. Conducted emissions test is required.
Not to mention that FM radio is possibly going away ish in favor of digital broadcasts (of course, this has been happening forever... http://www.radioworld.com/arti... )
Sure, many integrated WiFi/BT chipsets also include an FM receiver. But turning it on, in a phone that wasn't shipped with it turned on, is not just a software matter. With the LO powered up, you'll need to repeat conducted and radiated emissions tests. And if the phone wasn't intended to be shipped with the radio enabled, the necessary passives to connect it to the earphone jack as an antenna likely won't be on the PCB. And in the case of Apple, since they absolutely never intended to use the FM capability, I'd be amazed if the relevant pads from the WiFi package are even led out to traces.
The average age of a vehicle on US roads is 11.4 years ish and climbing. Self driving cars, like home automation, are "five years away from changing the world" and likely always will be; definitely still will be in five years. Minor aspects of functionality originally developed for self-driving applications will become mainstream piecemeal, but we're decade(s) away from self-driving cars being mainstream.
This is unlikely. He's a white collar criminal of the purest sort. It's extremely likely that he'll get probation, at most. Or exoneration. What it really boils down to is: who has he burned? The question of whether he'll see some time behind actual real bars hinges on whether the people behind the prosecution (not necessarily the SEC, btw - the SEC is merely the complainant...) have a grudge. This could easily be political, too - if he gets convicted, people in the State and Federal Government up to and including Obama step up and say "bad man, we fixed it, love us".
Because environmental activists are trying to ban THOSE sorts of bulbs.
They may never issue another firmware upgrade for these particular hubs; simply, the next version of the hub will be marketed as "for Friends of Our Wallet Certified Partners Only" and will be incompatible to non-partner devices from the get-go. It is absolutely conceivable that this was truly a UX decision - trying to tamp down the level of complaints from consumers who bought third-party bulbs that don't quite work right. However the fact is that this is a nascent (many might say, unnecessary luxury) market and people who buy this stuff are almost exclusively bleeding edge technology buffs and tinkerers, or people who simply throw a blank check at an integrator and say "make it work". The latter category of people isn't generating these support calls, because their integrators buy the expensive bulbs to avoid tech support, and the former category - which is the enthusiast category that could grow these devices into the mainstream - demands interop.
Mmm, actually I'd go one stronger than that and suggest you never, ever enable any of the network connectivity features - don't attach it to your WiFi network, don't plug an Ethernet cable into it. The OSes and apps on those things are completely security unverified, and several of them have been proven to send very nasty quantities of information gleaned from your local network activities back to home base (besides serving you up advertising).
It runs Netflix today. A year from now when Netflix has some new encryption protocol or codec, good luck finding a firmware update from the TV manufacturer.
Smart TVs are this whole argument all over again. They UNIVERSALLY suck compared to using a third party set top box, or using a content thrower/receiver like Chromecast and having a real, non-adware-infested, regularly-updated app on your smartphone or tablet. A good TV is a dumb screen that shows nice pictures and makes nice sound. The market for good TVs is saturated and prices have been driven down because there's not much difference between a $300 TV and a $600 TV of the same nominal specs, so TV manufacturers are trying to slice off a wedge of the set-top-box profits by essentially integrating a (really, really shitty) set-top box into their TVs.
Sure, I wasn't arguing with you on the question "is a tablet with zero battery life still useful as a tablet", I was stating that even if he put the tablet in a safe and only used it once a year, the battery will *still* die, because its lifespan is capped, regardless of how much or little he's using it. You can shorten the lifespan of a Li-poly battery significantly. You can't lengthen it significantly :)
Absolutely - and, since this belief is never true because it would also require a double digit growth in personal disposable income, the tech industry is constantly under pressure to create new product categories of things people don't want, so that this new category can have a temporary growth spurt. 3D TV and smartwatches are two recent examples.
At one time there were "home computers". These were basically appliances. You inserted the cartridge or diskette for the program you wanted
Eh, not many people would agree with that characterization of "home computers" (in the sense that it was meant in the 1980s, which your mention of cartridges implies). Most people who owned a home computer in that era learned at least a little BASIC, and pretty much all of them learned at least some "command line" skills (even if the "command line" in question was using the BASIC interpreter in direct mode).
This. Plus, corporates often *lease* their computers so they get a hardware refresh every two years, service plans baked into the lease cost, etc etc. Leases wouldn't show up as sales. I'd be pretty astonished if you could point me to a Fortune 100 (hell, even a Fortune 500) that has standardized on Surface as their mobile computer of choice.
When was I away from an outlet for more than 3 hours? Pretty much any time I'm flying, which is more or less once a week, and if am not in a class of service that has power outlets at the seat. While for many (most?) people laptops have become the new desktop, it's still true that there are people who spend significant time away from mains power.
That whole change of subsidy philosophy on the carriers' part could very easily make a sea change in the hardware market. Even the people who can afford to drop $650 on a premium phone upfront experience sticker shock, especially since there are now many very credible phones on the market, unlocked, for $200 or less. It may be that we're going to see a combination of "purchase me on an instalment plan offered by the hardware vendor" a la Apple, plus a significant contraction of the flagship phone market in favor of devices in the middle of the price spectrum. Similarly to the PC market, not everybody actually *needs* a high end flagship, and if the "how much do I have to extract from my wallet to walk out of the store with a new phone" question gets rearranged with a much higher sticker on the flagship vs. midrange, more people may contemplate that fact before plunking down cash.