Also, a GPG web of trust for peer review. Reviewers can get their public key signed by other experts to build up their reputation as an expert on X. Then they sign their reviews of papers, and you can verify whether they are an expert in the field they are reviewing.
There's also a market in pre-nuclear age steel for use in applications where sensitive equipment would be affected by the cobalt-60 that contaminates our entire steel industry because it uses the air that we soiled with nuclear explosions.
However, we've not all mutated into comic-book superheroes or Cronenberg monsters.
GPS can't send shit. It's a receiver only, it picks up signals from satellites in frigging space. If your phone could send signals to space it would cost, and weigh, a fuckload more.
There's no remote tracking without a cellular modem or other transmitter to send the coordinates resolved by the GPS receiver across a terrestrial network.
I came here to say just this, but if Backblaze really will give you unlimited backup AND there's a duplicity backend for it, if you're backing up more than 1TB or so then Backblaze will be cheaper than even S3 Glacier.
Backblaze are probably making out like gangbusters even if they're re-selling S3 capacity though, most people's backups will only be a small fraction of that.
People game standardized tests. Graphics cards, benchmarks, cars, students, teachers, if you have a standardized test, people will put in the effort to game the numbers.
Maybe they should do what they do for TV : recruit a random sample of people, stick an energy monitor on their appliances, and see what happens.
The government in the UK has promised to help their motivation and spirit by putting a lien on their parents house to pay for any social care they require. Go UK!
Everyone foolishly assumes that machine intelligence will be able to run on a laptop, when the earliest computers occupied entire buildings.
nvidia just released a single-card GPU geared specifically to deep learning computing loads with 21 billion transistors in it.
The first computer I used made do with about 6,500 but still fit in a case the size of a hardback book. And that wasn't even one of the earliest ones.
George Hotz - one guy working along - hacked together a passable self-driving car with less powerful hardware. Logically speaking, the computing hardware in the Google self-drivers must.. fit in a car.
They've already trialled automated truck platoons - multiple trucks in a virtual train, slipstreaming to save fuel - on the M6 motorway in the UK.
Even if the trucks can only cope on freeways / motorways with their simplicity... that eliminates the vast majority of hours required to get cargo from A to B. There are already firms starting up "last mile" drone-truck remote-piloting services, where the truck driver sits on his ass in a gaming rig and drives the truck from a staging depot just off the freeway to it's destination.
Even if they can't get the tech for THAT right - they'll just have drivers sat at the depot, maybe with a folding moped in a bag. Drive the truck to it's drop off, then to any local pickup, back to the depot where the robot takes over.
Turns trucker into a gig economy job instead of a steady middle class occupation.
I'd agree but the keyboard layout is *terrible* for a programmer. All the important keys are in the wrong place.
I'd rather have Linux on quality PC hardware - like a Lenovo T460s - than a Mac any day. The mistake people make with PCs is buying bargain basement quality hardware because you can - they should be looking for Maclike quality - and they'll probably end up spending less.
People develop pathological scratching and textile fibres get into the wounds. That's it. Last I heard from the Morgellons community they were claiming the fibres were created by the disease. Clearly the laboratory findings that the fibres are all clothing textile fibres has now been absorbed into the mental pathology since it can't be explained away.
I mean, really. So-called scientific papers that cite anecdotes like
"However, a more thorough analysis of the fibers performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation forensics laboratory has revealed that the fibers do not resemble textiles or any other manmade substance. In fact, the fibers are virtually indestructible by heat or chemical means, making analysis difficult by conventional methods.
Virtually indestructible fibres?? Surely the Government should be locking these people away and farming them to build a space elevator.
Oddly the incidence of this so-called disease is much lower in the UK, a country that mostly air-dries it's clothes. And isn't obsessed with alien abductions.
It's terrible at being compatible with MS Office though, which is sadly the number one must-have feature of an office suite. And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version.
LibreOffice is probably better at being compatible with old versions of Office than modern versions of Office though. Many's the time I've seen old Office documents rescued by being loaded into LibreOffice and saved as a more modern format that the current version can understand.
As long as all your target document recipients are either using LibreOffice, or will accept PDF, you're fine. If you have to send your documents to someone who uses MS Office, you can't rely on LibreOffice not to embarrass you horribly - even though it's MS Office screwing up the formats, layouts, footers/headers, etc.
My daughter thinks GIMP is great and Photoshop is crap ; but she started with GIMP. It is largely about what you've learned and overcoming the "yuk" factor of having to learn a different way of doing things.
I get the same feeling when I have to use Windows, or OSX, for any kind of productive work when for the last decade I've been using Linux.
Even better when paired with something like Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment which puts the menus on a search hotkey.
Tap <alt> and type part of the command you're looking for, presto! It even remembers the ones you use the most, I think. There's a reason editors like Atom and Eclipse, etc, have something like this baked into the program itself (and it's not just because Atom with a bunch of plugins has more menu items than the food court at Disney).
I use Syncthing - runs on all major OSs including phones, runs (almost*) entirely on your own infrastructure so less scope for being snooped. Packaged for my NAS box as well. (A NAS or equivalent server for backups is something every self-respecting nerd should own). And no arbitrary data size limits.
* It uses some public servers for connection negotiation and sometimes as peers - but all traffic is encrypted.
> a modern ICE will cost you less than 4 grand in fuel for the entire life of the vehicle
In the USA, maybe. In nations where the tax on fuel makes up most of it's cost like the UK... I spend about £2,000 a year on fuel in my tiny little Skoda CitiGo, commuting a mere 60 miles round trip 4x a week.
Tesla Model 3 (the closest they've come to a mass-market car) has a range of 215 miles. The battery pack makes up a large amount of it's mass. If you can cut the battery down to 1/3rd the size, the range of the car will go up, so you can probably cut it a little further - maybe to 1/4. Now you're talking about a battery that only costs 2.5x as much.
Plus the speculation that these batteries will cost 10x as much when the inventor describes them as "cheap" is wild. If they cost 3x more to manufacture, they're definitely already worth it for electric cars - because even a unit that holds the same charge as the current battery, and thus costs the same, improves the car by being lighter, taking up less space, and charging faster, giving it better range or carrying capacity and greater utility.
> Will the market be willing to pay over 10x as much for a battery with 3x the charge is the business question.
The cost of the battery module in an iPhone 6 is around $4.50, the total cost is $236 [1]
At the margins they sell them at - Apple would probably drop the battery size by 1/3rd, put in the new $30 battery module, eat the extra $25.50 in costs themselves, and then take great glee in pointing our that their phones were now even lighter, and had double the battery capacity and charged 5x faster than every other phone on the market.
At which point every other manufacturer would have to sit up, take notice, and start using those batteries themselves or be viewed as genuinely inferior, instead of generally superior (in terms of hardware capability, most of the premium Android phones crap all over the iPhone, they just don't have the shiny case and the Apple Reality Distortion Generator). You might get long-term holdouts in the cheaper end of the market, but the premium lines would have to adopt it, which would expand the market, make it more viable to manufacture those batteries, economies of scale kick in, etc.etc.etc.
The later second generation of General Motors EV1 ran on NiMH batteries, leased at prices comparable to a BMW, and had a 100-140 mile range on a full charge - more than enough for the vast majority of journeys (a 50 mile commute each way from city to city is about 3-4 hours driving depending on traffic, I sure as hell wouldn't want to drive more than that on a regular basis). Hell, even the 1st generation EV1 with a lead-acid battery (70-100 mile range) would be enough for my current commute.
And unless your particular battery module is a commodity component, this is worth jack.
Nokia had the right idea on this ; most of their user-replaceable battery modules had lifespans longer than the line of phones they first appeared in. But with the trend toward integrated batteries, everyone started designing special-purpose units for one particular model, which is no longer worth manufacturing after that model became obsolescent. Which is a shame, because treated well, most phones will, as you note, outlast their battery.
Batteries degrade even on the shelf when you don't use them, so unless your phone was so mega-popular that it's worth manufacturing new ones (basically just iPhones), any module you're going to get is going to be old stock, or a knock-off manufactured so cheaply that you could almost rely on being able to use your phone as a grenade.
I have a Nexus 4 that I've had 5 years, has survived being repeatedly upgraded to the latest version of Android even when Google / LG stopped supporting it, is even outlasting the TPU case I bought for it, has only one or two imperceptible scratches on the screen. It's still my daily driver and still a great phone - the only two components I worry about are the USB port (I got a wireless charger to help reduce the number of cycles) and the battery - I still get 2 days of standby time if I'm careful, but it's starting to drop charge a little quickly once it drops below 40% now. I'd love to get a brand new, official, manufactured-this-year LG battery module for it, but such a thing does not seem to exist. And even the third-party knock-offs all seem to have been made in 2013 and sat in some superheated SE Asian warehouse since then, degrading to the point where they are sometimes worse than the unit they are replacing (as far as anecdotes on/r/nexus4 seem to reflect.)
You sweat the same stuff as you get in pee. You're covered in this stuff already. You're probably get more of someone else's on you from shaking hands with someone than you do from jumping in the pool.
And unless you have a bladder infection, pee is sterile.
There's no reason for concern, and what's more, people don't want to know. There was a vogue for putting chemicals in the pool that turned purple when they mixed with pee. Guess what? No-one uses them any more, because thinking about swimming in someone else's pee is far more of a (mental) health hazard than actually swimming in someone else's (highly diluted) pee.
Problem with whitelisting is that it destroys your computer.
It's not a computer any more. It's an appliance.
Which is fine for people you can only trust to run an appliance, but it prevents anyone from programming aka becoming more productive.
It's a nice little racket - it guarantees the IT dept. a job (they were charging £2,000 to vet programs for distribution at my last place), it gives the "real" programmers more work, but it stops users reaching enlightenment and getting the computer to do what it's for - lots of repetitive tasks in an automated manner.
---
Aside from that, whitelisting software has been responsible for some of the more spectacular performance drops I've seen - like taking a process that writes around 30,000 files and increasing it's runtime from 2 minutes to 15 minutes, taking an operation that subject matter authors were doing when they felt like it and making it a tea-break thing, totally wrecking productivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, a GPG web of trust for peer review. Reviewers can get their public key signed by other experts to build up their reputation as an expert on X. Then they sign their reviews of papers, and you can verify whether they are an expert in the field they are reviewing.
... with nuclear waste.
Since the spate of nuclear tests in the 60s, carbon-14 levels still haven't dropped to baseline.
There's also a market in pre-nuclear age steel for use in applications where sensitive equipment would be affected by the cobalt-60 that contaminates our entire steel industry because it uses the air that we soiled with nuclear explosions.
However, we've not all mutated into comic-book superheroes or Cronenberg monsters.
Stuff gets contaminated with stuff. It's generally only a problem for biological lifeforms when natural processes concentrate that stuff and it's toxic to them.
GPS can't send shit. It's a receiver only, it picks up signals from satellites in frigging space. If your phone could send signals to space it would cost, and weigh, a fuckload more.
There's no remote tracking without a cellular modem or other transmitter to send the coordinates resolved by the GPS receiver across a terrestrial network.
I came here to say just this, but if Backblaze really will give you unlimited backup AND there's a duplicity backend for it, if you're backing up more than 1TB or so then Backblaze will be cheaper than even S3 Glacier.
Backblaze are probably making out like gangbusters even if they're re-selling S3 capacity though, most people's backups will only be a small fraction of that.
People game standardized tests. Graphics cards, benchmarks, cars, students, teachers, if you have a standardized test, people will put in the effort to game the numbers.
Maybe they should do what they do for TV : recruit a random sample of people, stick an energy monitor on their appliances, and see what happens.
The government in the UK has promised to help their motivation and spirit by putting a lien on their parents house to pay for any social care they require. Go UK!
Everyone foolishly assumes that machine intelligence will be able to run on a laptop, when the earliest computers occupied entire buildings.
nvidia just released a single-card GPU geared specifically to deep learning computing loads with 21 billion transistors in it.
The first computer I used made do with about 6,500 but still fit in a case the size of a hardback book. And that wasn't even one of the earliest ones.
George Hotz - one guy working along - hacked together a passable self-driving car with less powerful hardware. Logically speaking, the computing hardware in the Google self-drivers must.. fit in a car.
They've already trialled automated truck platoons - multiple trucks in a virtual train, slipstreaming to save fuel - on the M6 motorway in the UK.
Even if the trucks can only cope on freeways / motorways with their simplicity... that eliminates the vast majority of hours required to get cargo from A to B. There are already firms starting up "last mile" drone-truck remote-piloting services, where the truck driver sits on his ass in a gaming rig and drives the truck from a staging depot just off the freeway to it's destination.
Even if they can't get the tech for THAT right - they'll just have drivers sat at the depot, maybe with a folding moped in a bag. Drive the truck to it's drop off, then to any local pickup, back to the depot where the robot takes over.
Turns trucker into a gig economy job instead of a steady middle class occupation.
I'd agree but the keyboard layout is *terrible* for a programmer. All the important keys are in the wrong place.
I'd rather have Linux on quality PC hardware - like a Lenovo T460s - than a Mac any day. The mistake people make with PCs is buying bargain basement quality hardware because you can - they should be looking for Maclike quality - and they'll probably end up spending less.
It's not anything. Because it doesn't exist.
People develop pathological scratching and textile fibres get into the wounds. That's it. Last I heard from the Morgellons community they were claiming the fibres were created by the disease. Clearly the laboratory findings that the fibres are all clothing textile fibres has now been absorbed into the mental pathology since it can't be explained away.
I mean, really. So-called scientific papers that cite anecdotes like
"However, a more thorough analysis of the fibers performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation forensics laboratory has revealed that the fibers do not resemble textiles or any other manmade substance. In fact, the fibers are virtually indestructible by heat or chemical means, making analysis difficult by conventional methods.
Virtually indestructible fibres?? Surely the Government should be locking these people away and farming them to build a space elevator.
Oddly the incidence of this so-called disease is much lower in the UK, a country that mostly air-dries it's clothes. And isn't obsessed with alien abductions.
A limp what?
LO may be a better editor.
It's terrible at being compatible with MS Office though, which is sadly the number one must-have feature of an office suite. And only MS Office nails it, and then only within the current version.
LibreOffice is probably better at being compatible with old versions of Office than modern versions of Office though. Many's the time I've seen old Office documents rescued by being loaded into LibreOffice and saved as a more modern format that the current version can understand.
As long as all your target document recipients are either using LibreOffice, or will accept PDF, you're fine. If you have to send your documents to someone who uses MS Office, you can't rely on LibreOffice not to embarrass you horribly - even though it's MS Office screwing up the formats, layouts, footers/headers, etc.
My daughter thinks GIMP is great and Photoshop is crap ; but she started with GIMP. It is largely about what you've learned and overcoming the "yuk" factor of having to learn a different way of doing things.
I get the same feeling when I have to use Windows, or OSX, for any kind of productive work when for the last decade I've been using Linux.
Even better when paired with something like Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment which puts the menus on a search hotkey.
Tap <alt> and type part of the command you're looking for, presto! It even remembers the ones you use the most, I think. There's a reason editors like Atom and Eclipse, etc, have something like this baked into the program itself (and it's not just because Atom with a bunch of plugins has more menu items than the food court at Disney).
I use Syncthing - runs on all major OSs including phones, runs (almost*) entirely on your own infrastructure so less scope for being snooped. Packaged for my NAS box as well. (A NAS or equivalent server for backups is something every self-respecting nerd should own). And no arbitrary data size limits.
* It uses some public servers for connection negotiation and sometimes as peers - but all traffic is encrypted.
Yeah, you have to keep a special copy of a 32-bit version of Firefox and Java around if you want *any* of it to work...
True, in that case, the time was consumed fixing little technical issues like it's propensity to catch fire though.
If this is stable now, then the only hurdles to jump are mass-manufacturing processes.
> a modern ICE will cost you less than 4 grand in fuel for the entire life of the vehicle
In the USA, maybe. In nations where the tax on fuel makes up most of it's cost like the UK... I spend about £2,000 a year on fuel in my tiny little Skoda CitiGo, commuting a mere 60 miles round trip 4x a week.
Tesla Model 3 (the closest they've come to a mass-market car) has a range of 215 miles. The battery pack makes up a large amount of it's mass. If you can cut the battery down to 1/3rd the size, the range of the car will go up, so you can probably cut it a little further - maybe to 1/4. Now you're talking about a battery that only costs 2.5x as much.
Plus the speculation that these batteries will cost 10x as much when the inventor describes them as "cheap" is wild. If they cost 3x more to manufacture, they're definitely already worth it for electric cars - because even a unit that holds the same charge as the current battery, and thus costs the same, improves the car by being lighter, taking up less space, and charging faster, giving it better range or carrying capacity and greater utility.
> Will the market be willing to pay over 10x as much for a battery with 3x the charge is the business question.
The cost of the battery module in an iPhone 6 is around $4.50, the total cost is $236 [1]
At the margins they sell them at - Apple would probably drop the battery size by 1/3rd, put in the new $30 battery module, eat the extra $25.50 in costs themselves, and then take great glee in pointing our that their phones were now even lighter, and had double the battery capacity and charged 5x faster than every other phone on the market.
At which point every other manufacturer would have to sit up, take notice, and start using those batteries themselves or be viewed as genuinely inferior, instead of generally superior (in terms of hardware capability, most of the premium Android phones crap all over the iPhone, they just don't have the shiny case and the Apple Reality Distortion Generator). You might get long-term holdouts in the cheaper end of the market, but the premium lines would have to adopt it, which would expand the market, make it more viable to manufacture those batteries, economies of scale kick in, etc.etc.etc.
[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/iphone-...
The later second generation of General Motors EV1 ran on NiMH batteries, leased at prices comparable to a BMW, and had a 100-140 mile range on a full charge - more than enough for the vast majority of journeys (a 50 mile commute each way from city to city is about 3-4 hours driving depending on traffic, I sure as hell wouldn't want to drive more than that on a regular basis). Hell, even the 1st generation EV1 with a lead-acid battery (70-100 mile range) would be enough for my current commute.
And unless your particular battery module is a commodity component, this is worth jack.
Nokia had the right idea on this ; most of their user-replaceable battery modules had lifespans longer than the line of phones they first appeared in. But with the trend toward integrated batteries, everyone started designing special-purpose units for one particular model, which is no longer worth manufacturing after that model became obsolescent. Which is a shame, because treated well, most phones will, as you note, outlast their battery.
Batteries degrade even on the shelf when you don't use them, so unless your phone was so mega-popular that it's worth manufacturing new ones (basically just iPhones), any module you're going to get is going to be old stock, or a knock-off manufactured so cheaply that you could almost rely on being able to use your phone as a grenade.
I have a Nexus 4 that I've had 5 years, has survived being repeatedly upgraded to the latest version of Android even when Google / LG stopped supporting it, is even outlasting the TPU case I bought for it, has only one or two imperceptible scratches on the screen. It's still my daily driver and still a great phone - the only two components I worry about are the USB port (I got a wireless charger to help reduce the number of cycles) and the battery - I still get 2 days of standby time if I'm careful, but it's starting to drop charge a little quickly once it drops below 40% now. I'd love to get a brand new, official, manufactured-this-year LG battery module for it, but such a thing does not seem to exist. And even the third-party knock-offs all seem to have been made in 2013 and sat in some superheated SE Asian warehouse since then, degrading to the point where they are sometimes worse than the unit they are replacing (as far as anecdotes on /r/nexus4 seem to reflect.)
And frankly, who gives a shit.
You sweat the same stuff as you get in pee. You're covered in this stuff already. You're probably get more of someone else's on you from shaking hands with someone than you do from jumping in the pool.
And unless you have a bladder infection, pee is sterile.
There's no reason for concern, and what's more, people don't want to know. There was a vogue for putting chemicals in the pool that turned purple when they mixed with pee. Guess what? No-one uses them any more, because thinking about swimming in someone else's pee is far more of a (mental) health hazard than actually swimming in someone else's (highly diluted) pee.
Yeah, I used to love that my N900 could both receive *and* transmit FM - you could use it as your personal FM radio station in the car.
AFAIK Postgres has a PL/SQL compatibility module now.
Problem with whitelisting is that it destroys your computer.
It's not a computer any more. It's an appliance.
Which is fine for people you can only trust to run an appliance, but it prevents anyone from programming aka becoming more productive.
It's a nice little racket - it guarantees the IT dept. a job (they were charging £2,000 to vet programs for distribution at my last place), it gives the "real" programmers more work, but it stops users reaching enlightenment and getting the computer to do what it's for - lots of repetitive tasks in an automated manner.
---
Aside from that, whitelisting software has been responsible for some of the more spectacular performance drops I've seen - like taking a process that writes around 30,000 files and increasing it's runtime from 2 minutes to 15 minutes, taking an operation that subject matter authors were doing when they felt like it and making it a tea-break thing, totally wrecking productivity.