Posts by Steve Todd 2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
Excepting that (1) the breaks on a Prius are rather powerful and can easily overcome the engine, (2) you can force the gearbox into neutral while on the move (some early models let you shift to Park, which could be a bit exciting) and (3) the electronic key doesn't lock in the dash when it's running.
I'm not sure about your math, but 5520 x 0.5 hours per day = 2760 hours saved. 2760 hours per day divided by 345 would mean that these "extra" officers were working 8 hours/day, which is about spot on.
NZ$304m productivity savings over 10 years = 304m / 10 / 345 = average cost of employing an officer NZ$88k, which sounds about right (they don't get paid that, but it includes taxes, pensions and the cost of space at police stations).
NZ$159 includes hardware, software and support. Replacing all of the devices every year would only cost about NZ$80m, so you could afford to employ roughly 80 support staff/programmers per year inside of that budget.
The wording could have been better, but it's pretty clear from both the article and the links that this is about increasing the amount of lithium that can bind to the anode of a cell. More lithium = more mAh per cell = higher energy density. As an added bonus it supports higher current densities for charging.
This isn't the only attempt to improve density this way. There was similar research based on tin whiskers that was announced last year. Neither method adds significant weight to a cell so energy density is much improved.
Did you not read the article? "A team from the University of Southern California (USC) has built a lithium battery that provides three times the power capacity of conventional designs". Same sized battery, three times the electrical capacity. The design needs more Lithium than conventional cells, but has a higher energy density.
What percentage of the driving population do these occupations represent (hint: since the average milage per year for a car in the UK is 12,000, which equates to 50 miles per working day, then the answer must be low). We're not talking about banning all petrol cars instantly, just replacing them for the vast majority of occasions that their range is more than sufficient.
You personally may need (or more likely just want) to drive more than 200 miles per day almost every weekend, in which case current EVs aren't practical FOR YOU, but that doesn't mean that they are not practical for a large number of people. The less of them that use petrol the more that is available for you. How is that a bad thing?
"So you need to own two cars just in case you actually need to go somewhere further than to work and back?"
There are these companies, you may have heard of them, that will rent you a car when you need one. If that's only a few times a year then this is far cheaper than owning one. The average person in the US drives less than 30 miles per day, do they all need to own vehicles that can cover 400+ miles on a tank? If so you can apply the same logic and argue that they all need cars that fly at 600MPH because they do that a couple of times per year also.
There are two issues with spinning rust in mobile devices like phones and tablets - even with a flash cache built in. The first is power consumption - they are always going to need more, which is bad for battery life.
The second is resistance to shock/impact. They don't react well to the careless movement that such devices get. Much better to stick with SSD for mobile and full sized SSD caches for laptops/desktops.
If long term storage is so important to you then you should be buying your books carved in stone or on clay tablets. I can just see people coming up with the same arguments when paper came allong (paper? Terribly flimsy stuff, I wouldn't be caught dead using it).
The remainder of your argument assumes that all ebooks are DRM'd (they aren't) and that it is impossible to remove (its pretty easy in fact).
If you want to run legacy software you can buy yourself a much cheaper laptop. If you want to run tablet software then the catalogue available under Windows 8 is slim and unimpressive, the iPad has it beaten into the ground here. What Microsoft have ended up producing is a machine that isn't good in either environment and is 25% more expensive than Apple's top end iPad model (cellular data and GPS not being options that Microsoft offer so I'm not including that model). I'd guess that Apple are laughing their socks off.
ARM do two things: they license their architecture to others to create their own custom CPU designs that are compatible with other ARM devices (e.g. Apple's A6 CPU, which is based on the A15 architecture, but much lower power), or they sell their own off the shelf designs for a fee per chip made.
Odd definition of production ready you have there. The original fuel cell Golf had all of 20kW of power, 27BHP. That's not enough to sustain motorway speeds or hill climbs. Their CURRENT generation of fuel cell cars manage 100kW (137BHP), but only 160 miles range and 0-60 in 14 seconds.
If you read the links in the Wikipedia article then the latest Clarity is estimated to cost Honda $120-140,000. Too expensive, too slow and too short a range on a tank of fuel.
Try putting the word "economical" in there. Hydrogen fuel cells have been about since before the days of the Apollo program, but they are stupidly expensive because they rely on a platinum catalyst. They won't sell you a Clarity because the cost would make your eyes water.
Are the words "Computer Store" confusing to you? Do you wander into one by mistake when you are looking for a new pair of trainers? If not then you should have figured out that they are not covered by a trademark for the layout of computer stores.
I seem to remember the comentards leaping up and down cheering when Apple got sued by Swiss railways over their trademarked clock face design. It was round, had three hands and marks at the hour points. Enough of the double standards already.
The layout of an Apple store is quite distinctive. Trademarking that design doesn't stop anyone else opening a shop selling computers, it just prevents them making said stores look too like Apple's design.
There's a distinct difference between preferring another manufacturers product(s) and hating a particular company. The former is perfectly normal behaviour and fair comment (you preferred the GSIII to the iPhone? Fair enough, it's your money), but the latter is a form of fanaticism.
64GB is your limi, they don't make bigger microSD cards, and it has to be microSD. 64 + 38GB (the amount you have free if you delete the recovery partition) = 102GB, and that's still a fiddle as you'll have to shunt stuff between card & SSD to get them to fit. Last time I checked 102GB was less than 128GB.
While the Casna might not have transatlantic range it will certainly let you ferry passengers who arrived on such a flight to their intended destination.
Similarly you can do all the heavy work on a full desktop workstation, but such a device isn't practical to take on site or down to the factory floor where the people who are actually building your fantastic design want to see what they are supposed to be making and enter minor corrections when things don't quite fit.
The hilarious thing is that while all these armchair experts are prognosticating how an iPad couldn't possibly run a modern CAD package or render AUTOCAD files, Autodesk have gone out and written a version that runs on iPads, iPhones and Android devices that lets you share, view and edit files with desktop systems. No one is suggesting that the iPad will replace full CAD workstations, but its a perfectly viable tool for taking drawings out into the field and making minor changes.
I come from a family of draughtsmen. My Uncle was one of the first to use CAD in the UK. They ran an 8 user system off of a single Univac mini with 64K words of RAM, and used it to design oil rigs. There's plenty of capacity in an iPad to render CAD files (it's got about the same CPU/GPU oomph as a Windows box from 5-10 years ago, and they were more than powerful enough to run the likes of CATIA)
>Which is statistically significant?
2700 out of 200 million, and Anna claims this is a pre-existing bug (that I've never heard of before). I'd say that, near as makes no difference, my experience is just as statistically valid as her thread.
Given there are no iPhone 5's that are out of warranty and Apple will repair or replace defective devices on the spot, we might have heard about mass return rates don't you think?
No such thing as identical devices. There will be manufacturing differences (the WiFi "bug" sounds more like a hardware manufacturing issue) and software configuration issues (3rd party software & OS configuration). Look at what happens when there are firmware upgrades for devices like the Xbox, there are always a small percentage of failures.
No problems with it at all here. Of course if you have an installed base of 200 million devices then some are going to fail/have problems when you upgrade them (and Anna likes to try especially hard to find those examples). If a factory restore (easy and well documented on the web) doesn't fix the problem then back to Apple with them (using hairdryers etc not recommended).
The odd thing is that they will sell you a model B Pi, a keyboard, a mouse, a WiFi USB dongle, a powered USB hub, a USB power supply & cable, 4GB SD card with Rasperian Wheezey installed and a HDMI -> HDMI cable for £75. Looks like you could buy the kit, throw away the Pi and be under their RRP on the other bits.
Cinemas already use 8K resolution and digital cameras likewise. People look at parts of an image, not the whole thing at any given moment. The brain then stitches the results back together into a completed whole. One of the tricks of video encoders is that we're less sensitive to detail in moving objects, so they can skimp a bit there, while staionary objects are refreshed less frequently but in more detail.
Big screens are getting cheaper all of the time, and big screens will need 4K certainly, 8K possibly.
Its not the first time composites have been used in civil aircraft. They have progressively used more and more composite parts for things like wings. They weave conductive threads into the composite to solve problems like lightning strikes. What is new is that this is the first time that they have been used for the fuselage.
The Boeing engineers came up with a bunch of targets to hit before they started on the project. Those targets will have been agreed with Marketing, who have to sell the damned thing, but the engineers wouldn't have agreed to anything that they didn't think they could do. As it happens they came in under their weight target, so they didn't have to use Lithium Ion cells,
But lots of cost to the media providers, they have to write an app for each display platform. With DNLA, Miracast and AirPlay the display side stuff is done once and it needs little or no work to support from the portable device. It's not going to be popular because of the effort to implement the display apps as far as I can see.
>What happened to the old "boot with discrete" or "boot with integrated" graphics?
Graphics card manufacturers came up with ways of dynamically switching between the two depending on demand, so you get low power when you're not doing much and don't have to reboot to run a game etc.
If MS hadn't gone out of their way to force TIFKAM down our throats and disable the old Start desktop interface then there wouldn't have been the fuss. THAT'S what has got them into trouble. They could have got away with a system where touchscreen and tablet users got TIFKAM by default and everyone else got a conventional desktop.
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