Posts by Nik 2 117 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2015
That looks like a long way from the classic bathtub curve found in mechanical devices - there's no flat bit on the bottom, and the down and up curves are at similar gradients.
A proper bathtub shows a very steep drop followed by a prolonged period of low failure rates and a gradual increase after that, but this looks like one of those fancy tubs that are only found in showrooms and expensive boutique hotels.
I like my Surface Pro, but I understand why others wouldn't. A decision to buy the latest one would be based on the spec uplift from the previous version and the price point(s)
It would be useful to have a review from someone who had used one before - it's hardly a new form-factor
<quote>We might get slightly better batteries in the future, but battery technology is not subject to Moore's law - we can't expect revolutionary new chemistry to turn up out of nowhere.</quote>
I broadly agree with you, but one should never underestimate the ingenuity of very smart people with a sufficient financial motivation. There are often ways round unsolvable problems, and lots of modern tech was seen as improbable or impossible [or pointless - ed] until it became commonplace.
Energy density has risen from 55Wh/litre to 1600 in 12 years, and 80Wh/kg to 700 since 1990*. Still a lot of dead weight to carry around, but never say never.
*https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energy-density-record/
Can anyone explain how the futuristic use case scenarios affect the design of the specification?
I can see that video and voice calling means that the various data packets need to arrive consistently in a way that isn't needed for, say, email or web browsing, but once we have a spec that delivers that is there anything to improve beyond reliability bandwidth and latency?
TIA
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly how the Teams UI works and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
That would be the R3 unit, obviously.
The concept is derived entirely from Dr Zeuss' 'The Cat in the Hat Comes Back', where Little Cats A through Z emerged from the hat of their predecessor.
JWST ls limited to the R9 unit due to the problems encountered in constructing robots smaller than a single atom, but DARPA is rumoured to be developing self-repairing quarks at the size of an R14.
"Electric cars by 2030 will massively increase generating capacity needed"
Total car and van miles in the UK is around 275 billion pa, which needs ~70TWh of energy.
That's about 20 of current total production, but given the cyclical nature of energy consumption, the increase to peak capacity will be much smaller, as long as the peak time for charging EVs doesn't coincide with the existing peaks.
Looked at the from the other end, an average car covers 20 miles a day [Per gov.uk figures], equating to ~5kWh. Recharging in the low demand period from 11pm to 6am gives an average load of ~850 watts per vehicle; 1.7kW for a 2-car household. I don't buy the argument that EVs mean that we have to increase local or national grid capacities because 850 watts is the sort of power the lights my kids leave on used to use before the move to LED.
It's the bane of much modern software; operating systems, browsers, MS Office...
I know users who keep updates switched off because they're convinced that things they can't find have been silently removed in an update for the sake of 'user convenience' And they're not always wrong.
It's also not necessarily a final position, either. The data so far accumulated gives sufficient confidence to go to 5, further data may (or may not) give confidence to go beyond that.
The "As a result, NASA has determined they are comfortable with up to a five-time reuse for both the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon capsule," is very very different to the sub-headline of "NASA urged to reuse Musk hardware no more than five times"
Poor editing, el reg.
This stablecoin is an officially recognised form of currency without a relationship to any physical asset. Its face value is guaranteed because the government of Japan says it is.
How is this not a fiat currency?
If it is a fiat currency, what advantage does it offer over the existing currency, other than that it can be traded without the use of a clearing bank?
<quote>I don't see where is Intel innovation here?</quote>
<quote>This is important because liquid and immersion cooling requires completely different form factors than what's used in air cooled datacenters today. This unfamiliarity remains one of the technology's biggest inhibitors.</quote>
Is it that they have developed a totally different form factor specially for liquid cooled systems?
The XKCD examples quoted above are close, but I think that this was first forseen by the most excellent William "Bill" S. Preston Esq.
and Ted "Theodore" Logan:
<quote>
Gates gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you
Put it in the veins of everyone
Do you know what you want? You don't know for sure
You don't feel right, you can't find a cure...
</quote>
With apologies to Russ Ballard
On the video he says "So I told him to F*** off"
That's never going to end well, especially if you've just annoyed said PC, even if doing so was entirely legitimate.
He also says that he had been told before he walked down the street that the camera was there, so if he'd been trying to hide he could have gone round a different way...
Icon: Stop, in the name of the (controversial and ethically somewhat dubious) law
The subtitle says "The snaps are the most distant images taken from the Sun since "Pale Blue Dot" and the text says " It's also the most distant image ever taken from the Sun, breaking the record set by Voyager 1 for its famous "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth "
I think it's the latter, but it can't be both.
It's not quite fair to say that Predator is the state of the art in this field - BAE Systems have had some ptreety smart stuff doing self-flying for a few years now, (https://www.baesystems.com/en-uk/article/surrogate-uav-prepares-for-maiden-flight-in-uk-airspace) and there's a small company called Blue Bear that I know have done flying in formation using only on-board visual sensors on a drone. I can't imagine that this doesn't involve some fairly smart collision avoidance capabilities.
I'm sadly unsurprised that the regulation is harder to sort out than the technology...
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