> I remember reading about this Swedish dude who added 2 solar panels totaling about 1 kW to his hybrid station wagon.
I want to see a picture of that.
Apparently 1 kw fits on an extended box van [1]. But I don't now how you'd do it on a wagon without making it look like some sort of Burning Man art car.
My exact numbers might be off (which is kind of a problem it seems on HN), but the point still stands - you can add practical amounts of range by having the car just sitting there, even in places where there's not that much sunlight.
Besides, I just checked out panels, and there's a lot of 500w ones that are appx 1mx2m, these station wagons are huge, easily 2m wide and 5m long, half of it a flat roof, so its not outrageous.
If you're interested in some hard data, Backblaze publishes their HD failure numbers[1]. These disks are storage optimized, not performance optimized like the parent comment, but they have a pretty large collection of various hard drives, and it's pretty interesting to see how reliability can vary dramatically across brand and model.
The Backblaze reports are impressive. It would have been very handy to know which models to buy. They break it down to capacity of the same family of drives so a 2TB might be sound, but the 4TB might be more flaky. That information is very useful when it comes time to think about upgrading capacity in the arrays. Having someone go through these battles and then give away the data learned would just be dumb to not take advantage of their generosity.
Can confirm. My 3TB Seagate was the only disk so far (knocking on wood) that died in a way that lost some data. Still managed to make a copy with dd_rescue, but there was a big region that just returned read errors and I ended up with a bunch of corrupt files. Thankfully nothing too important...
> It's pure robbery on Apple's part. Completely beyond the pale now. Their ridiculous RAM and storage prices were never that big of a deal back in the PowerBook/early Macbook Pro days, because you could always opt out if you were a tiny bit handy with a small screwdriver (my 2008 unibody lets me swap storage with 1 screw, swap a battery with zero!). Now? It's unforgivable. I don't care about soldered RAM, I get it, but it is despicable charging as much as the entire computer to upgrade the RAM a paltry 16GB.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with you.
But.
I suspect that Apple isn't solely doing this for profit. Apple's pricing structure aggressively funnels people into the base config for each CPU.
Thinking about getting an M4 with upgraded ram? A base config M4 pro starts to look pretty good.
In practice, this means that Apple's logistics is dramatically simplified since 95% of people are ordering a small number of SKUs.
> There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit.
It was really egregious when the base config only came with 8 GB of ram. I'll admit that storage can be a bit tight depending on what you're trying to do, but at least external storage is an option, however ugly and/or inconvenient it may be for some.
Don't want to deal with the logistics of lots of SKUs? Don't sell them. Trying to upsell people is a money move. Selling a SKU where the 80+gb OS is like 40% of the disk is a good SKU to cut. Especially if some consumers are unlikely to realize how little space they will actually have.
> Don't want to deal with the logistics of lots of SKUs? Don't sell them. Trying to upsell people is a money move. Selling a SKU where the 80+gb OS is like 40% of the disk is a good SKU to cut.
This isn't a profitable move from Apple's perspective - they try to keep the base unit at about the same price across generations. That's what happened when they moved from 8 GB of ram to 16 GB.
> So if someone gains access to your email, they also get FB access…?
I mean, that's how it works for most websites. I think I have 2FA turned on for FB, but honestly the phone system is way less secure than email at Google/Microsoft.
> If a actor works for a day on a TV show he may get cheques forever.
Most actors get paid either a fixed fee or hourly. It's only the top talent that can negotiate points. And honestly, that's pretty good for the producers, since that decreases their risk if the TV show or movie doesn't do well.
> If you hire a photographer for a wedding, you will pay him the same rate as a contract developer. But you won't own the rights to the photos and keep having to pay the guy if you want copies.
This part is so weird to me. But I honestly suspect that most photography customers don't care so much about owning the rights to the photograph they pay for, as long as they can use it how they want. And over time, the norm gradually became baked into the industry.
> that decreases their risk if the TV show or movie doesn't do well.
The risk is not decreased. The risk is the same, just moved around. Instead of the producers risking not making a certain amount of profit, now you have the risk that the actor only asked and got a paltry sum for a runaway success.
The uncertainty of how a movie will fare cannot be removed from existence through contracts or financial arrangements. But you can make it so some other party suffers instead of you.
...it's possible we have the same opinion. I'm not sure if this is a counter argument or just a rephrasing :)
I think the core idea is to avoid someone actually losing money. The producer might end up with a loss, the actor's profit is strictly positive (not accounting for opportunity costs...).
> There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.
The reason all the AAA games are on it is because they're on the Windows platform, and more importantly their customers are on the Windows platform.
If 95% of gamers ran MacOS instead of Windows, you'd see a very different tech stack among game developers.
Everything feeds everything else. If Apple had a stack and a business model that worked for game developers, you’d see a different stack.
Microsoft is where it is because they are viciously competitive at different layers of the stack. Apple wants a piece of every nickel, Microsoft wants a piece of every computer. They license windows for every Mac user in a company.
No, they're on Windows because it was the only viable gaming desktop environment during the 90's and 00's. Apple was all but dead and hardware was limited, Linux was in its infancy, Unix vendors didn't care about normal desktop users, etc...
In the early days of 3D gaming, there were studios that used OpenGL over DirectX on Windows. ID Software were the best known example of choosing OpenGL over DirectX.
Of course excellent OpenGL products exist (ID software is the worst example because they were... geniuses), but from the developer point of view, DirectX was the full package.
Forgive me for being an idiot but i was under the impression dx12 was closer to vulkan architecturally which makes it easier to port to Linux display drivers (and thus why it has)
1) OpenGL is a (now legacy spec) and DirectX is an API on Windows. OpenGL spec is implemented by your GPU driver.
2) DirectX is a collection of multimedia APIs on Windows. OpenGL is just graphics. Direct3D is one of those APIs.
3) Thirdly OpenGL and Direct3D (before version 12) are pretty much the same in they can do. The code is pretty similar IIRC (though it been some time since I've done Direct3D programming).
4) Devs use DirectX because there is a full set of APIs for the target platform. Linux and Mac aren't typically targeted when making a game. Mac and Linux sales have been a very small percentage historically.
Has there been a game where vulkan performance has been better then dx12? Whenever they are side by side vulkan always performs worse in my experience.
If games run faster on linux with DX12 translated to Vulkan than they do on identical hardware running on Windows 11 then I can't imagine a particularly big performance difference.
Were folks under the impression there were other options for license violations? Your comment implies that a lawsuit being the only recourse to enforce a license renders that license moot.
Some people just hoped that picking a corporate-unfriendly license would be enough of a deterrent by itself, because most folks can't actually afford to sue. But infringers, big and small, are increasingly realising that these licenses are toothless by themselves, they need to be backed by money.
I don’t disagree with any of that, I think the challenge is certainly the costs of enforcement. For GPL licenses anyway (I realize the OP used the more permissive MIT license) I think their is (or there should be) a non-profit foundation established to collectivize the funding and legal actions necessary to support open source projects in these kinds of scenarios. Certainly, pursuing license violations in a manner that maximizes awareness and makes examples out of violators should prompt others to reconsider their actions.
> I think the challenge is certainly the costs of enforcement.
IMO, this is fundamentally a mismatch between how software is developed in practice and how copyright works.
If software was like a book, where it's finished and published once, then simply registering it with the copyright office would be all anyone needs to do: up to $10k/copy statutory damages is a stiff enough deterrent that few large companies would want to take the risk. And even if they did, it'd be easy to find a lawyer to take the case on contingency.
As a non-lawyer, that doesn't seem to match nearly as well with software as a constantly evolving work. But I'm not an expert - maybe periodically submitting versions is enough.
Software Freedom Conservancy are the most visible GPL enforcers these days. The FSF probably does some enforcement too, but doesn't seem to talk about it as much.
> For GPL licenses anyway...I think their[sic] is (or there should be) a non-profit foundation established to collectivize the funding and legal actions
Hence my thinking there is. I kept thinking EFF for some reason, but I knew that wasn't right. EFF are the ones who consistently predict which anti-privacy/anti-consumer laws will definitely get passed.
> One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.
This is just not true.
Ariane Group was a market leader in space launch when SpaceX started launching rockets, and Ariane 6 was designed specifically to help Ariane Group maintain commercial competitiveness with Falcon 9. They just did a bad job of it[1].
The story line of Ariane 5/6 only being there to preserve independent access to space only appeared on the scene after SpaceX conclusively trounced them in the market.
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1. The reasons why this happened are complicated by some of them are:
* For a long time Ariane Group leadership maintained a belief that SpaceX was selling F9 launches below cost and that the USG was subsidizing them with higher cost government launches.
* Ariane Group publicly claimed that reuse was not economically feasible and that that capability in F9 didn't matter.
* Ariane Group has long maintained (and continues to do so) a policy of "economic return" where countries get contracts for subcomponents in rough proportion to the amount of money they contribute to the program. This necessitates a "big design up front" approach, and makes iteration very slow and difficult.
* SpaceX was able to improve Falcon 9's performance far more than anyone probably expected through aggressive iteration, more than doubling its payload to LEO over its lifetime. This was, in large part, due to the Merlin 1D engine doubling the thrust of the Merlin 1C. For context, over 30 years, the Space Shuttle's RS-25 engines increased in thrust by only ~10%.
> People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets
It's my impression that Apple really tried to service this market - that last model was probably the iPhone 13 mini. I assume that there just isn't enough demand for smaller phones to justify the effort to develop them.
I was honestly hoping that we'd get a small phone as the iPhone SE 4. But it seems like that's not to be. At least, if the 16e is the closest we'll get to an SE in the near term.
yup, I bought a 13 mini and was happy that Apple was one of the companies that supported this form factor. That being said, the 13 mini sales numbers speak for themselves and I understand why this kind of phone isn't released every year. I'm holding out that Apple recognizes that most of the users of the 13 mini aren't serial upgraders and will continue refreshing the segment every 5 years or so
> I'm holding out that Apple recognizes that most of the users of the 13 mini aren't serial upgraders and will continue refreshing the segment every 5 years or so
I loved my iPhone 13 mini for the 3-years it was my daily driver. But yeah, the mini line is probably dead.
Yeah I'm holding out that they've decided to just refresh the small form factor on a slower cadence. I also have a 13 mini, we'll see how long I can hold out.
I was curious about the SE4 since I had an SE2 and Verizon let me trade in the SE2 for the SE3 for free. Based on the rumors of what the SE4 was going to be, we did get an SE4, it was just rebranded as the 16e. The rumor was they were gonna get rid of the button and go with the more recent iPhone style and such. I wonder if they will rebrand the Apple Watch SE as an Apple Watch 10e or something along those lines.
Unfortunately the 12 and 13 mini were badly timed when stores closed for COVID. Actually holding one of them to use it is really what sells the smaller size, IMO.
I have my 12 mini still but it’s showing its age. Probably have to suck it up and get a big phone next upgrade.
I want to see a picture of that.
Apparently 1 kw fits on an extended box van [1]. But I don't now how you'd do it on a wagon without making it look like some sort of Burning Man art car.
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1. https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/comments/1dpcxu4/if_any...