I don't have any experience of mtp on mac os or linux but the windows MTP implementation sucks. For usb mass storage or SMB I can use any application that uses the normal windows file APIs to work with the files. The windows MTP implementation even when it's working* isn't integrated into the filesystem, so you have to manually copy stuff between the device and a real filesystem so I can work on it

In summary while I can see that the switch to MTP solves some problems on the device side it was a substantial downgrade in terms of the ability to mange the storage from a PC and the ability to access the storage from any random PC without a load of messing around first.

* And getting it to work can be a PITA sometimes, especially on XP where the driver is not included by default but some people seem to be having issues even on win7.

You have fallen for marketing bullshit.

Modern flash in it's raw form has some nasty properties that magnetic media does not suffer from (or suffers to a much lesser extent). The erase blocks are much larger than the write blocks and much larger than the logical blocks used by most file systems. The lifetime of each erase block is determined in terms of the number of erase cycles (unlike magnetic media which doesn't really suffer from localised wearout),flash cells can also discharge over time causing a cell to validate initially but later have errors. Shrinking processes and the use of multiple voltage levels to store two (mlc) or three (tlc) bits per flash cell improves density but at the cost of making the above problems worse.

The designers of common flash media wanted their products to be a drop in replacement for magnetic storage. The result is that the flash media contains controllers that attempt to deal with the problems of the flash and present an idealised block device to the host. How successful they are in maintaining that abstraction varies massively. It's possible to engineer in nice failure modes (e.g. turning read-only on wearout) but there is no gaurantee that the manufacturer will have actually done so. Bugs in the firmware or badly handled corner cases can easily result in data corruption.

They happen because somewhere on the path a connection is overloaded and it's buffers fill up, maybe that is at your end, maybe it's at the other users end. Maybe it's somewhere in between. The internet is not and was never designed to be a network that provides bandwidth and latency gaurantees. If you want those you need to negotiate a specific route and priority access to that route between two specific locations. At that point I don't think you can reasonablly consider the conenction to be "the internet" anymore.

Only the smallest of solar/battery systems run at 12V.

It's quite clear to me that the author of the article is clueless.

That is a common saying but highly misleading and therefore dangerous.

What kills is current through the heart and to some extent the duration of that current. Since we can't really be sure what path current will take through the body during a fault we have to consider current through the body. That current is determined by

1: the impedance of the source
2: the open circuit voltage of the source
3: the impedance of the body

A very high impedance source or a source with minimal total energy available can have a very high open circuit voltage and yet not present a hazard. This is what we see with static electricity.

However when we are talking about shocks off the mains the impedance of the source is negligable. So the important factors are the voltage of the supply and the impedance of the body. A 230V supply is more likely to deliver a fatal shock than a 120V one. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that things like shuttered sockets and plug cavities/pin insulation are the norm in much of the EU.

The advantages of the higher voltage are efficiency and lower fire risk.

I would think a kettle would be fine.

With a motorised applicance it will depend on the type of motor. Universal motors will generally be fine (maybe a bit less powerful due to the higher inductance but the design would have to be pretty marginal for that to be relavent). Motors running off DC supplies (e.g. everything you will find in your PC) will be fine too unless the PSU is very marginal. Induction and synchronous motors are more likely to fail.

lower voltages mean much higher wiring losses or much more expensive wiring (or likely a combination of both). DC at a given voltage is substantially more dangerous than AC because it is prone to arcing.

20% conversion efficiency is pretty shit by modern standards

http://www.apcmedia.com/salest... is an interesting read, it's aimed at datacenter UPS systems but many of the arguments would apply equally to a house battery system.

As for the posters mention of living in a caravan a house is much bigger than a caravan (though admittedly smaller than a datacenter). So the wiring losses are less of an issue.

Your box is now a Debian oldstable box.

Debian stable (jessie) has 3.16, debian testing (stretch) also has 3.16 right now though i'd expect it to get 4.0 in the not too distant future. Debian unstable has 4.0.

The big question is what happens if/when greece tries to pay it's debts with their new currency, converts balances held in greek banks to the new currency and retroactively declares contracts written in euros involving at least one greek party to be converted to the new currency and so-on?

If they don't do that then the introduction of a new currency would seem pretty pointless, noone (including greeks) would want it. If they do that then I can't see the rest of the world (and in particular the rest of europe being very happy about it).

Will they say "pay in euros as agreed or we roll the tanks"?
Will they say "sure that is fine"?
Or something in between? (e.g. kick them out of the EU and impose tarrifs)

Sure an organisation the size of Mozilla or wikimedia's requires a lot of money. Losing that money would be painful and require a massive downsizing.

But do these overbloated nonprofits really serve their communities? Neither wikipedia or firefox seem appreciablly better (and in some ways worse) then they were when the organisations behind them were much smaller. The resources seem to be being spent on pet projects and contraversial UI redesigns rather than on making real improvements in their core products.

The thing that really got me about GTA V was that at least offline (I don't have an xbox live account, maybe I should have got one, I understand there was more money to be made in the online stock market than the offline one) there was no real way to make money in the endgame other that waiting for money from your buisnesses which arrives painfully slowly (and unlike in earlier GTA games saving repeatedly to advance time doesn't seem to help). If you played the main story normally you end up with enough money to make the rewards from side activities look pitiful (and doing each race etc once took nowhere near long enough for the money from the buisnesses to build up) but not enough to buy all the properties (and thus feel you have completed the game). Stock trading didn't seem to yeild much. Repeating missions did nothing for your ingame currency.

This was made worse by the inability to move money between characters, buy a property jointly between multiple characters or sell a property owned by one character to another. Building up enough money to buy the golf course by endgame activities would take an insane ammount of time.

Even more annoying was I found that you can be rich in the endgame by combining the assasination missions with stock trading but the assasination missions are limited in number so if you do them when they become available and/or don't fully exploit the stock trading benefits then you lose the ability to make money out of them later.

It doesn't take very long to swap a battery pack either. I wonder how the cost having a charging rack and enough battery packs that you always have a charged one compares to the cost of having a source of hydrogen for refueling.

Theres two ways to make electricity from radionuclides.

One is to just have a lump of radioactive material and let it decay. Then you capture (some of) the decay energy either thermally (radioisotope thermal generator) or electrically (beta-voltaic generator). Upsides are it's simple and it scales down pretty well. Downside is that the efficiency is very poor and so is the power to weight. Usefull if you want a little bit of power for a long time. Probablly not suitable for a UAV.

The other is to go in for a full-blown fission reactor. As well as the safety issues there is the problem that they just don't scale down very well and the power to weight is still poor (especially when you include radiation sheilding). The US and russian militaries did attempt to design fission powered jet aircraft but it was difficult to provide enough shielding to protect the crew and the programs were abandoned after the development of ICBMs. The US also started design on a nuclear ramjet powered missile but again abandoned it after the development of ICBMs. While UAVs don't have a crew I doubt a craft that was a massive radiation hazard to those arround it would ever be approved for civilian use or even peacetime military use.

BS.

You will not get the HDL for the SoCs on the vast majority of SBCs and even if you could running HDL in a simulator is EXCRUCIATINGLY slow. There is a reason chip designers spend massive ammounts of money on large FPGA rigs, being able to run a design in progress at 1/10th realtime or so is a massive improvement over running it in a simulator.

So anything you can drop into your "circuit simulator" to represent the SBC will be at best a crude approximation. If you are really lucky you might get a crude IO approximation hooked up to an emulation core that roughly approximates the processor. More likely you won't even get that.