For whatever reason, the games industry has decided that these things are amazin' and everyone has to do it. Of course nobody is doing it, I mean Occulus has a prototype out that has some pretty major issues and no release date for final hardware but that's it. Everyone else doesn't even have any hardware at all.

So of course what companies lack in deliverables they make up in hype. Talk about how damn cool their shit will be, how the world will be changed, etc, etc. Particularly since it doesn't seem any of them have a solution to any of the issues. Most of the things aren't solved by magic, but by better technology which is being developed by other companies. Things like latency/refresh are largely going to be a combination of higher speed displays and faster GPUs to drive them. Well, those will get developed I'm sure, but by Samsung or LG, not by Occulus or Valve.

Valve has also been having some problems in this area as of late. They seem to wish to become more than just "the guys who run Steam" which makes sense, because Steam is super profitable but also unstable, people could migrate to a different store en masse for various reasons. However their "no bosses" organization means that a lot of playing happens and not as much delivering. So you see hype and noise, but not necessarily final products.

The Steam box is a good example. Heard lots about that for a long time, some hype videos about their controller, and yet nothing is on the market, and there is no date when anything might happen.

When you look at developers, the lower price points for the Pi has produced some excellent applications. After seeing the Pi put to use to run an entire animated Christmas Light Show, I bought a Pi B+.

Sometimes your purchase decisions are based on finding the application you want to run and then buying the hardware that will run it.

If you are into synchronized Christmas light displays on a budget, you can't beat a mix of Vixen, X Lights/Nutcracker for content creation and loaded on a Raspberry for scheduling and playback.

My setup is using addressable LED pixel strings, Falcon Pi Player on a Raspberry, connected to a DYILEDExpress DMX Bridge using e1.31 protocol. The entire control hardware is under $150 in hardware. Only major expense is buying LED lights which scales with your display size.

For more info view the link below for technical details on the show that has me planning next year's show.
View an excellent example of a Pi running a Christmas show. http://johnsonlightshow.com/

Ahh good call. My knowledge is dated. The 3rd phase was the leg that connected the gulf cost and it was completed last year.

I should have double checked. If you excuse me, I'm going to go wipe this egg of my face.

-Rick

"Nope - because oil is a world market"

Correct, except that it costs money to move. Having a continuous pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast makes it dramatically cheaper to get the crude to the world market. Having the line terminate in Chicago makes it cheaper to refine and distribute regionally. This offsets shipping costs of bringing imported fuels in to the middle of the country. While oil as a whole is a fungible commodity in the concept of investment and pricing, the realistic implementation of it is still dependent on infrastructure and transportation.

"It will certainly reduce prices in the US by increasing the global oil supply."

The XL pipeline doesn't alter the world's supply. The same oil is already being pumped and refined, it just makes it cheaper to get to higher priced markets. It would reduce prices in the US if it were more profitable to sell in the US, which is largely what we currently see with the Keystone pipeline terminating in Chicago. With the termination point in the Gulf, the reduced cost of international distribution allows a greater profit to be earned by shipping it to other countries.

"Becoming a net exporter of oil would be terriffic"

And the XL pipeline would have no meaningful impact here. This is Canadian oil.

"and because we'd no longer have a strategic interest in the Middle-East "

The US doesn't currently have any strategic oil interests of our own in the Middle-East, and the XL pipeline would not impact that. The US only imports ~1/4 of our total oil consumption, the vast majority of that comes from Canada and Central America because it's closer and cheaper than floating barges over from Saudi Arabia.

Europe on the other hand, has extremely limited oil supplies, they are quite dependent on Russia, the eastern block states, and the Middle East for their fuel. And the XL pipeline, even with direct access to the coast, isn't going to push enough oil to offset any sort of major disruption from Saudi Arabia or Russia.

So in closing, no, the XL pipeline would not change us into a net exporter, it would not reduce gas prices in the US, and it would not have a meaningful impact on the global oil supply.

-Rick

This bill would move forward with the XL portion of the pipeline. The Keystone pipeline currently terminates at the refineries near Chicago, Il. The XL portion of the pipeline would extends the line to the Gulf Coast, allowing for the oil to be more easily re-sold on the world market as opposed to being land locked into the US market.

The XL portion was never meant to reduce oil prices in the US, it was meant to increase profit margins by reducing costs to transport the oil and oil products to higher priced markets.

Can we take down the environmentalism straw man yet?

-Rick

A Raspberry Pi with a fresh install works great for searching stuff. Use a public hotspot with a WiFi game adapter. Leaves no traces that can be identified. Wipe and repeat. They can set all the trackers they want. Not much globally unique on a Pi besides the Mac.

I wonder where other common items in the diet would fall.

How does table salt compare against booze ounce for ounce?

Big deal, you can eat an entire plant and live. This does not mean I'm going to not have any salt, as it is essential to life. Moderation is essential with most everything consumed. in large amounts, drinking water is deadly.

By no means am I suggesting you should not ever drink any water or anything containing water as ingredient. Same for alcohol. Limit intake to safe levels.

It is just a bunch of whiny asshats who care about specs on paper rather than real world performance. The 970 is damn amazing. It makes the 980 nothing more than a overpriced luxury toy, and I say that as a 980 owner. Its performance is within 10-15% of a 980s and it is like half the price, what's not to like?

Also as for the memory thing this is actually a BONUS from nVidia, not a cripple. What I mean is in the past, they'd have just stuck 3.5GB on it and called it good. Then, if something needed more than 3.5GB, you go to system memory which is very slow 16GB/sec if you are running 16x PCIe 3 and much slower if you run less (like if you are doing SLI on a consumer board with PCIe 2 it would be 4GB/sec). However with this, you get another 512MB of RAM that is faster. Not as fast as the primary RAM, but much faster than hitting the system RAM over the PCIe bus. It won't perform as well as a 980 in those high memory situations, but it would perform better than if it just didn't have it at all.

I agree they should have noted it better, but really who gives a shit in reality? The 970 is the best "step down" card they've ever made compared to the highest end. Amazing value for the money and real world benchmarks from somewhere like HardOCP show it kills at modern games.

It's also funny how they act like nVidia did this to "harm" people for some business reason. If anything, they'd want to make the 970 look worse so people would be more likely to spend the near double to get a 980. However instead they made the 970 as close to the 980 as they could and I'm sure that ate in to the 980 market.

Not saying that this judge is deserving of a doxxing, but I would like to point out his trial history: http://www.plainsite.org/judge...

Which includes almost $300,000 in civil forfeiture cases in southern Texas. Those cases most folks refer to as "state-sanctioned highway robbery".

-Rick

I get tired of seeing audio 'tards try to claim an expensive solution is needed to badly designed gear. I've seen this bullshtit with regards to S/PDIF cables and poorly designed DACs. It is true that you can get clock skew, reflections, etc with some cables. However any DAC worth its shit today should reclock and buffer the incoming signal, thus rendering transmission issues moot (so long as the signal is coherent enough to transfer the data). However, there are shitty "audiophile" DACs that don't and they try to use it as some kind of "proof" about cable quality.

What it comes down to is there are issues and they can be engineered around. When it comes to digital and noise ya, digital devices are noisy. Guess what? You properly ground and shield your analogue section and it is not an issue. It isn't like this is something super expensive and thus only available on the high end, just requires proper engineering. The answer isn't reducing digital noise since there is little that can be done on that front overall, it is making the analogue section immune to it.

Some fedex driver posted a 'day in the life of' blog and mentioned his 150+ mile daily route. Base salary of a fedex driver is ~$13/hr. Call it $20 as costs (tax/benies/sick/vacation/etc), that puts it at $160/day. Which is right about $1/mile.

But here's the rub, the article claims that switching from a Diesel truck to an electric truck takes their operating expenses from $1/mile to $0.30/mile.

If labor is already $1/mile, then they are either doing absolutely no maintenance and using no fuel on the Diesel and they have hired illegal immigrants to drive the electrics that they are charging up on stolen electricity, or....

labor is not included in the numbers they provided.

I'll let you choose which you feel is correct ;)

-Rick

I keep a set of cheap amplified speakers on my desk. It's the kind with a tattletale buzz when a cell phone is too close. It's hard to be stealthy in a field full of bushes full of bells.

The full block from TFA:

An electric truck is already a step up in efficiency and environmental responsibility from traditional internal combustion trucks, with a delivery cost to the shipping company of 30 cents per mile (compared to roughly a dollar per mile with diesel).

they're claiming a 70% cost reduction by going to an electric truck. Same driver, same parcel load, same mileage, ect...

Which would imply that their Diesel fuel + Diesel specific maintenance costs them 70 cents per mile MORE than their electricity and electric specific maintenance.

If they can put that same driver in an electric vehicle and do the same deliveries for 30 cents a mile, I'm thinking that they are doing something really wrong with the Diesel vehicles.

The big wear and tear that they will see over my horse truck is brakes. But even if you figure they drop $1000 on rotors, pads, and labor for brake jobs, every year, they're still putting probably 50k miles a year on those trucks. Which works out to be 2 cents per mile. And that's the hardest hit area.

You could toss in the tranny (although it should be holding up for much more than a single year of stop and go). But even if they're only getting 1 year out of a tranny, and they drop $5k for a new tranny installed each year, that's still only 10 cents a mile.

Suspension, power steering, tires, etc... would all be taking the same abuse whether you're in a Diesel or an electric.

To be spending $0.70/mile on a vehicle putting down 50k+ miles a year, means spending over $35,000 a year on vehicle maintenance.

To put that into scope, a Ford e-350 stripped chassis (your basic commercial delivery frame) MSRPs for $25,000. Jump up to an e-350 cutaway (your standard UHaul truck) for $30,000. Even if they blow $15k on a custom cab/body, you're still looking at a $40,000 vehicle. How the heck are they blowing over $35,000 a year maintaining a $40,000 vehicle?

-Rick

I would assume that the goal would be to pull into a subdivision, park, and then let the drone(s) deliver a half dozen parcels to residence in that subdivision.

Or identify packages that cannot be drone delivered (shape/size/weight), drive to those locations, and have drones launching/returning for the smaller packages while the driver is en route with the big stuff.

-Rick

From TFA:
"A delivery truck costs roughly a dollar per mile with diesel."

I have a 1997 F-250 that pulls a fully loaded 3-horse slant load goose neck trailer and even with amorting out the depreciation over mileage, including tires and maintenance, and obviously Diesel fuel, I'm no where's close to $1/mile.

We don't put nearly as many miles on the truck as a delivery truck, so they are likely seeing higher maintenance costs, but with so many miles their amorted costs are going to be way lower per mile driven.

If they're looking to save costs and they're currently spending $1/mile on their trucks, I think there are some low hanging fruit they could tackle before jumping to drones.

-Rick