Ok, I googled for it, and it seems that the solution is more complex than just using an inverter : https://motorino.ca/technology...

The point is, it can be done. It costs more in components than the cheapest possible scooter (but it's still well within the capabilities of Chinese mass industry to manufacture) but it would give you enough power that hills wouldn't be a problem. All is required is the government gradually phase out the gasoline scooters by increasing taxes and fees, slowly ratcheting up year after year until the annual registration fees are more than cost difference to electric. Then just make them illegal.

Not true. In fact, with AC power supplies, you go AC->DC->inverter FETs. DC->inverter FETs is less parts. You clearly were talking out your ass it seems. This would be a matter of motor design - I'm not going to say for certain if you can design a motor to give you high enough torque at low speeds and also have high efficiency at high speeds, but you probably can.

They are? Even inverter drive motors?

Perhaps. The thing is, there are people who have been programming in C since they were 11, and they are 30 now. Basically no one has that depth of experience in a rare language like Erlang.

I mainly do embedded systems work where C with inline ASM is the only viable option, but I do wish for something better than C++ when it comes time to do the pieces of the system that are higher level. C++ is a bloated mess and has many design faults that make catastrophic bugs far more likely. C is simple and fast but lacks many of the abstractions needed to build a complex system efficiently.

But what can I do. Qt is a great platform for embedded guis, but it is pure C++. It's one of the most _supported_ platforms, you can get embedded processor OS images that are already set up to go straight to running your GUI in Qt with the least hassle.

I've looked at a little hobbyist game development - UE4 is rapidly becoming the go to engine for that, and it's almost entirely C++.

So even though I do wish for a language that doesn't have the drawbacks of C++, all I can really do is read Bjarne Stroustrup's books and learn the lesser used features so I have a chance in interpreting other people's confusing code...(with so many language features, you can easily create code that other people won't know how to read)

But it isn't as fast as C. Look at the benchmarks.

Of course popularity matters.

1. More popular languages you can find less expensive developers for...(or more total developer talent for a given amount of money)

2. More popular languages are likely to have stackoverflow posts with examples for every single basic task and explanations about what errors mean. (before you gloat about how you don't need help from SO, have you ever faced goddamn C++ linker errors? Might as well have an Ouija board out to find out what the mistake is)

3. More popular languages work on more computers and are likely to continue to work in the future

4. More popular languages tend to be faster. Usually a shit ton faster. Java has gone from a bloated mess to a bloated mess that is often within spitting distance of C on performance shootouts. That's from the popularity spurring further development. C is almost always king of the hill and nothing is faster. Python? Rust? Whatever n00bs. Those languages may be nice to write complex code that only gets run occasionally but if you need high end performance they aren't going to cut it.

...So? It's been generally this way for 50 years. The fact that you have a recent and inadequate counter example doesn't mean you're right.

What we don't need is fees _after_ we use a service. I'm fine with data caps, but there needs to be a popup where you confirm the charges for the additional data, and each additional charge, not afterwards when you get slammed with a $300 bill.

There's an oligopoly of wireless companies and they all primarily use a model where you get billed _afterwards_ for as much as they can trick you into using. And you always pay far more for "overages" than the same service cost if paid upfront. And of course they decline to mention the taxes and fees when advertising wireless service, just to make the actual bill even larger than advertised.

Obviously, a model where most people use inexpensive phones they purchased upfront and use pre-paid services is much better. Especially one where you could choose from competing pre-paid service cards to refill your phone at a shop somewhere and still have the same phone number and phone. (does it work this way in the rest of the world? I thought it sorta did)

Maybe. I don't see how that's going to work. Sony may have to change their policy if they are confronted with the technical reality that no one has a decent looking VR game that can run on the original PS4.

As for VR being a gimmick - sure. A nasty chicken and egg problem. VR games have the potential to be incredible but since the hardware is so expensive very few people have bought headsets. That in turn means that there's not enough market to make a 50 million dollar game with heavy VR support. Also, the current hardware for headsets still isn't high enough resolution for a lot of uses, which means that new headsets need to be released with the paltry money from the current set. This will probably happen, but if the headsets are any higher resolution you'll need video cards that are unaffordable right now (something like 2x Pascal Titan Xs is what you need) which creates another chicken/egg problem...

I thought what triggered this stopgap upgrade was VR, not 4k. Best case scenario, the more powerful console offers moar pretties for everyone.

- For people with 1080p screens, they get 60 fps and a few more effects on the same games that will also run on the older console.
- For people with 4k screens, they get a marginal 30 fps but near 4k rendering on the same games that will also run on the older console.
- For people with VR headsets, they can play the same game in VR at 1080p 60fps but with more of a feeling that they are actually present in the game world.

Win/win/win. Well, game developers who have to maintain 2 optimized engine branches, one for each console, lose...(since you'd want to use a game architecture that is the same for both versions except that low level implementation files differ)

So, why didn't Microsoft give discounts on the OS cost to PC manufacturers that install a TPU chip that only allows the machine to boot from digitally signed OSes? (which ofc Windows would be the only one).

Why isn't this story published in 2006? It does seem like an obvious tactic, why did they never get around to doing it?

_Although_ I suppose I don't see how Microsoft would benefit. If Lenovo ships a laptop with Windows on it, that means Lenovo paid the per deployment license fee, however much it costs to large OEMs. Which means that Microsoft has it's money, why would they care if the end user uninstalled the OS they paid for and ran Linux or dual booted?

Unfortunately, I think you might be right. Although, if this is true, why do 720p and 1080p encodes of a video look so similar? The 720p version is frequently only barely perceptibly of lower resolution, especially in motion. Is there not some standard algorithm to fix this blurring problem?

I know that in video games and in desktop use, what you are talking about is true. But I've seen at least one video game (Rainbow Six Siege) that has a great algorithm for repairing the damage. You can't really tell the difference between 1080p and full 4k rendering when it's in use...

I develop embedded systems from Windows. (maybe I'm biased, but I feel that since Windows requires the least hassle to do most tasks it's superior to Linux as a desktop OS. I think Linux is a reasonably good OS for an embedded system, however, and I sometimes use it for that but I develop most of the code from Windows)

I'm sitting in front of a 4k monitor right now and this is just not the case. I still have a side monitor, although I do often leave it turned off. Yes, technically there are enough pixels, but in practice most apps won't handle it as well as they handle separate monitors.

If you notice, one of the resolutions is a subset of the UHD 4k. The other one is only slightly sharper and it should be possible to downsample to UHD 4k with no loss of quality.

Not that most people would be able to tell the difference between a 1080p bluray and a 4k bluray...