They are complaining about the noise level of the existing E-3, which is based on the old Boeing 707 with old noisy low bypass turbofans. The new plane E-7 is based on a contemporary 737 so no more noisy than a regular commercial jetliner.
6,552 karma · joined February 7, 2015
Semi-offtopic, but what decent 'proper' off-road vehicles are available on the market these days? Seems many (most?) of the 'traditional' brands like Jeep and Land Rover as well as most pick-up trucks have long since switched to the 'luxury SUV/truck' market rather than actual off-road vehicles.
Ladas were common over here until the late 80'ies. They all but disappeared during the 1990'ies. They weren't exactly known for quality compared to Western cars, but they were cheap, and easy to fix by yourself if you were so inclined.
And yes, the story behind the Lada was that the Soviets made a deal with Fiat to acquire an obsolete factory. So the entire factory was dismantled and shipped to the USSR. And then they just kept producing the same model, with extremely minor changes, for decades.
We're at the point where things are changing fast. Yes, largely driven by the ginormous solar and battery production coming from China. The rest of the world better get their ducks in order if they want to compete.
Now electricity wholesale markets are an artificial construct, but it has been designed to mimic other commodity markets in that the producer on the margin sets the price.
There's a kernel of truth here in that Otto engines suffer lower efficiency at part load, however I suspect the real reason is that gas car range is "good enough" and refilling is fast, so one doesn't tend to obsess about remaining range.
> This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
That's because a) some batteries suffer degraded performance at low temperature, and b) ICE cars use the plentiful waste heat for cabin heating whereas an EV needs a heat pump or even resistive heating of the cabin air.
I've used FreeDOS for doing BIOS updates. In the pre-UEFI days it was common for manufacturers to provide BIOS updates as a DOS executable, apparently with the expectation that the customer would be able to dig up some old MS-DOS disk somewhere.
I suppose nowadays there isn't much use for that anymore thanks to doing FW updates via UEFI capsules. Though at least on the Linux side (LVFS/fwupd) it seems most PC clone vendors aren't on board yet.
Longer term, I think the future looks bright for RISC-V. If nothing else, at least the Chinese are investing heavily into it, for obvious reasons wrt avoiding sanctions and such.
How much of Qualcomm's profit comes from providing yet another ARM chip vs. all the value-added parts they provide in the ARM SoC's, like all the radio modem stuff necessary for mobile phones?
Now that's kind of a rhetorical question, not sure a clear answer exists, at least not outside Qualcomm internal finance figures. Food for thought, though.
(That's sort of the logic behind RISC-V as well. The basic ISA and the chip that implements it is a commodity, the value comes from all the application specific extra stuff tacked on to the SoC.)
> * https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
Some people, for some strange reason, want to endlessly relitigate the old 1980'ies RISC vs CISC flamewars. Jim Kellers interview above is a good antidote for that. Yes, RISC vs CISC matters for something like a simple in-order core you might see in embedded systems. For a big OoO core, much less so.
That doesn't mean you'd end up with x86 if you'd design a clean sheet 'best practices' ISA today. Probably it would indeed look something like aarch64 or RISC-V. So certainly in that sense RISC won. But the win isn't so overwhelming that it overcomes the value of the x86 software ecosystem in the markets where x86 plays.
Wrt to retirement, it's probably more due to cancer rates in general shooting up in people of retirement age. The body gets less adept at dealing with crap that eventually develops into cancer.
Sure it's not good for you, so using PPE is certainly warranted, but it's on a whole different level of badness compared to asbestos.
[1] Per wikipedia, there are some varieties of mineral wool used for high temperatures (think insulating industrial furnaces and such) which are carcinogens.
Not working in the industry, what do they actually do with asbestos that has been removed? I presume it can't be 'destroyed', so it needs to be stored indefinitely somewhere where it doesn't cause harm? Dump it in an unused mine shaft and seal the entrance?
https://aiobs.org/how-healthy-and-costly-are-the-most-used-i... shows insulation cost for a (typical?) 1500sqft (~140m^2 for the rest of the world) home. The most common, and also the cheapest, type of insulation being fiberglass bats at $560. So if this home would cost $200k, that's 3% of the total price. So even if asbestos would be free, it would barely move the needle in total cost.
Edit: That $560 looks suspiciously low. Googling around some more shows an insulation (incl. installation) cost for a "typical" home at around $3500-$4500. In any case, a small fraction of the total cost of a house project.
In addition to buildings, e.g. ships. Think about a steamship, what material that is fireproof and doesn't rot do you think they used for insulating boilers and steam pipes? One museum ship I'm somewhat familiar with ripped out all the asbestos insulation and replaced it with IIRC mostly mineral or glass wool during a major renovation some years back, just to make it safer for the mostly volunteers who dedicate their time to keep the ship functioning.
That's also one reason why progress in cancer research and drug development is so slow. 'Fix' one cancer, and what you've developed likely has little effect on the zillion other cancer variants.
Of course it's possible to make it work, but if you need a concrete foundation in the ground to keep the posts immobile you're destroying the economics of it.
Then again, why don't those 'really expensive mounting solutions' suffer from the same issue?