Hertz aren't dumping their EV fleet. Hertz EVs are mostly Teslas, which are expensive to buy and repair, and have significant depreciation. Hertz bought expensive and sell low. Rental companies sell their stock off after a few years, and the depreciation hit Hertz hard. "We are experiencing the consequence of a material price decline in Teslas and EVs more generally". They are flogging off about 40% of their Teslas, about 4.4% of their total vehicle fleet. Hertz are now focusing on buying cheaper EVs.
Posts by Tessier-Ashpool
346 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2016
Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up
Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service
Apple's Vision Pro costs big bucks to buy and repair ... just don't mention the box design
Re: More homepod than ipod?
"And remember when some phones had lidar/radar in them to help? The market spoke, that didn't last long..."
Loads of iPhone and iPad models since 2020 feature LIDAR. You won't find it on Android devices. But then again, you won't find secure facial recognition on those devices either.
New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law
Re: Think of the Grid!
We import quite a bit of electricity. France will make up the shortfall with their extensive nuclear capability. Assuming, of course, our renewable program grinds to a halt. A lot of people have trouble with the notion that we're in a transition. It will take many years to fully switch over to EVs and get renewables into shape. That's why the targets are a long way in the future.
Adobe ditches $20B Figma takeover under pressure from monopoly cops
Dump C++ and in Rust you should trust, Five Eyes agencies urge
Re: Bull
I've written C# code that - despite my best and careful efforts - have occasional spasms when the garbage collector kicks in. Admittedly, my programming was a few years ago, but something else that often cropped up in C# was the obligatory nested using { } construct used to dispose of managed resources. Sometimes you have to do far from the obvious to dispose of managed resources correctly beyond wrapping them in using statements, involving temporary assignment of variables before disposal, and similar tricks. I'd hardly call any of that nonsense "safe". I often called it "yuk".
Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability
Re: Call me old fashioned
All cars burn in a similar manner once they are alight. What most people don’t realise is that the bulk of the heat energy produced in a vehicle fire does not come from the fuel or battery. Rather, it is the burning plastic, rubber and other combustibles in the car that supply most of the energy in the fire.
https://lashfire.eu/media/2022/09/2022-08_Facts_and_Myths.pdf
There are approximately 300 petrol and diesel fires in the UK every day. It’s a really common thing, too common for the MSM to report on.
Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system
Re: No shit
No confusion whatsoever. The gripe here is that domestic cabling isn’t up to it. Well it is, because if you can power an electric shower in your home you can power an EV. As for the equivalence of showering for 3+ hours, the idea is that GRID capacity will increase over the next couple of decades to accommodate. It should also be noted that most showering in the UK already takes place at narrow periods of time in the morning and evening.
Re: No shit
I had mine (an old Victorian cottage) updated from 60A to 100A. The DNO did this in a morning for free. It involved them installing thicker cabling from the overhead supply. While they were at it, they gave my house a dedicated phase. Previously, three cottages were supplied on the same phase. Result: no more dimming lights, and loads of spare current capacity, even with the EV charger in place.
Apple jacks prices to juice profits because $19.3B a quarter isn't enough
Re: Apple TV+... anyone? anyone?
Tehran (female undercover Mossad agent in Iran) is quite gripping. A bit like 24.
I've received three free trials of Apple TV, courtesy of buying Apple equipment, but I wouldn't actually hand over real money for it. I have a date in my calendar for cancelling the latest free trial.
Apple blames iOS 17 bug for overheating iPhone 15 woes
The only way is WebKit: Vivaldi's browser arrives on iOS
Re: Can anyone tell me why ...
As said above, because they can. Apple take a fairly protective stance of software they permit to be installed on iOS. One notable example was the Flash rendering engine, which Apple excised years ago, ostensibly on the grounds that it was a CPU-hungry POS that gave their iPads a bad name. To be honest, I don’t much care, as Apple’s fork of WebKit works pretty well, and when it goes wrong, updates for gazillions of users (who use WebKit for both browsing and other things) are provided. This may well all change if their hand is forced and they are obliged to allow third party rendering engines.
Scientists spot startlingly close black holes in Hyades star cluster
Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year
Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead
Read lips? Siri wants to feel them, according to fresh Apple patent
Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law
Meredith Whittaker
I saw Meredith Whittaker, of Signal fame, on C4 News this evening taking some Tory stooge to task over this. I’m now a little in love with this woman. She is awesome. When the Tory suggested Signal would not quit the UK if the law goes pear-shaped, she demanded to know if he was calling her a liar. And then she scolded him with his first name like she would when castigating a guilty child. Of course, the Tory had no real answer other than to carry on with his magical thinking.
Apple warns of three WebKit vulns under active exploitation, dozens more CVEs across its range
Re: "Not good at security"?
I agree with you - mostly. Where I have a big problem with Apple is that you can have a super shiny expensive Apple Mac on your desktop that is a festering mess of vulnerabilities, since they have a habit of designating devices as 'obsolete' after a period of time and do not provide further software updates.
It's bizarre that my friend's Mac, bought in 2013, craps out when she tries to buy anything on a supermarket website. Because Safari is so dangerously out of date that the store won't accept it. I installed the most recent version of Firefox for her, and she can now browse again with confidence.
BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030
If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone
Re: Just set the entire moon to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC +0) ...
When I developed a payment system for our company, I reported the emailed transaction time in UTC rather than local time. To do otherwise would yield ambiguous information a couple of days in the yearn the 1am to 2am slot.
Company managers went ape because virtually nobody in the fairly large IT department had heard of UTC.
Apple complains UK watchdog wants to make iOS a 'clone' of Android
20 years on, physicists are still figuring out anomaly in proton experiment
Re: It's a facinating field
Protons are composed of empty space, too. AFAIK their constituent quarks are fundamental point-like particles with no intrinsic size. Quantum Field Theory postulates that quark fields permeate the entire universe but at any time some places are a bit quarkier than others (an excitation) and that’s what you call a quark. Similar story for electrons. How big something is and where it is all goes to pot when Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle comes into play, so I might as well stop using English right now. The universe doesn’t care about the notions of us macroscopic humans, and plays by different rules.
Physics Nobel Prize in a superposition between three quantum physicists
Re: Measuring a property does not set it...
To be honest, I’m not sure anyone “understands” quantum mechanics. “Shut up and calculate” appears to be the standard paradigm.
Human concepts like “measure” and “particle” really become unstuck when the quantum world is involved, so I’m not sure it’s even valid to say that measuring one particle has an instant effect on the other. Too many rabbit holes involved there.
But… if you say that nobody knows the state of a particle until you look, but when you do look it’s entangled counterpart must by definition be in an opposite state, how is that different to saying that you don’t actually have two particles at all? Rather, instead you have an extremely long entity with two disparate ends? And you don’t know if it’s A…B or B…A until you have a peek. No hidden variables, just something being something. Note that I am necessarily applying human concepts and words here. Under the hood the universe doesn’t really care about how we think.
DeepMind uses matrix math to automate discovery of better matrix math techniques
Re: Historically it was believed you needed n^3 operations to multiply 2 square matrices together
Thanks for the link. Interesting article. I’d not thought of treating matrix elements as matrices themselves but of course it makes sense if you think about it. I wonder how this relates to the way that the universe itself works out what’s going on. Quantum mechanics is stuffed full of matrix operations and every part of the universe is said to be intimately connected with every other part.
Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing
Re: I'm getting rusty
I'd join you, but I already scarpered from the world of work. I was doing primarily C# for many years, which I must admit was an easy and powerful way to program, especially with LINQ extensions. But the headaches of null pointer reference exceptions was a real pain in the neck, and garbage collection / object disposal was always a bit hit and miss as to whether it would work efficiently and cleanly. I got into the habit of using the "using { }" construct religiously to dispose of disposable resources, but code analysis would inevitably moan that I needed to go through additional manual hoop jumping to clean things up. Right. Royal. Pain. In. The. Neck.
EU proposes regulations for tablet battery life, spare parts
Reliability of product
Good idea. If this mandates critical security updates to keep your gadget working “reliably” I’m all for it.
I see that Apple have recently provided such an update for older iGadgets (I guess it must be a pretty serious bug fix). But taking the guesswork out of your purchase can only be a good thing for the customer.
Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down
Asteroids may shoot pebbles into shallow temporary orbits, boffins believe
Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'
Apple's latest security feature could literally save lives
Re: WebKit, anyone?
It’s not a question of what an individual may - or may not - do. And neither you or I could possibly know this. It’s a technical/legal question of how Apple could provide the option at the same time as complying with forthcoming EU legislation.
If someone happens to have a third party browser engine installed, something that many have clamoured for, Apple cannot then provide a lockdown radio button without substantial qualification on the settings app. Something like “If you have installed any of a long list of 3rd party apps, this feature will not work as described.”
NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030
Apple may have to cough up $1bn to Brits in latest iPhone Batterygate claim
Throttling is a reasonable technical solution to a problem, the problem being that certain older phone models with degraded batteries would unceremoniously shut down. Better that your phone runs a bit slower than just crap out on you.
But Apple implemented throttling on the quiet. Unannounced, with no option to disable it (at that time). That’s what upset users, and quite rightly so.
EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035
EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices
Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed
Re: Lousy web design
Indeed. I've seen users complain that Safari doesn't work at all well with certain websites. Very often such websites are very poorly written, as you can easily determine by running a URL through an online HTML validation tool such as https://validator.w3.org/
It seems that Chrome is more forgiving (if that's actually the right word) of rubbish developers who don't know how to construct HTML properly.
Re: Ker-Ching!
The main reason that Jobs banned Flash was, I distinctly recall, because the code was a resource hog that flattened an iPad's battery.
In the article it says "Apple won't let you use anything else. There is no good reason for this."
I can think of one good reason: if an alternate browser has free rein to interact with the device (in the same way that Flash did) its browser engine could behave in a similarly bad way. I'm not saying it would; I'm saying that it could. For that very reason alone, I imagine that if Apple are forced to accept this, they would only do so with the user's explicit permission to absolve them of performance responsibility. There's a monetary cost to bodgers turning up at an Apple Store for help. Also, Apple won't want people waving a phone around in a pub saying that its performance is crap, dissing their products.
Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way
Re: Design Flaw
But there is an “expanding substrate”, space itself. AFAIK, it’s reckoned it will expand forever. Who can say.
I don’t know about a black hole being a “glitch”. I favour the notion that they are just exceedingly expensive computational resources for a mathematical God. Just imagine if you were God, troubled with the onerous task of driving the universe forward. You’ve got to individually compute the forces between all atoms in the cosmos to change the universe from one instant to the next. Quite a task.
That gets all the more burdensome when you have mind-bogglingly large numbers of particles close together in a compact object like a neutron star or black hole. So what do you do with your available resources? You reduce your computing clock rate to put a limit on how quickly things can change.
Funnily enough, this is exactly what happens in the vicinity of a black hole: time slows down.
Spare a thought for God. He / she / it has a lot of number crunching to do.