FYI this kind of thermostat is actually better. American style thermostat put your HVAC system in either on or off state (basically PWM), whereas this kind of communicating thermostat can tell the system what the temperature is, so they adjust power accordingly. I do wish they have standardized protocol though.
Single stage hvac systems tend to have better performance in the max capacity cooling cases (Texas) and last significantly longer than units that rely on non-linear electronic devices.
The difference can be as extreme as 10+ years of service life. There are residential systems that were installed in the 80s and 90s that are still running fine today. The hermetically sealed scroll compressor is an engineering marvel. The electronics will generally fail before any meaningful mechanical wear is incurred.
Single stage forced air / air handlers AC systems are basically only found in North America because they are so grossly inefficient and because most people in the rest of the world realize they can save money by not having all of their rooms ran off the same system. The rest of the world runs on mini splits for that reason.
>Single stage hvac systems tend to have better performance in the max capacity cooling cases (Texas) and last significantly longer than units that rely on non-linear electronic devices.
Inverter systems have more conversion losses than single stage. Most of the time, I definitely intend to run my system as hard as it can. There are only 4-5 weeks out of the year where variable speed would make a meaningful difference.
Semiconductors wear faster than copper wires and contactors and are much harder to replace. I can take a part from my neighbor's condensing unit and it would almost certainly work in mine. The make/model is largely irrelevant. I can go on Amazon, search "Start+Run Capacitor" and buy the first thing I find.
> Most of the time, I definitely intend to run my system as hard as it can. There are only 4-5 weeks out of the year where variable speed would make a meaningful difference.
Because all too often the electronics are what fail and replacement parts are not available so the whole thing is scrap even though the compressor is still good.
The thermostat is better only because it takes advantage of the inverter modulation capabilities in the heat pump. I don't have the sense that inverter modulation is the norm for most home ducted systems, even new builds in North America.
I've only observed ductless systems like this in retrofitted, older homes in Canada. And at that point they're usually not integrated with the home's existing heating system / thermostat.
It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make for simple, open I/O. It's not PWM but rather a "call" for heat, cooling, or fan. If I'm refinishing the wall I can (and have) put in a $3 thermostat in its place so I don't destroy the $300 one with paint and dust.
It's also very easy to debug and repair, as I experienced on a day when the temperatures exceeded 100F and was able to execute an emergency repair myself.
If companies like Nest and Ecobee were not allowed to exist, we would all be stuck with the overwhelmingly universally overpriced, proprietary garbage the OEMs put out.
For those outside academia, the ”reward mechanism” is a choice between A) being a genius and working hard to become a leader in your field, B) becoming very good at writing grant applications, C) capitulating to corporations and living with the moral burden of their exploits
I have apps published to both the Play Store and App Store, and I agree. Despite the stereotype, Apple is much nicer to deal with. If you work within the Google ecosystem, you enjoy none of the benefits of the supposedly open Android system, but need to deal with more bureaucracy, more limitations, and worse support.
well... no, splitting a monolith once it has grown past the point where services make sense is incredibly difficult. My last employer spent a couple of years doing it and ultimately gave up. There is just way too much interdependency to split it up cleanly.
So the key here is good engineering leadership to recognize when that point arrives, and push the company to start the transition.
And indeed, microservices solve a organization problem not an engineering problem. When I taught the architecture to new hires, I always say: a service is the largest piece of system that stays together in a reorg :)
That's assuming you don't separate concerns in your monolith into modules with clear boundaries and dependencies. If you did that from day one, splitting a module off to a different service is easy.
If you can manage that then there's no real benefit to microservices though. The reason for splitting is to solve the problem of failing to separate concerns, so a team that can't do that well is better off building microservices from the start because the alternative for them is building a monolith that will be hard to split.
I don’t agree. The technical device we use for creating clear boundaries, useful abstractions and managing dependencies in monolithic code is the function/method/procedure call.
The history of distributed software is littered with the corpses of attempts to make the RPC look like a function/method call (I worked for a CORBA vendor decades ago). But these two techniques are so different on a fundamental level they are not substitutable except in the most trivial cases. The compute and elapsed time RPC overhead which makes perfectly good local abstractions completely impractical across a network. And then there are the differences in terms of failure modes, concurrency and synchronicity.
So even a beautifully designed and layered piece of “monolithic” software with a code base costing of coherent and clean abstractions will not be easy to port to a microservices/distributed architecture.
You are talking about change (or extension) of status, not visa.
US is unique in that the visa sticker and your right to remain in the country (status) are two different things. The only purpose of the visa sticker is to allow you to travel to a U.S. port of entry, where you apply for admission, and therefore legal status. You can have legal status in the U.S. while the visa sticker has expired, and your status can be changed or extended domestically. However unless you have a valid sticker you cannot leave and return.
Australia too - however, to get a renewal all you need is an online connection and a credit card, the renewal (at least for me!) goes through automatically. (Notwithstanding that Australia just increased the PR-renewal cost from ~400-500 to ~1400-1500 AUD)
Is it? If I understand it correctly, in Japan, if you have a valid residence card, you can use that to enter the country. That is not true for the US (if you consider I-94 the US equivalent of residence card)
Yeah, my bad. After re-reading your original comment I think I was responding to the part that explains 'visa sticker grants entry, residence status is separate', but I have somehow missed the tail of 'you cannot enter w/o the sticker'. In Japan, the former is exactly the same shape but the latter is not. If you have a long-term residence status (and carry the card) you can enter the country on it alone.
There are some technicalities -- your passport has to carry the re-entry permit, but it's affixed to everyone who requests it at the port of exit, granted it's up to 1 yr.
Similar even with LPR (Legal Permanent Resident) status. Your green card is valid for ten years. When the card expires it must be renewed, but your status does not expire. But you would need a current, valid card, to re-enter if you left (or have extenuating circumstances which you'd -reallllly- want to have worked through with a consulate prior to attempting.
I thought that was universal. The Visa gets you into the country. Your entry stamp shows how long you can stay. It was an extra white card in USA but I forget what designation the form had. Been a while.
One example I'm familiar with which is different, are Schengen tourist visas. You need to leave before the visa expires. That's not the case for US tourist visas.
Apparently the Form I-94 (Arrival/Departure Record) card is phased out. But it used to be that it contained your allowed term of stay. I am sure the digital version has something like that. You do not automatically get the max allowed duration per your visa. It might be that they are one and the same especially short visa terms of course. But i haven't actually been since mid 2000s so I wouldn't actually know for sure.
Hostage may be a bad analogy. More like a game of chicken. Imagine you are a regular @icloud.com email user. Apple is basically saying "I dare you to block all @icloud.com email and lose all these customers"
you could say the same thing about AWS or Cloudflare hosting anybody and everybody. Spain actually started blocking a bunch of their IP blocks during football matches due to a poorly thought out legal decision.
Note the reason of this conspiracy: the founder of Tang dynasty is not of pure Han Chinese ethnicity. In the grand scheme, this is just part of the rise of Han nationalism in recent years, which had its roots in the nationalism rhetorics adopted by the Chinese state under Xi.
I'm sure you can see the parallels of this in the United States and Europe.
Seriously, Apple is "big tech," but they are the only one that appears to give a crap about privacy at all. And really, they put a lot of money and effort into it.
We need to give kudos when they are due.
Apple's Private Cloud Compute should have won some kind of Nobel Privacy Prize, which for some reason does not yet exist.
They still don't let me install uBlock origin + noscript. Whitelisting per-domain and per-site what can run Javascript does more for my privacy than anything else, and I can do that with firefox on linux and android, but on iOS I'm not allowed to install firefox.
There's obviously no real technical limitation since if you live in the EU you can sideload an alternative browser in theory (though apple has made it unrealistic in practice since they're ignoring the spirit of the law and instead doing their darndest to resist giving users even a whit of freedom).
They also don’t allow you to install Windows executables. They do allow you to run adblockers designed for Safari, like Wipr, and there are any number of noscript-alikes, like StopTheScript. I’m not saying that to be snarky, but to say that different platforms have different ways of doing things.
And Firefox is in the iOS App Store. I know what you meant to say, and that it’s not the same as Firefox on Android, but it’s wrong to say you’re not allowed to install Firefox.
Since Apple specifically disallows using other web engines on the App Store, I have bad news for you : Firefox on the App Store is just a reskinned safari and as such, a lot of features cannot be implemented because they depend on the web rendering engine.
I also can't use Safari because I want my tabs and bookmarks to sync between my desktop machine (linux) and my phone (iOS), and Safari is the only major browser which can't do that.
Not to mention Safari is just an inferior browser which seems possibly designed to hold back Progressive Web Apps so that everyone has to make app-store apps and tithe a percent of all profits to apple.
In this day and age, privacy is luxury, so that's what they sell.
I don't think there are any ethical motivations for them (or any other large corporation - none of them have morals so they cannot act morally). It's just that there's a market niche, so it will be filled by someone.
Sure, but technically proficient users often have other things they want to spend their time on, outside of exercising technical proficiency on every single thing.
Heck, I don’t even do my own oil changes anymore despite it being easy. Life gets busy, you know?
Many systems out there have specific exceptions from their VPN policy for iCloud emails and iCloud private relay. Places that would immediately block fastmail because of its alias feature will not block iCloud because too many people use it. Market share is real power. You can ban 0.1% of your customers, you can't ban 30% of your customers.
The person you're replying to is saying "Sites I use block all VPNs besides Apple's subscription service VPN" - I'm not sure they're not blocking it just because they fervently believe in Apple's privacy commitments and engineering :)
Only pointing this out because I love Apple's privacy story and don't want your reply to be misconstrued as sarcasm, and thus the reason why it enjoys a singular exemption is because its ineffective.
I’ve never been under the impression that privacy relay is anything like a true VPN. I mostly thought it stopped BS that happens on public WiFi and public sniffing. It’s meant to protect you only until you get to a major carriers infrastructure.
The design is supposed to be better than a true VPN, because neither Apple nor the exit node (Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly) are supposed to know both who you are and what you’re doing. Of course, Apple pays them for this service, so they could exchange info.
They don't block it because of the publicity it would generate. Social factors matter.
"We blocked people for using special hacker privacy tools. Stop using the special tools if you want service." versus "we blocked people for using the most popular kind of end device. Buy a second, really obscure brand of device if you want service."
(In the US, that is. Outside the US, Android devices are more popular but Apple still has the plurality because there's only one of it)
Private Relay also works because it's on by default for everyone paying for iCloud (including everyone just on the 0.99/month tier for photo backup) - so Apple can use it across their apps (e.g. loading images in Apple Mail) and it doesn't let you single out privacy conscious users!
Yup. Premiums change depending on the deductible you choose[1] and your age.
[1]: If you have the CHF2500/year deductible, premiums are cheaper but you have to pay that amount out of picket before the insurance company reimburses your expenses
Isn't this how socialized healthcare works in every country? Whether they realize it or not the principle is generally the same, an amount (usually bundled under "social contributions") goes from people's gross salary to pay for the health insurance.
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