I've never noticed keyboards making much difference on my coding speed unless they are dramaticlly different.. to small (like some laptops) or those nasty ergonomical things that are bent in crazy shapes. Windows keyboards with dozens of useless buttons annoy me too.
My one big keyboard bitch other than those is keyboards that are metal on the bottom. I like to lay the keyboard on my legs (so I can sit with my feet up) and the ones with metal are COLD when your wearing shorts.:)
I like my Happy Hacker keyboard but I usually use my cheap $10 (I actually buy them wholesale for $3) keyboards. They may die a couple times a year from heavy abuse but they are so cheap I don't care. I keep the Happy Hacker for special occassions.
I assume (prehaps incorrectly) that Netscape and other commercial bundlers of Mozilla do regression testing and such using specialized tools for such things. I still think the opensource process itself is it's own type of testing which does much the same thing but obviously it never hurts to run more tests. The more careful you are the better the output. There is no reason to hold up nightly builds for these other tests though.:)
It's a step closer to being a real browser. It's recent improvements in CSS support go a long way towards that end too.
Avant looks okay but still to IE'ish for me. Especially with those default XP colors. I assume by looking that you can skin it not to look like a candy factory exploded.:) I'm not quite sure why people bother copying features from Opera and Mozilla to IE but if it pleases them to do so rather than to just use one of these then I guess it's their time so I don't care. I don't really like the preview image of Avant with the multiple windows inside the main window. To me those kind of programs are annoying. Why would you want a tab that wasn't full-browser? Just curious.:)
When a product is good I praise it. I choose not to praise products that suck. Is that elitism? Since anyone is free to improve their own product or just switch to the one I recommend it hardly seems so.
If I get bored maybe I'll see if Avant will run on my Linux box. IE6 runs fine but sometimes minor things can make one Windows program run fine while another brain farts.
My main issue is with the desktop, not the libraries themselves. For apps both KDE and Gnome I think are doing okay. It's just as a desktop enviroment that they suck. I don't have any problems with Gnome 1. It lacked polish but was okay mostly. When the switch to Gnome 2 came I delayed for quite a while to give it time to shake out the bugs and then tried it long enough to learn it pretty well. It had stablity problems and configuration of certain items was fairly difficult to do because 1. they got rid of the GUI configuration for those things and 2. they made it harder to manually set those things and 3. they just plain removed them as features. There is a whole list of bitches that I won't bother to respout here but overall they tried to be more 'Windows' without seeming to really consider why they were trying to do so. Also when I asked questions and made comments to people in the development circle I felt I got a lot of attitude that they wanted to draw Windows users and didn't care what the opinions of experienced users was. I got a lot of "We don't want you to do that." as reasons why things had been removed or made difficult. I especially don't like Gnome 2's panels and related menus. They are glitchy, have low usability, and configuring them takes way to much effort (and practice). The default menus are rather horrible for either an experienced user or a newbie. I don't really like the new WM either.. Metacity I think it's called.
With both KDE and Gnome it takes forever for them to load and they tend to hangup with errors far more than they should. Not so much for me (an experienced user) but for the newbies I deal with and for whom these projects evidently are trying to please.
Currently, I am running HackedBox as my WM with a mixture of KDE and Gnome apps that I like. I use GDM for graphical logons simply because I like it's look and ease of use better than other options. I'm toying with writing a Gecko-based WM but I'm not sure even I'd use that.. it's mostly just an experiment. I'm also experimenting with gesture support and having panels that superimpose themselves over unused portions of title bars rather than taking up valuable screen space. Minor efforts to make desktop computing more effecient in general.
You must then either already have a fairly quiet computer or you hit those keys mad hard (harder even than me.. which is hard to believe) to make that much noise.. or I guess you could have a very noisy keyboard (mine was $10 and is reasonably quiet). Otherwise the noise of a keyboard is typically drowned out by those jet engines attached to modern PC's that we call fans.:)
Not at all. You can make something BETTER by not copying and not dumbing things down. I for one don't think people as a whole are stupid. UI design should be based on making things easier - not dumber. The difference being that intermediate to expert users should find the interface easy rather than newbies. People will spend much more time being an experienced user than a novice so it doesn't make sense to cater to the novice. Sure there is a fear of learning but that's something people will just have to get over if they want things to be better.
A good example is that many enterprise apps when ported from DOS to Windows tried to be more novice friendly by making moving between fields a mouse action where before they were a TAB action. This requires the users hands to leave the keyboard, find the mouse, find the pointer, move the pointer to the next box, click that box, move back to the keyboard, and resume typing. It wasn't long before many of these programs began adding back in the ability to TAB to the next field. Yes, to newbies the mouse seemed easier.. but experienced workers hated the change and it could badly damage the businesses productivity.
Stability and speed is also important. KDE/Gnome especially IMO are going the wrong way in these areas as they try to satisfy Windows users.
Besides - the desktop is a dying concept. Embedded devices to a large degree will take the place as novice users interface of choice. Why figure out how to do something with a powerful (but possibly complex) interface when you can use a handheld gadget that has three buttons and can do what you need (and only what you need)? Obviously you'll still have desktops just as we still have command line interfaces.. but they'll shift from being a cashcow to being a geek tool.
I predict a near future in which less complex devices, similar to (or the same as) game consoles are used by most people for tasks like web browsing, word processing, etc. The systems will likely run Linux or a similar OS but in a version that has been stripped of anything unneeded.. configured especially for the given hardware and tested for stability. I think they'll have a desktop but given the limited capabilities of the systems that the desktop will be very lightweight. Just to step further out on a limb I'll guess that Apple and Sony will be the two major competitors in this market.
If you're really concerned about PC noise you might look into getting a Mini-ITX system. For around $300-$400 you can get a system that is about as silent as any computer can get (slight noise from disk drives when in use). I'd suggest getting one that is fully fanless. No CPU fan with an external fanless power supply. Combined with your silent keyboard I think you'd have a very quiet work enviroment.
Is this why Microsoft yanked their newest XP patch back after it started screwing things up? Really on such a simple fix as this it's pretty easy to test if it stops the problem. Load the code in question into a non-patched Mozilla.. oops crashes. Load the code into a patched Mozilla.. yeh it doesn't crash. Pretty good chance things are working nice. Problems occur more when you wait and package lots of small fixes into a single patch. The more you change at once the more likely you'll break something. Every nights builds of Mozilla get tested by thousands of users on all sorts of different platforms and configurations. No commercial product can manage that.
There is something to saying that a nightly build is not the same as a fix in the stable branch but often such fixes are backported and distributed to end users (via their distro) so that the users don't have to use unstable builds or wait for the next stable version.
My computer only cost $405 and it isn't bad (rather good actually). I have to continue to think that $300 just for a keyboard/mouse is overpriced. Dare I ask if wherever you work is hiring? If you can afford to buy lots of $300 keyboards I want to do what you do.:)
This is why real browsers such as Opera and Mozilla offer tabbed browsing. Open links in new tabs. When your done just kill the tab and your still on the original page.:)
The only use for something like this for me would be on a laptop or tablet or similar portable system. If they could superimpose such an input device over your tablet's screen then I could see using it. It'd be useful to me to be able to have a ghostly keyboard come into view when I made a certain gesture and thus let me type and the rest of the time to just have the screen work as a touch/pen surface and support simple gestures. Not having to hual around the keyboard or a clumsy portable mouse IMO would be worth the hassle.
But then I think peoples laptops/tablets should be able to interface as something of a kvm with headless boxes around the world. They should be able to plug into the keyboard, mouse, and monitor ports and allow you to switch between the connected machine and the portable with some sort of keystroke or gesture. I always found it a bit pointless to have sepperate keyboard, mice, and monitors for each computer.
Just to be argumenative I'll say that the main problem with RedHat (and Linux) recently is the effort to dumb it down for the folks out there who can't do anything but run Minesweeper on their XP box.
Linux should not be Windows or MacOS. If users want a dumbed down OS let them use Windows or MacOS. At most let them use a retarded distro like Lindows. Playing copycat you can never be the best. KDE and Gnome have both driven me away as a user as they have become more bloated and dumbed down.
The same with support. Once the machine is booted to your desktop you have what you paid for. That support is more than what you'll get from Microsoft. If you want more then pay for it or learn to use the community support Linux offers. Linux is a community as much as software. You have to accept both to appreciate either.
Installing is about as easy as to keep pressing 'next' so I don't really know what more you need help with. Again I find it easier than the Windows install or the last MacOS I installed (ver 9).
Keystroke by keystroke guides suck because few computers are likely to be the same. People will need to learn to think a little bit if they want their computer to work well for them. This is especially true when it comes to compiling software.
Your fourth demand is actually reasonable I think. Maybe don't give a full guide to all configuration files but a quick overview of what the files are would be a nice touch. The only obvious problem with this is that there is no way a newbie will comprehend even the descriptions of these files. It'd be confusing to them.
In Linux you seldom need to adjust your screen parameters. Maybe they need to add a note about CTRL-ALT-+ so that users will know how to shift between the available settings easily. There is really no need to tweak X settings directly as a user.
I would like to see RedHat include Ximian's Red Carpet in their default installs. I think it would make it easier for users to learn to add/remove/update packages. IMO Red Carpet is just better than any of RedHat's own tools for this job.
If you really want a no brainer distro for newbies then try Knoppix. You don't need to install it, recompile anything, or configure anything. For the most part 'it just works'. It could always be better though.:)
I could see a Bill & Ted knockoff commercial as being funny. Have two slacker guys who want to become game programmers that are sent back through time with their PS2 to see what important historical figures think of Grand Theft Auto. Most bodacious. Excellent dude. Party on with Playstation!
Actually, I feel the plot for a stupid but funny movie building in my mind. We really need a movie about some script-kiddies that go on to save the world by phreaking the payphones of time.:)
Maybe this is the Japanese name and they'll rebrand it for us western folks for which the original Playstation was usually called the PSX. Maybe it'll become the PS2X or something? Myself I like the name PS2 Extreme (pronounced Playstation tooooo Extreme).
I usually read the articles before commenting but as you said this one was just lame.
Really if you don't want as much information turn something off. Leave you phone, PDA, and laptop at home. Take your significant others, kids, or a friend and just go hang out and experience reality. It's all a choice to be connected or not.
For heavy work trucks and other vehicles that don't have room for batteries I can see ethanol or fuel cells. I think in the future we should see a lot of different types of cars instead of just one. We should choose the most effecient solution for each job and should let the different options compete. That'd actually drive some innovation for a change. The current market exists in a careful non-innovation bubble to keep the prices up and the gasoline selling.
One way or the other we'll have to start to change because we're going to run out of oil (at least until we learn to make it affordably) and I'd rather save what we have for other uses than going up in smoke.
You ever see an EV designed for racing? They can make gas powered cars look sick. With an electric car there is rally nothing to slow a car down other than the limits of the driver and the life of the batteries. Consider it an upgrade.:)
Don't misunderstand me. I want better batteries but you can recycle a battery. You can't do much to recycle gasoline. It isn't a pipe dream if you make it happen.
Also it can be very enviromentally friendly to charge a battery - as well as economical. Even if your local power doesn't come from a renewable resource you, or a charging facility, can set up your own renewable source. It does take some special effort to charge this kind of batteries (over say powering a light bulb) but it can be done if you know how to set the system up. You always have the option with an EV to choose the more enviromental solutions.
Ethanol is a good start on the problem, and one I think should be used more. Unfortunately many engines have trouble dealing with it and for various reasons it isn't distributed as much as I wish it were. You still face something of a centralization issue with any type of fuel but probably no more than you would to finding a supplier of say batteries for an EV. (If needed it's possible to make either ethanol or a battery yourself.. something you can't do with gasoline).
For a long-term solution I think nanotechnology will make all these solutions moot. However, I don't think we should wait 50 years to start cleaning up the mess we've made of the enviroment.
You'd have to redesign a lot of current EV's but for new EV's it'd be no big deal. May as well complain that having a standard way of putting gas in cars is a pain. Sure batteries are heavy but it's no big deal to mount them on a rack that can easier be loaded in/out with a mechanical arm. I've seen several EV's that already do this.
You seem to be assuming that the user would own the batteries. It'd be easier to have the user lease the batteries from the refueling company and just swap packs as needed. Sure you could have people that'd try to cheat the system but you could make that difficult with a little technology. You'd probably lose no more money from EV cheats than from people who drive off without paying for their gasoline.
Individual stations couldn't, and wouldn't need to, supply the battery packs but for a company like Shell it'd be a very small initial investment due to the number of EV's in existence that use the standard (zero) and as the users would lease the packs the company wouldn't lose money on the packs. Compared to the cost of even one of the wind turbines Shell builds the cost of a pack is pocket change.
No, batteries used in EV's are mostly recycled. They are only bad for the enviroment if thrown in a landfill. Luckily since they cost so much most EV users are smart enough not to do such a thing.
I'd love to see better batteries but I don't think fuel cells are a good replacement. Compressed air vehicles and such do strike me as a good idea if they can get good enough.
The real solution is that all electricity should be produced by renewable means but that really is a different (if related) issue. That people think a coal plant is more attractive than a wind farm just strikes me as insane. Wait until the brownouts get worse and maybe people will finally see the light. Or maybe we just need a politician that isn't so involved with the oil business.
I won't argue that it won't catch on with the general public but then my opinion of the general public is that they're complete morons. If a car is sexy then these morons won't care if it's an EV. Produce such an EV and people will buy them.
True, but as the stations tend to have a bit more centralized behavior I think it'd be easier to set a standard from them. Also to a gasmart an extra $5k investment isn't really much to risk.
My own feeling is that a non-profit group should make a deal with the government to put such EV refueling stations at all state rest stops. That'd be enough to give things a push I think. I'm not sure if there are enough interested people to sponsor a not-for-profit approach such as that everywhere but I bet we could manage it in certain areas.. such as around Silicon Valley.
Even electricty generated from the same old nasty stuff (coal, etc) is more effecient than a gasoline powered car. That includes the loss in transmission. It's also a lot easier to generate electricity from renewable sources than it is to generate gasoline.
The main problem with EV's is that battery's are heavy and fairly expesnsive. They aren't especially bad for the enviroment because they are almost 100% recycled. Refueling could be made as easy and quick as refueling a gasoline powered car (probably quicker actually) but obviously you'd have to get a large chain of gas stations to do it or it isn't going to work for most people.
Even without being subsidized an EV isn't much different in price than a regular car. You have a much more simplified system which makes it overall cheaper. The batteries bring the cost back up to be about the same. I think you'd find the TCO lower though because usually EV's are much cheaper to maintain and have lower insurance rates. Of course if you're a real renewabe wacko (like me) you can build a renewable charging station at home which frees you from most of the cost of refueling as long as you don't go on road trips.:)
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I've never noticed keyboards making much difference on my coding speed unless they are dramaticlly different.. to small (like some laptops) or those nasty ergonomical things that are bent in crazy shapes. Windows keyboards with dozens of useless buttons annoy me too.
:)
My one big keyboard bitch other than those is keyboards that are metal on the bottom. I like to lay the keyboard on my legs (so I can sit with my feet up) and the ones with metal are COLD when your wearing shorts.
I like my Happy Hacker keyboard but I usually use my cheap $10 (I actually buy them wholesale for $3) keyboards. They may die a couple times a year from heavy abuse but they are so cheap I don't care. I keep the Happy Hacker for special occassions.
I assume (prehaps incorrectly) that Netscape and other commercial bundlers of Mozilla do regression testing and such using specialized tools for such things. I still think the opensource process itself is it's own type of testing which does much the same thing but obviously it never hurts to run more tests. The more careful you are the better the output. There is no reason to hold up nightly builds for these other tests though. :)
It's a step closer to being a real browser. It's recent improvements in CSS support go a long way towards that end too.
:) I'm not quite sure why people bother copying features from Opera and Mozilla to IE but if it pleases them to do so rather than to just use one of these then I guess it's their time so I don't care. I don't really like the preview image of Avant with the multiple windows inside the main window. To me those kind of programs are annoying. Why would you want a tab that wasn't full-browser? Just curious. :)
Avant looks okay but still to IE'ish for me. Especially with those default XP colors. I assume by looking that you can skin it not to look like a candy factory exploded.
When a product is good I praise it. I choose not to praise products that suck. Is that elitism? Since anyone is free to improve their own product or just switch to the one I recommend it hardly seems so.
If I get bored maybe I'll see if Avant will run on my Linux box. IE6 runs fine but sometimes minor things can make one Windows program run fine while another brain farts.
My main issue is with the desktop, not the libraries themselves. For apps both KDE and Gnome I think are doing okay. It's just as a desktop enviroment that they suck. I don't have any problems with Gnome 1. It lacked polish but was okay mostly. When the switch to Gnome 2 came I delayed for quite a while to give it time to shake out the bugs and then tried it long enough to learn it pretty well. It had stablity problems and configuration of certain items was fairly difficult to do because 1. they got rid of the GUI configuration for those things and 2. they made it harder to manually set those things and 3. they just plain removed them as features. There is a whole list of bitches that I won't bother to respout here but overall they tried to be more 'Windows' without seeming to really consider why they were trying to do so. Also when I asked questions and made comments to people in the development circle I felt I got a lot of attitude that they wanted to draw Windows users and didn't care what the opinions of experienced users was. I got a lot of "We don't want you to do that." as reasons why things had been removed or made difficult. I especially don't like Gnome 2's panels and related menus. They are glitchy, have low usability, and configuring them takes way to much effort (and practice). The default menus are rather horrible for either an experienced user or a newbie. I don't really like the new WM either.. Metacity I think it's called.
With both KDE and Gnome it takes forever for them to load and they tend to hangup with errors far more than they should. Not so much for me (an experienced user) but for the newbies I deal with and for whom these projects evidently are trying to please.
Currently, I am running HackedBox as my WM with a mixture of KDE and Gnome apps that I like. I use GDM for graphical logons simply because I like it's look and ease of use better than other options. I'm toying with writing a Gecko-based WM but I'm not sure even I'd use that.. it's mostly just an experiment. I'm also experimenting with gesture support and having panels that superimpose themselves over unused portions of title bars rather than taking up valuable screen space. Minor efforts to make desktop computing more effecient in general.
You must then either already have a fairly quiet computer or you hit those keys mad hard (harder even than me.. which is hard to believe) to make that much noise.. or I guess you could have a very noisy keyboard (mine was $10 and is reasonably quiet). Otherwise the noise of a keyboard is typically drowned out by those jet engines attached to modern PC's that we call fans. :)
Not at all. You can make something BETTER by not copying and not dumbing things down. I for one don't think people as a whole are stupid. UI design should be based on making things easier - not dumber. The difference being that intermediate to expert users should find the interface easy rather than newbies. People will spend much more time being an experienced user than a novice so it doesn't make sense to cater to the novice. Sure there is a fear of learning but that's something people will just have to get over if they want things to be better.
A good example is that many enterprise apps when ported from DOS to Windows tried to be more novice friendly by making moving between fields a mouse action where before they were a TAB action. This requires the users hands to leave the keyboard, find the mouse, find the pointer, move the pointer to the next box, click that box, move back to the keyboard, and resume typing. It wasn't long before many of these programs began adding back in the ability to TAB to the next field. Yes, to newbies the mouse seemed easier.. but experienced workers hated the change and it could badly damage the businesses productivity.
Stability and speed is also important. KDE/Gnome especially IMO are going the wrong way in these areas as they try to satisfy Windows users.
Besides - the desktop is a dying concept. Embedded devices to a large degree will take the place as novice users interface of choice. Why figure out how to do something with a powerful (but possibly complex) interface when you can use a handheld gadget that has three buttons and can do what you need (and only what you need)? Obviously you'll still have desktops just as we still have command line interfaces.. but they'll shift from being a cashcow to being a geek tool.
I predict a near future in which less complex devices, similar to (or the same as) game consoles are used by most people for tasks like web browsing, word processing, etc. The systems will likely run Linux or a similar OS but in a version that has been stripped of anything unneeded.. configured especially for the given hardware and tested for stability. I think they'll have a desktop but given the limited capabilities of the systems that the desktop will be very lightweight. Just to step further out on a limb I'll guess that Apple and Sony will be the two major competitors in this market.
If you're really concerned about PC noise you might look into getting a Mini-ITX system. For around $300-$400 you can get a system that is about as silent as any computer can get (slight noise from disk drives when in use). I'd suggest getting one that is fully fanless. No CPU fan with an external fanless power supply. Combined with your silent keyboard I think you'd have a very quiet work enviroment.
Is this why Microsoft yanked their newest XP patch back after it started screwing things up? Really on such a simple fix as this it's pretty easy to test if it stops the problem. Load the code in question into a non-patched Mozilla.. oops crashes. Load the code into a patched Mozilla.. yeh it doesn't crash. Pretty good chance things are working nice. Problems occur more when you wait and package lots of small fixes into a single patch. The more you change at once the more likely you'll break something. Every nights builds of Mozilla get tested by thousands of users on all sorts of different platforms and configurations. No commercial product can manage that.
There is something to saying that a nightly build is not the same as a fix in the stable branch but often such fixes are backported and distributed to end users (via their distro) so that the users don't have to use unstable builds or wait for the next stable version.
My computer only cost $405 and it isn't bad (rather good actually). I have to continue to think that $300 just for a keyboard/mouse is overpriced. Dare I ask if wherever you work is hiring? If you can afford to buy lots of $300 keyboards I want to do what you do. :)
This is why real browsers such as Opera and Mozilla offer tabbed browsing. Open links in new tabs. When your done just kill the tab and your still on the original page. :)
The only use for something like this for me would be on a laptop or tablet or similar portable system. If they could superimpose such an input device over your tablet's screen then I could see using it. It'd be useful to me to be able to have a ghostly keyboard come into view when I made a certain gesture and thus let me type and the rest of the time to just have the screen work as a touch/pen surface and support simple gestures. Not having to hual around the keyboard or a clumsy portable mouse IMO would be worth the hassle.
But then I think peoples laptops/tablets should be able to interface as something of a kvm with headless boxes around the world. They should be able to plug into the keyboard, mouse, and monitor ports and allow you to switch between the connected machine and the portable with some sort of keystroke or gesture. I always found it a bit pointless to have sepperate keyboard, mice, and monitors for each computer.
Just to be argumenative I'll say that the main problem with RedHat (and Linux) recently is the effort to dumb it down for the folks out there who can't do anything but run Minesweeper on their XP box.
:)
Linux should not be Windows or MacOS. If users want a dumbed down OS let them use Windows or MacOS. At most let them use a retarded distro like Lindows. Playing copycat you can never be the best. KDE and Gnome have both driven me away as a user as they have become more bloated and dumbed down.
The same with support. Once the machine is booted to your desktop you have what you paid for. That support is more than what you'll get from Microsoft. If you want more then pay for it or learn to use the community support Linux offers. Linux is a community as much as software. You have to accept both to appreciate either.
Installing is about as easy as to keep pressing 'next' so I don't really know what more you need help with. Again I find it easier than the Windows install or the last MacOS I installed (ver 9).
Keystroke by keystroke guides suck because few computers are likely to be the same. People will need to learn to think a little bit if they want their computer to work well for them. This is especially true when it comes to compiling software.
Your fourth demand is actually reasonable I think. Maybe don't give a full guide to all configuration files but a quick overview of what the files are would be a nice touch. The only obvious problem with this is that there is no way a newbie will comprehend even the descriptions of these files. It'd be confusing to them.
In Linux you seldom need to adjust your screen parameters. Maybe they need to add a note about CTRL-ALT-+ so that users will know how to shift between the available settings easily. There is really no need to tweak X settings directly as a user.
I would like to see RedHat include Ximian's Red Carpet in their default installs. I think it would make it easier for users to learn to add/remove/update packages. IMO Red Carpet is just better than any of RedHat's own tools for this job.
If you really want a no brainer distro for newbies then try Knoppix. You don't need to install it, recompile anything, or configure anything. For the most part 'it just works'. It could always be better though.
I could see a Bill & Ted knockoff commercial as being funny. Have two slacker guys who want to become game programmers that are sent back through time with their PS2 to see what important historical figures think of Grand Theft Auto. Most bodacious. Excellent dude. Party on with Playstation!
:)
Actually, I feel the plot for a stupid but funny movie building in my mind. We really need a movie about some script-kiddies that go on to save the world by phreaking the payphones of time.
As sexy as everyone seems to think this unit looks maybe they should call it the PS XXX?
I hope this thing doesn't run as hot/loud as an XBox. Geez my computer is quieter than an XBox (or PS2) even under full load.
Maybe this is the Japanese name and they'll rebrand it for us western folks for which the original Playstation was usually called the PSX. Maybe it'll become the PS2X or something? Myself I like the name PS2 Extreme (pronounced Playstation tooooo Extreme).
I usually read the articles before commenting but as you said this one was just lame.
Really if you don't want as much information turn something off. Leave you phone, PDA, and laptop at home. Take your significant others, kids, or a friend and just go hang out and experience reality. It's all a choice to be connected or not.
For heavy work trucks and other vehicles that don't have room for batteries I can see ethanol or fuel cells. I think in the future we should see a lot of different types of cars instead of just one. We should choose the most effecient solution for each job and should let the different options compete. That'd actually drive some innovation for a change. The current market exists in a careful non-innovation bubble to keep the prices up and the gasoline selling.
One way or the other we'll have to start to change because we're going to run out of oil (at least until we learn to make it affordably) and I'd rather save what we have for other uses than going up in smoke.
You ever see an EV designed for racing? They can make gas powered cars look sick. With an electric car there is rally nothing to slow a car down other than the limits of the driver and the life of the batteries. Consider it an upgrade. :)
Don't misunderstand me. I want better batteries but you can recycle a battery. You can't do much to recycle gasoline. It isn't a pipe dream if you make it happen.
Also it can be very enviromentally friendly to charge a battery - as well as economical. Even if your local power doesn't come from a renewable resource you, or a charging facility, can set up your own renewable source. It does take some special effort to charge this kind of batteries (over say powering a light bulb) but it can be done if you know how to set the system up. You always have the option with an EV to choose the more enviromental solutions.
Ethanol is a good start on the problem, and one I think should be used more. Unfortunately many engines have trouble dealing with it and for various reasons it isn't distributed as much as I wish it were. You still face something of a centralization issue with any type of fuel but probably no more than you would to finding a supplier of say batteries for an EV. (If needed it's possible to make either ethanol or a battery yourself.. something you can't do with gasoline).
For a long-term solution I think nanotechnology will make all these solutions moot. However, I don't think we should wait 50 years to start cleaning up the mess we've made of the enviroment.
You'd have to redesign a lot of current EV's but for new EV's it'd be no big deal. May as well complain that having a standard way of putting gas in cars is a pain. Sure batteries are heavy but it's no big deal to mount them on a rack that can easier be loaded in/out with a mechanical arm. I've seen several EV's that already do this.
You seem to be assuming that the user would own the batteries. It'd be easier to have the user lease the batteries from the refueling company and just swap packs as needed. Sure you could have people that'd try to cheat the system but you could make that difficult with a little technology. You'd probably lose no more money from EV cheats than from people who drive off without paying for their gasoline.
Individual stations couldn't, and wouldn't need to, supply the battery packs but for a company like Shell it'd be a very small initial investment due to the number of EV's in existence that use the standard (zero) and as the users would lease the packs the company wouldn't lose money on the packs. Compared to the cost of even one of the wind turbines Shell builds the cost of a pack is pocket change.
No, batteries used in EV's are mostly recycled. They are only bad for the enviroment if thrown in a landfill. Luckily since they cost so much most EV users are smart enough not to do such a thing.
I'd love to see better batteries but I don't think fuel cells are a good replacement. Compressed air vehicles and such do strike me as a good idea if they can get good enough.
The real solution is that all electricity should be produced by renewable means but that really is a different (if related) issue. That people think a coal plant is more attractive than a wind farm just strikes me as insane. Wait until the brownouts get worse and maybe people will finally see the light. Or maybe we just need a politician that isn't so involved with the oil business.
I won't argue that it won't catch on with the general public but then my opinion of the general public is that they're complete morons. If a car is sexy then these morons won't care if it's an EV. Produce such an EV and people will buy them.
True, but as the stations tend to have a bit more centralized behavior I think it'd be easier to set a standard from them. Also to a gasmart an extra $5k investment isn't really much to risk.
My own feeling is that a non-profit group should make a deal with the government to put such EV refueling stations at all state rest stops. That'd be enough to give things a push I think. I'm not sure if there are enough interested people to sponsor a not-for-profit approach such as that everywhere but I bet we could manage it in certain areas.. such as around Silicon Valley.
Even electricty generated from the same old nasty stuff (coal, etc) is more effecient than a gasoline powered car. That includes the loss in transmission. It's also a lot easier to generate electricity from renewable sources than it is to generate gasoline.
:)
The main problem with EV's is that battery's are heavy and fairly expesnsive. They aren't especially bad for the enviroment because they are almost 100% recycled. Refueling could be made as easy and quick as refueling a gasoline powered car (probably quicker actually) but obviously you'd have to get a large chain of gas stations to do it or it isn't going to work for most people.
Even without being subsidized an EV isn't much different in price than a regular car. You have a much more simplified system which makes it overall cheaper. The batteries bring the cost back up to be about the same. I think you'd find the TCO lower though because usually EV's are much cheaper to maintain and have lower insurance rates. Of course if you're a real renewabe wacko (like me) you can build a renewable charging station at home which frees you from most of the cost of refueling as long as you don't go on road trips.