I think the idea is that, with a smart meter, the utility can tell when you consume that power, and what the incremental steps are. For example, you could probably figure out when the occupants wake up, go to bed, turn on the computer, turn on the TV, turn on your marijuana grow lights, etc. The article lists some other things such as "whether someone uses a specific medical device or baby monitor" that I find somewhat dubious, but within the realm of possibility, especially if they have a particularly unique way of using power (the wattage used, and the duty cycle, for example - more likely with a medical device than a baby monitor, though).
That said, it's not a reason to not adopt the technology, which can bring a wide variety of benefits, as you mention. It *is* a reason to pass legislation to control who can access that data and under what circumstances, if you feel that it is likely to be mishandled.
I agree, to a certain extent - I never buy RAM or storage from Apple either. But it is certainly true that soldering it on saves a fair amount of space (and a little weight) in a very tight design - and at least the SSD is socketed, so somebody can reverse-engineer it and make a custom replacement, as has been done for the MacBook Air.
I also found it interesting that Apple seems to effectively be charging less for the same RAM/storage options on the Retina MacBook Pro; if you upgrade the non-Retina one to the same 8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD that the base Retina model has, you're already paying $200 more than the base Retina model - and you're not getting the fancy new screen. All other specs are substantially the same (gain a Thunderbolt port, lose a FireWire 800 port, gain an HDMI port, lose an audio in port). And of course, if you compare it to the non-retina high-res screen version of the 15", add an extra $100 for that upgrade too.
The 2.6 GHz version is similar; upgrade the drive from a 750 GB HD to a 512 GB SSD, and you're already paying $300 more for the low-res 15" model than the retina one.
So they seem to be gouging less for these models than they do elsewhere in the product lineup.
I think it's because, like most laptops Apple has made recently, they're blowers. A long time ago (like 2001 or 2002), they used a traditional fan, where air comes in one side and goes straight through out the other - to fit it, they angled it at 30 degrees or so inside the laptop. Since then, they've mostly been using blowers, where air comes in at the center of one side, but is then blown out at a 90-degree angle, off the ends of the blades. They make these much larger, which lets them run at lower RPMs while moving the same amount of air, meaning they're quieter and sound less like a mosquito. The plastic shroud keeps the air from blowing out in all directions, and directs it out the back of the computer.
It looks like the airflow in there is designed to enter near the battery (you can see ducts on what I believe are the speakers), cruise over the logic board, enter at the exposed center part of the blowers, and exit out the back on the sides, through some heat sink fins connected to a heat pipe that goes over the CPU and GPU. Some air also enters through the middle back, to go over the top of the RAM.
For the Retina MacBook Pro, it's actually $199; $129 is for the MacBook, or the normal 13/15-inch MacBook Pro. (The 17" MacBook Pro battery replacement is $179.)
That said, the price isn't far off other manufacturers' discrete battery prices; Dell's prices for similarly-sized batteries range from $146 for their cheapest 90 Wh 9-cell battery (for certain Inspiron models), to $300 for a 97 Wh 9-cell extended battery that covers the whole bottom of a Latitude, with most 90 Wh batteries at about the $170 price point. Compared to that Latitude one, $199 isn't such a bad deal for a 95 Wh battery...
Sure, there are some downsides to this, and not everybody wants cloud gaming - on the other hand, there are a lot of benefits. For example, you don't need to upgrade your graphics card every few years to play the latest games with the best quality settings. Consoles could keep up with state-of-the-art graphics, and PC games that arrive late in the console cycle won't be dumbed down so that they look the same between the PC and consoles. Going to a LAN party? Leave your desktop at home; bring a small portable device (say a phone, tablet, or ultrabook), a controller, and maybe a display - or just plug a controller straight into a TV, for that matter. Find an awesome new game? Tell your friends, and in under two minutes, they're playing it with you. No need to download it, or go to the store to buy it. Like Mac OS X, but you're a gamer? No need to have two computers (one for gaming, one for other use), or reboot into Boot Camp. Or more generally, no need to worry about whether the awesome new game is available on iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, Windows, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, etc. - use it on whichever one you prefer. And use it on different platforms at different times, without having to buy it again.
There will always be a market for buying physical copies of games so that you own them; you can still rent and buy DVDs in person, despite Netflix's best efforts (and huge success) with DVDs-by-mail and streaming video. But it does have the potential to disrupt the market, and introduce some new concepts and business models that just aren't possible otherwise.
OK, I was playing fast and loose with my English. I should have said that "there is a positive correlation between voltage and power and energy" or something to similar effect. As opposed to no correlation (or a negative one).
In any case, at least for a lot of signaling types, P=V^2/R doesn't matter, because R is approximately infinity. What matters more is charging and discharging the capacitance of the traces on the PCB, etc., so E=1/2*C*V^2 is the quantity of interest. With memory, this can vary, as there may be termination (e.g. a resistor to ground or some reference voltage), but that depends on the type of memory as well as the specific implementation.
More importantly, energy to accomplish a particular task is what really matters. Though usually, we're just given average or typical power numbers. But your mobile device's battery stores energy, not power or potential.
At least the voltage is proportional to power and energy...
I should say not, given that the photo of the plug at the top of the article would obviously never fit into the photo of the socket halfway down. The accompanying plug photo in the second photo may not have the same problem (at least the two parts of the plugs don't protrude different amounts). Anyway, graphic designer fail.
And, for a less-superficial observation, who's going to want to open two port covers on opposite corners of the socket, especially given that both are likely to be spring-loaded? You're gonna need three hands to plug the car in! Let's hope those were subject to the artist's wild imagination as well.
I've seen similar figures, and yes, they include the battery (which isn't necessarily Li-Ion; hybrids tend to use NiMH because of the lower cost, while electrics need to use Li-Ion for the the better energy storage per pound, in order to keep the vehicle at a reasonable weight).
Probably written by somebody that missed the same article when it was first written. I remember reading this in the newspaper long before I could drive, probably early 1990s when airbags were just becoming popular. I was able to find online articles dating back to 1996 on this topic.
The joke is that, being an American, I think it surely must come from the US, because, since we invented beer, and we created Guinness (read up a few levels), we probably invented Irish whiskey too. I'm just happy that other countries picked up on the whole beer thing and have started their own great microbrews that the locals love, like Foster's and Heineken.
The same thing happened with cars; out with the carburetor, in with the fuel injectors. Computers in the ignition, brakes, radio, speedometer... Repairing a car isn't like it used to be; and certainly for some things, it's just "replace module X". Similarly, for computers, you won't meet many people who will debug individual components on a motherboard, or swap controllers on a hard drive. If a module breaks, you replace it. Shrink everything down, and it all becomes a single module. Back in the day, your computer might've had separate chips for the disk controllers, memory controller, FPU, cache, CPU... These days, it's all in one. The same thing is true for tablets; there's no room for connectors, sockets, screws, snaps, etc. Glue holds it all together, and components are permanently soldered on to save the space of a plug.
Fixing electronics will probably continue to take more complex tools and more practiced technique, just as mechanics (at least, ones that are doing more than following steps in a service manual) now need to understand a lot more about many different systems.
If Apple was doing this just to screw people over, they probably could've picked a better adhesive that didn't soften with heat, or at the very least, didn't start softening until the heat destroyed the surrounding electronics. Or they could've used ultrasonic welding or some other method to hold it shut permanently.
As has been noted elsewhere, the program is not from NPR; it's from Chicago Public Media (and is distributed by Public Radio International).
And as a bonus, who do you think caught the "massive lie"? Surely it was one of the great conservative media outlets, looking for an opportunity to discredit the liberals? No, it was a correspondent from another public radio group, American Public Media.
No media group is perfect, but one that is willing to publicize their errors, admit to them, and publicly retract a story with major factual errors is far above a media outlet who regularly blurs the line between their opinion shows (that never live up to journalistic standards of truth and fact-checking) and their factual news shows (that often don't live up to journalistic standards either). And I'm not just poking at Fox here; there are outlets on both sides that are awful. Fox is just one of the biggest, worst offenders.
I think this very much is an Intel ad. I was curious, because this sounded familiar, so I looked it up. From the press release and GE's white paper, it looks like their system: Uses 25 mAs dose (75% less than standard, they say) Is ready in an hour, 100 times faster than when they started in 2006 (so 6-10x of that speedup is Moore's Law, the other 10-16x is algorithm improvement) Uses 28 quad-core Xeons
On the other hand, a GPU solution from 2 years ago: Gives a 2-4 mAs dose (97-99% less than standard, they say) Is ready in 1-2 minutes, 100 times faster than contemporary CPU algorithms Uses a single GPU
Maybe it's related to the fact that it seems like such an easy problem to solve, if we just put the resources into it. We can make fully-automated factory floors with sensors so that the robots don't trample each other or the humans - so just apply the same techniques to the highways. There's finally a few companies really working on this (probably in large part due to the DARPA Grand Challenge), though they're doing it the computationally hard way (assume the roads don't change - no extra guides, no communication between cars, no communication from traffic lights).
So since nobody's invested the resources yet, we try to look for reasons to explain why. The legal one is by far the most plausible and understandable, as opposed to some insurmountable technical reason that would probably be difficult to explain. It also resonates the best, considering most of the American public is well aware of the frequency of frivolous lawsuits, and anxiously awaits the day when they get to benefit from one themselves.
I'll grant you this: I expect *somebody* will need to replace their hybrid battery at 10 to 12 years. Is that an average time? Certainly not. For examples to the contrary, how about 350,000 and 500,000 km before battery replacement on some Australian taxis (the only two battery replacements in the country as of the date of the article)? And of course, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", so here's some statistics: The first-generation Prius had a failure rate of about 1% post-warranty; they were sold in the US from 2001-2003. The second-gen Prius had a failure rate of 0.003%, probably helped by improved design after Toyota's experience on the 1st gen, and it being a newer car. Similarly, Honda reports a failure rate of 0.2%.
My hybrid has a 10-year/150,000-mile warranty on the battery. You can bet that if the failure rate were above a couple percent by 10 years, they wouldn't be able to provide that warranty economically.
The battery is not like your electric razor or computer, where the battery dies after a few years. They put huge amounts of engineering and testing into these things; for example, the Prius only uses about 40% of its total battery capacity - when it says "full" on the gauge, the battery is 80% charged. When it says "empty", the battery is 40% charged. By doing this, they get hundreds of thousands or millions of cycles on the battery during its lifetime. And most of the time, a "charge cycle" is just a few percent of the battery's full capacity (e.g., accelerating from a stoplight discharges it a percent or two, then stopping several blocks later puts a percent or two back in).
Yes, a few unlucky people will have to replace their battery. But the total maintenance cost is about the same as any other vehicle. In fact, my regular maintenance is quite a bit lower than most; I change my oil once a year/10k miles. Every three years/30k, I replace the air filter. And at 10 years/100k, the coolant needs to be replaced. That's pretty much it; everything else is just the "visually inspect" or "adjust fluid levels if necessary" type stuff.
Hybrids are all the rage. But they really aren't that green. Batteries use metals that can be difficult to obtain and energy intensive to produce. They take far too long to recharge. And then they don't last. Pure electric would be the way to go if we had decent batteries, by which I mean batteries that approach the convenience of the humble gas tank. So we have this hybrid approach which uses both gas and electricity in combination. And it still needs a bit of battery capacity. All the expense, trouble and weight of both kinds of drive in one package!
As if battery troubles aren't bad enough, a conventional gas powered direct drive vehicle is quite capable of beating the fuel economy of a hybrid. There's lots of low hanging fruit that manufacturers are still ignoring. They are finally improving transmissions, putting in more gears and dumping that huge, huge waste of gas known as the torque converter. Took them long enough, and there's plenty more. Aerodynamics could so easily be much better. Instant on/off for the gas engine would save big time, and erase the one big advantage hybrids do have: the better city fuel economy. Put up with bad batteries, and then not even get better fuel economy?!
There's so much hybrid misinformation and hate out there... The NiMH batteries are highly recyclable and are very reliable (my hybrid has a 10-year/150,000-mile warranty on the battery). Yes, a car that you plan to keep for 20 years is likely to need a battery replacement; these are often taken from totaled vehicles at a significantly reduced cost compared to a new battery, and total costs are no more expensive than the expected maintenance for a non-hybrid of similar age.
Plug-in hybrids are great, because you can charge them whenever you have the opportunity, but you don't need to. The Prius plug-in can be recharged in under 3 hours from a regular 120V outlet, or in 90 minutes from a 240-volt outlet. And if you can't recharge, you still get 50 mpg. Obviously, plug-ins with a longer range need longer to recharge. Pure EVs are good for some people, but not all. They're often a reasonable choice for a family's second car, so they still have one car that can be used for road trips. Alternately, some people realize that the frequency of needing to drive 100+ miles at a time is low enough that they can just rent a car.
If a conventional commercial gas vehicle can beat a commercial hybrid, why don't they? Instant on/off is a start, sure, but doesn't buy a huge amount of fuel economy. It also requires a beefier 12V battery and a bigger alternator/starter motor. On a hybrid, there doesn't have to be a separate alternator/starter motor; it can just use the same electric motor it uses for propulsion. And city economy isn't just bad because of idling; a huge amount of energy is wasted in braking. How often do you accelerate from a red light, just in time to hit the next red light? In my area, because the lights are not timed, that happens to me all the time. Timing the lights to each other would help, but is impossible to do on every street. Most cities do it on one or two major roads (I've heard all of San Francisco has only 6 timed streets). So any time you brake, you're wasting huge amounts of energy, unless you can recover that somehow. That's what hybrids do.
Hybrids aren't perfect, but given today's technology, they're often one of the better choices. When the day comes that vehicles can all drive themselves (and be programmed to do so efficiently, and communicate with each other), it would be very possible to make a conventional vehicle that meets the current economy of hybrids, and we can revisit this topic.
We chose to live where we are within 2 miles of most of our daily trips. Our kids can walk to school until they graduate high school. We go to the local rec center rather than drive across town.
The problem is that most Americans want to live in the exurbs in large homes outside of the cities, and then bitch and moan about "killer commutes" and high price of gas. Give up that fancy home 30 miles outside of town, and buy an older home in the City center where things are within walking distance.
This.
$5/gallon gas? That's an outrage! Something must be done! It'll increase my monthly gas bill by... $10? Never mind.
And the jab at the Prius was only an observation, and wasn't even analyzed to see if it was statistically significant (which means it probably wasn't...). And it certainly wasn't "regardless of their wealth", since the type of vehicle was their only observation of the drivers' wealth in the first place!
That sentence just sounds like the editor/author said "hey, this'll make a great contentious point that'll get us lots of page views!" And thus, they picked out the most insignificant sentence of the whole research paper to use in the article.
Actually, I was thinking it's a variant of this; perhaps women are less confrontational, and would prefer to accept you as a friend (because let's be honest, you know they're checking Facebook regularly), and then quietly delete you a month later, with the assumption that you likely won't notice, and almost certainly won't notice any time soon. At that point, you're more likely to chalk it up to a general culling of friends, which many people do periodically, rather than an "I don't like you".
The advantage of cheapness is you can use more to buy reliability. It's what Google does with servers, for example. And, for that matter, SSDs already do it with ECC and CRC. As the reliability goes down, you just add more. And add some extra capacity too - that helps with both wear leveling and provides spare blocks for when they start failing. And for storage, it's really easy to swap in a spare. In many applications (RAM, cache, etc.), there are a few extra rows of storage to tolerate manufacturing defects; before the silicon is sealed inside the chip, they reprogram the spare rows to replace any broken ones. Techniques like this are not unknown, and as it becomes a bigger problem, solutions will be developed.
That's not to say that something else won't come along that's better than SSD; that may happen too. But just because we hit a frequency wall around the time of the Pentium 4 doesn't mean that Intel stopped making faster CPUs. They just do it by using more transistors, not by cranking up the clock rate.
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I think the idea is that, with a smart meter, the utility can tell when you consume that power, and what the incremental steps are. For example, you could probably figure out when the occupants wake up, go to bed, turn on the computer, turn on the TV, turn on your marijuana grow lights, etc. The article lists some other things such as "whether someone uses a specific medical device or baby monitor" that I find somewhat dubious, but within the realm of possibility, especially if they have a particularly unique way of using power (the wattage used, and the duty cycle, for example - more likely with a medical device than a baby monitor, though).
That said, it's not a reason to not adopt the technology, which can bring a wide variety of benefits, as you mention. It *is* a reason to pass legislation to control who can access that data and under what circumstances, if you feel that it is likely to be mishandled.
I agree, to a certain extent - I never buy RAM or storage from Apple either. But it is certainly true that soldering it on saves a fair amount of space (and a little weight) in a very tight design - and at least the SSD is socketed, so somebody can reverse-engineer it and make a custom replacement, as has been done for the MacBook Air.
I also found it interesting that Apple seems to effectively be charging less for the same RAM/storage options on the Retina MacBook Pro; if you upgrade the non-Retina one to the same 8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD that the base Retina model has, you're already paying $200 more than the base Retina model - and you're not getting the fancy new screen. All other specs are substantially the same (gain a Thunderbolt port, lose a FireWire 800 port, gain an HDMI port, lose an audio in port). And of course, if you compare it to the non-retina high-res screen version of the 15", add an extra $100 for that upgrade too.
The 2.6 GHz version is similar; upgrade the drive from a 750 GB HD to a 512 GB SSD, and you're already paying $300 more for the low-res 15" model than the retina one.
So they seem to be gouging less for these models than they do elsewhere in the product lineup.
I wonder why the fans are enclosed in plastic shrouds? http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/macbook-pro-retina-display-innards-labelled.jpg
I think it's because, like most laptops Apple has made recently, they're blowers. A long time ago (like 2001 or 2002), they used a traditional fan, where air comes in one side and goes straight through out the other - to fit it, they angled it at 30 degrees or so inside the laptop. Since then, they've mostly been using blowers, where air comes in at the center of one side, but is then blown out at a 90-degree angle, off the ends of the blades. They make these much larger, which lets them run at lower RPMs while moving the same amount of air, meaning they're quieter and sound less like a mosquito. The plastic shroud keeps the air from blowing out in all directions, and directs it out the back of the computer.
It looks like the airflow in there is designed to enter near the battery (you can see ducts on what I believe are the speakers), cruise over the logic board, enter at the exposed center part of the blowers, and exit out the back on the sides, through some heat sink fins connected to a heat pipe that goes over the CPU and GPU. Some air also enters through the middle back, to go over the top of the RAM.
For the Retina MacBook Pro, it's actually $199; $129 is for the MacBook, or the normal 13/15-inch MacBook Pro. (The 17" MacBook Pro battery replacement is $179.)
That said, the price isn't far off other manufacturers' discrete battery prices; Dell's prices for similarly-sized batteries range from $146 for their cheapest 90 Wh 9-cell battery (for certain Inspiron models), to $300 for a 97 Wh 9-cell extended battery that covers the whole bottom of a Latitude, with most 90 Wh batteries at about the $170 price point. Compared to that Latitude one, $199 isn't such a bad deal for a 95 Wh battery...
Sure, there are some downsides to this, and not everybody wants cloud gaming - on the other hand, there are a lot of benefits. For example, you don't need to upgrade your graphics card every few years to play the latest games with the best quality settings. Consoles could keep up with state-of-the-art graphics, and PC games that arrive late in the console cycle won't be dumbed down so that they look the same between the PC and consoles. Going to a LAN party? Leave your desktop at home; bring a small portable device (say a phone, tablet, or ultrabook), a controller, and maybe a display - or just plug a controller straight into a TV, for that matter. Find an awesome new game? Tell your friends, and in under two minutes, they're playing it with you. No need to download it, or go to the store to buy it. Like Mac OS X, but you're a gamer? No need to have two computers (one for gaming, one for other use), or reboot into Boot Camp. Or more generally, no need to worry about whether the awesome new game is available on iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, Windows, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, etc. - use it on whichever one you prefer. And use it on different platforms at different times, without having to buy it again.
There will always be a market for buying physical copies of games so that you own them; you can still rent and buy DVDs in person, despite Netflix's best efforts (and huge success) with DVDs-by-mail and streaming video. But it does have the potential to disrupt the market, and introduce some new concepts and business models that just aren't possible otherwise.
OK, I was playing fast and loose with my English. I should have said that "there is a positive correlation between voltage and power and energy" or something to similar effect. As opposed to no correlation (or a negative one).
In any case, at least for a lot of signaling types, P=V^2/R doesn't matter, because R is approximately infinity. What matters more is charging and discharging the capacitance of the traces on the PCB, etc., so E=1/2*C*V^2 is the quantity of interest. With memory, this can vary, as there may be termination (e.g. a resistor to ground or some reference voltage), but that depends on the type of memory as well as the specific implementation.
Volts are not a measure of power. Watts are.
More importantly, energy to accomplish a particular task is what really matters. Though usually, we're just given average or typical power numbers. But your mobile device's battery stores energy, not power or potential.
At least the voltage is proportional to power and energy...
...says the article.
I should say not, given that the photo of the plug at the top of the article would obviously never fit into the photo of the socket halfway down. The accompanying plug photo in the second photo may not have the same problem (at least the two parts of the plugs don't protrude different amounts). Anyway, graphic designer fail.
And, for a less-superficial observation, who's going to want to open two port covers on opposite corners of the socket, especially given that both are likely to be spring-loaded? You're gonna need three hands to plug the car in! Let's hope those were subject to the artist's wild imagination as well.
I've seen similar figures, and yes, they include the battery (which isn't necessarily Li-Ion; hybrids tend to use NiMH because of the lower cost, while electrics need to use Li-Ion for the the better energy storage per pound, in order to keep the vehicle at a reasonable weight).
Probably written by somebody that missed the same article when it was first written. I remember reading this in the newspaper long before I could drive, probably early 1990s when airbags were just becoming popular. I was able to find online articles dating back to 1996 on this topic.
I tried the 10 and 2 positioning once, but I couldn't get my knees that high.
Sigh. I thought that joke should have been obvious. Hell, if you think anything in that whole sentence was serious...
The joke is that, being an American, I think it surely must come from the US, because, since we invented beer, and we created Guinness (read up a few levels), we probably invented Irish whiskey too. I'm just happy that other countries picked up on the whole beer thing and have started their own great microbrews that the locals love, like Foster's and Heineken.
Noooo! They shipped Jameson's overseas too? Does anybody know where I can get a good domestic Irish whiskey in the US?
The same thing happened with cars; out with the carburetor, in with the fuel injectors. Computers in the ignition, brakes, radio, speedometer... Repairing a car isn't like it used to be; and certainly for some things, it's just "replace module X". Similarly, for computers, you won't meet many people who will debug individual components on a motherboard, or swap controllers on a hard drive. If a module breaks, you replace it. Shrink everything down, and it all becomes a single module. Back in the day, your computer might've had separate chips for the disk controllers, memory controller, FPU, cache, CPU... These days, it's all in one. The same thing is true for tablets; there's no room for connectors, sockets, screws, snaps, etc. Glue holds it all together, and components are permanently soldered on to save the space of a plug.
Fixing electronics will probably continue to take more complex tools and more practiced technique, just as mechanics (at least, ones that are doing more than following steps in a service manual) now need to understand a lot more about many different systems.
If Apple was doing this just to screw people over, they probably could've picked a better adhesive that didn't soften with heat, or at the very least, didn't start softening until the heat destroyed the surrounding electronics. Or they could've used ultrasonic welding or some other method to hold it shut permanently.
As has been noted elsewhere, the program is not from NPR; it's from Chicago Public Media (and is distributed by Public Radio International).
And as a bonus, who do you think caught the "massive lie"? Surely it was one of the great conservative media outlets, looking for an opportunity to discredit the liberals? No, it was a correspondent from another public radio group, American Public Media.
No media group is perfect, but one that is willing to publicize their errors, admit to them, and publicly retract a story with major factual errors is far above a media outlet who regularly blurs the line between their opinion shows (that never live up to journalistic standards of truth and fact-checking) and their factual news shows (that often don't live up to journalistic standards either). And I'm not just poking at Fox here; there are outlets on both sides that are awful. Fox is just one of the biggest, worst offenders.
I think this very much is an Intel ad. I was curious, because this sounded familiar, so I looked it up. From the press release and GE's white paper, it looks like their system:
Uses 25 mAs dose (75% less than standard, they say)
Is ready in an hour, 100 times faster than when they started in 2006 (so 6-10x of that speedup is Moore's Law, the other 10-16x is algorithm improvement)
Uses 28 quad-core Xeons
On the other hand, a GPU solution from 2 years ago:
Gives a 2-4 mAs dose (97-99% less than standard, they say)
Is ready in 1-2 minutes, 100 times faster than contemporary CPU algorithms
Uses a single GPU
Better, faster, cheaper... Pick three.
Maybe it's related to the fact that it seems like such an easy problem to solve, if we just put the resources into it. We can make fully-automated factory floors with sensors so that the robots don't trample each other or the humans - so just apply the same techniques to the highways. There's finally a few companies really working on this (probably in large part due to the DARPA Grand Challenge), though they're doing it the computationally hard way (assume the roads don't change - no extra guides, no communication between cars, no communication from traffic lights).
So since nobody's invested the resources yet, we try to look for reasons to explain why. The legal one is by far the most plausible and understandable, as opposed to some insurmountable technical reason that would probably be difficult to explain. It also resonates the best, considering most of the American public is well aware of the frequency of frivolous lawsuits, and anxiously awaits the day when they get to benefit from one themselves.
Expected replacement? What are you smoking?
I'll grant you this: I expect *somebody* will need to replace their hybrid battery at 10 to 12 years. Is that an average time? Certainly not. For examples to the contrary, how about 350,000 and 500,000 km before battery replacement on some Australian taxis (the only two battery replacements in the country as of the date of the article)? And of course, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", so here's some statistics: The first-generation Prius had a failure rate of about 1% post-warranty; they were sold in the US from 2001-2003. The second-gen Prius had a failure rate of 0.003%, probably helped by improved design after Toyota's experience on the 1st gen, and it being a newer car. Similarly, Honda reports a failure rate of 0.2%.
My hybrid has a 10-year/150,000-mile warranty on the battery. You can bet that if the failure rate were above a couple percent by 10 years, they wouldn't be able to provide that warranty economically.
The battery is not like your electric razor or computer, where the battery dies after a few years. They put huge amounts of engineering and testing into these things; for example, the Prius only uses about 40% of its total battery capacity - when it says "full" on the gauge, the battery is 80% charged. When it says "empty", the battery is 40% charged. By doing this, they get hundreds of thousands or millions of cycles on the battery during its lifetime. And most of the time, a "charge cycle" is just a few percent of the battery's full capacity (e.g., accelerating from a stoplight discharges it a percent or two, then stopping several blocks later puts a percent or two back in).
Yes, a few unlucky people will have to replace their battery. But the total maintenance cost is about the same as any other vehicle. In fact, my regular maintenance is quite a bit lower than most; I change my oil once a year/10k miles. Every three years/30k, I replace the air filter. And at 10 years/100k, the coolant needs to be replaced. That's pretty much it; everything else is just the "visually inspect" or "adjust fluid levels if necessary" type stuff.
Hybrids are all the rage. But they really aren't that green. Batteries use metals that can be difficult to obtain and energy intensive to produce. They take far too long to recharge. And then they don't last. Pure electric would be the way to go if we had decent batteries, by which I mean batteries that approach the convenience of the humble gas tank. So we have this hybrid approach which uses both gas and electricity in combination. And it still needs a bit of battery capacity. All the expense, trouble and weight of both kinds of drive in one package!
As if battery troubles aren't bad enough, a conventional gas powered direct drive vehicle is quite capable of beating the fuel economy of a hybrid. There's lots of low hanging fruit that manufacturers are still ignoring. They are finally improving transmissions, putting in more gears and dumping that huge, huge waste of gas known as the torque converter. Took them long enough, and there's plenty more. Aerodynamics could so easily be much better. Instant on/off for the gas engine would save big time, and erase the one big advantage hybrids do have: the better city fuel economy. Put up with bad batteries, and then not even get better fuel economy?!
There's so much hybrid misinformation and hate out there...
The NiMH batteries are highly recyclable and are very reliable (my hybrid has a 10-year/150,000-mile warranty on the battery). Yes, a car that you plan to keep for 20 years is likely to need a battery replacement; these are often taken from totaled vehicles at a significantly reduced cost compared to a new battery, and total costs are no more expensive than the expected maintenance for a non-hybrid of similar age.
Plug-in hybrids are great, because you can charge them whenever you have the opportunity, but you don't need to. The Prius plug-in can be recharged in under 3 hours from a regular 120V outlet, or in 90 minutes from a 240-volt outlet. And if you can't recharge, you still get 50 mpg. Obviously, plug-ins with a longer range need longer to recharge. Pure EVs are good for some people, but not all. They're often a reasonable choice for a family's second car, so they still have one car that can be used for road trips. Alternately, some people realize that the frequency of needing to drive 100+ miles at a time is low enough that they can just rent a car.
If a conventional commercial gas vehicle can beat a commercial hybrid, why don't they? Instant on/off is a start, sure, but doesn't buy a huge amount of fuel economy. It also requires a beefier 12V battery and a bigger alternator/starter motor. On a hybrid, there doesn't have to be a separate alternator/starter motor; it can just use the same electric motor it uses for propulsion. And city economy isn't just bad because of idling; a huge amount of energy is wasted in braking. How often do you accelerate from a red light, just in time to hit the next red light? In my area, because the lights are not timed, that happens to me all the time. Timing the lights to each other would help, but is impossible to do on every street. Most cities do it on one or two major roads (I've heard all of San Francisco has only 6 timed streets). So any time you brake, you're wasting huge amounts of energy, unless you can recover that somehow. That's what hybrids do.
Hybrids aren't perfect, but given today's technology, they're often one of the better choices. When the day comes that vehicles can all drive themselves (and be programmed to do so efficiently, and communicate with each other), it would be very possible to make a conventional vehicle that meets the current economy of hybrids, and we can revisit this topic.
We chose to live where we are within 2 miles of most of our daily trips. Our kids can walk to school until they graduate high school. We go to the local rec center rather than drive across town.
The problem is that most Americans want to live in the exurbs in large homes outside of the cities, and then bitch and moan about "killer commutes" and high price of gas. Give up that fancy home 30 miles outside of town, and buy an older home in the City center where things are within walking distance.
This.
$5/gallon gas? That's an outrage! Something must be done! It'll increase my monthly gas bill by... $10? Never mind.
Add a big lens hood and it works even better.
+1 to this.
And the jab at the Prius was only an observation, and wasn't even analyzed to see if it was statistically significant (which means it probably wasn't...). And it certainly wasn't "regardless of their wealth", since the type of vehicle was their only observation of the drivers' wealth in the first place!
That sentence just sounds like the editor/author said "hey, this'll make a great contentious point that'll get us lots of page views!" And thus, they picked out the most insignificant sentence of the whole research paper to use in the article.
Actually, I was thinking it's a variant of this; perhaps women are less confrontational, and would prefer to accept you as a friend (because let's be honest, you know they're checking Facebook regularly), and then quietly delete you a month later, with the assumption that you likely won't notice, and almost certainly won't notice any time soon. At that point, you're more likely to chalk it up to a general culling of friends, which many people do periodically, rather than an "I don't like you".
The advantage of cheapness is you can use more to buy reliability. It's what Google does with servers, for example. And, for that matter, SSDs already do it with ECC and CRC. As the reliability goes down, you just add more. And add some extra capacity too - that helps with both wear leveling and provides spare blocks for when they start failing. And for storage, it's really easy to swap in a spare. In many applications (RAM, cache, etc.), there are a few extra rows of storage to tolerate manufacturing defects; before the silicon is sealed inside the chip, they reprogram the spare rows to replace any broken ones. Techniques like this are not unknown, and as it becomes a bigger problem, solutions will be developed.
That's not to say that something else won't come along that's better than SSD; that may happen too. But just because we hit a frequency wall around the time of the Pentium 4 doesn't mean that Intel stopped making faster CPUs. They just do it by using more transistors, not by cranking up the clock rate.