GPU performance is interesting, I guess, but it's interesting for different reasons to me than it seems to be for you:
I, for one, am not surprised that PowerVR is doing better in this sector than nVidia, with the former having lost all relevance in the desktop and portable market, and the latter having spent the past few years trying to beat up ATI/AMD as top dog on the desktop. That PowerVR has a superior low-performance offering is really not very interesting.
What is interesting is that people think that it matters. I've never downloaded and used a "3D" app on my Droid other than Google Earth, whereas I've played both Doom and Madden on my iPod Touch 1g with good results.
In my experience, 3D apps/games on Android are few and far between.
And, FWIW, Google Earth is more responsive on that ancient iPod than it is on my overclocked Droid.
Funny as it seems, but overclocking could sometime save battery life as it could alter the default voltage usage of a particular frequency. At least, this is the case of Nokia N900 with Titan's Kernel Power, where we could choose 'starving' profile for overclocking with less voltage than default. Say it can run at almost half as much voltage at 600Mhz than normal. (fyi. N900 can be overclocked to 1.15GHz max. with Kernel Power)
That's not necessarily overclocking -- see also, undervolting or even underclocking.
On my Droid 1, I do all three: It runs at, IIRC, 1GHz, some of the time. Its lowest clock speed is 125MHz, where it spends most of its time (half of the default lowest rate of 250MHz). And all of these speeds are at lower voltage than default.
In the end, it's about a wash: I get a faster device for about the same battery life as I had at stock clocks. Heat generation is about the same, by my estimation, in common use.
None of this is particularly new: I have a fanless, diskless K6-2 350 that gets used for some realtime audio processing tasks using KX audio drivers. It is equipped with a big heatsink, clocked down to 200MHz, and running at low voltage. The hard drive is a CF card on an IDE bus.
It's stable as a champ, doesn't make a peep, and never gets too warm. (These days there's better options for that sort of work, with Atom and SSD, but it was the best I could come up with back then, and it still works just as well today as it did then.)
Especially as most people convicted aren't actually punished anyway. What's the point in using expensive technology to catch a thief then just giving him a small fine or a caution?
What's the point of giving petty* thieves more than a small fine or a caution upon conviction?
Should everyone, no matter how minor or severe the infraction, be sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, where they get to make big rocks into little rocks until they die and get buried under a small white cross across the way from their cell?
Should the presence of video evidence, or the lack thereof, contribute to such sentencing? Or perhaps more importantly: Should the expense of such video evidence be a factor in the sentencing?
Discuss.
*: I wanted to use the word "minor" there, as in "minor infraction." But that might be confused with "minors," so I didn't use that word. "Petty" is the best I could come up with, though it doesn't quite fit either, but at the same time I wanted to be concise. In a twist of irony, in the course failing to conjure a better adjective than "minor" for the sake of being concise, it seems that this footnote has eliminated all concision in an attempt to explain my choice of words lest they be misconstrued by the pedants here (of which I am one). Bummer.
While I think that you are technically correct, and I thank for for introducing me to the term "Zombie Brand" (which is a concept that I had been recognizing for many years, but about which I had not had any success in succinctly surmising in any meaningful sense).
I don't know that Memorex is the best example (post-Ford Jaguar seems like a much more likely candidate), but at least now I know how to describe the phenomenon.
Tracks in the States tend to be welded, as well, unless it's a particularly old line that isn't frequently used. Our lines are not generally fenced -- generally, not at all. And, as you say, trains move relatively slowly here (generally 55MPH, IIRC).
But our trains are LOUD. Huge diesel-electric locomotives, sometimes three or four of them, all grunting along and pulling enormous quantities of cars. Our signalling system is antique in design, relying on physical gaps in the track to trigger things like crossing gates as train wheels roll over them and conductively bridge them, contributing to the loud. Our expansion joints might be a bit tapered, but it seems as if any tapering is simply the result of it being hammered down by the onslaught of heavy steel wheels, and they are therefore also quite loud. And nevermind the horns, which are hurtfully loud at close range and can be felt in the chest. Or the bright flashing light which can be blinding at absurdly-long distances. The combination of all of it makes the earth shake and the pant-legs vibrate.
Most of our car-train accidents seem to occur in rural areas where the crossing has no electric signals or gates, and folks just get complacent and don't even bother to look for a train, let alone roll down a window and listen for one, or even slow down. "Ah, nobody ever uses this line anymore... I haven't seen a train out here for years." *squish*
The only pedestrian-train accident around here that I'm aware of, recently, involved a kid getting his leg caught in a moving switch, only to be squished a short time later.
(We'd rely on schedules to justify our stupidity instead, as you say is done over there, but our trains are seldom very regular. I guess the mentality of the squished is similar, though.)
It must be nice to have quiet trains, and it does sound like a lovely bit of engineering, but I've lived relatively close to railroads for most of my life and have never been bothered by the noise. I've also walked railroads, sometimes for tens of miles at a stretch, and have never been surprised by a train (though I've encountered plenty) -- I find that they're detectable well in advance, even with headphones on, both day and night.
Whatever the case, I'd rather have loud trains than dead people.
Who is saying that this chunk of 700MHz is going to be used only for mobile devices? I guess it's strongly implied because it's "AT&T," who we all know and hate as the only GSM provider in the States that is worth anything at all, but certainly you're aware that they do a lot more than offer cellular service.
Much of rural America is still limited to v.34 dialup -- and sometimes, not even that.
For fixed installations, directional antennas work just fine. The user doesn't even have to know where to point it, since it's easy to train an installer to take care of that on the user's behalf.
(Disclaimer: I am sometimes involved with an outfit doing just this in the 700MHz band, using (of all things) DOCSIS modems. It works far better than I ever expected it to, and it is profitable.)
Except for areas with very low population density, long-range data access is not practical when a great deal of bandwidth is needed. The bandwidth basically has to be divided among the active users in the area covered. The area covered goes up with the square of the distance so the number of users would climb rapidly as range goes up.
For as insightful as you seem to be, you seem to have never learned about directional antennas, or at least have never applied the idea in this context.
Channels 52-83 were owned by TV stations for their exclusive use, and now the frequencies have been leased to a singular Cell carrier for use by that carrier's customers. How is this a bad thing? Looks like a net positive to me.
There. Fixed that for you.
(Please realize that I draw my opinion from the fact that, once upon a time, nobody owned any airwaves but the people -- and that the initial concept of outside ownership was a transfer of rights from the people to corporations, not between corporations. They are inherently our airwaves, not those of whom are represented by a stock ticker.)
Bandwith is limited so you want to use low power close to the user.
Your statement is absolutely true.
But bandwidth is (by definition) limited in any band. It is better to use those bands which are actually good at traversing long distances to traverse long distances, than to use those same bands to traverse short distances when other bands could perform the same job more efficiently.
. Create a new Internet startup, use only FOSS (PHP/Java/Python, etc. for infra, OpenOffice/Google Office for documents, etc.).
Have it in the company culture from the beginning. And you don't have weird legacy VBA scripts or XLS to deal with.
Or any scripting at all that's worth scripting, for that matter. Your argument implies that we either be programmers, or that we turn back to manual tabulation.
An Excel sheet that performs its job properly is far better than the Python script that never got written.
And this, friends, represents the end of the glory that should have been the giant swaths of 700MHz spectrum which were liberated as part of the move from NTSC to ATSC.
Why design a completely separate UI for the occasional split-screen battle (or quad-view Goldeneye session) when you can just create one dedicated single-user networked multiplayer mode that doesn't suck?
The current aspect ratio of TVs isn't helping things much, either: Splitting a 4:3 screen horizontally seems like it was way more useful, way back when, than splitting a 16:9 screen vertically does today, even with 1920x1080 available to play with.
And, of course, PC games have been this way for ages (one computer and display per concurrent player). I'm not aware of any two-person FPS PC games which use a split-screen method, even though Windows has supported multiple input devices for an eternity. In fact, the only PC games I can think of which involved two or more players on one system were all turn-based.
Impressive moderation: Underrated, Funny, and Overrated*2, with the comment finally landing back at the default score of 2 (plus Funny).
So which is it, mods? I've had karma to burn since ya'll were shooting Cheerios in the toilet, and could care less...
But so far, exactly one person (in the month or two I've been using this sig) has signed up, and we both got 250MB of storage in the S3 cloud for it, for free.
Fun stuff. Keep modding, mods, as you decide whether my late comment to a discussion is spammy or not. It's fun to watch.
An interesting idea, and one that I've long pondered myself. It is increasingly clear to me that the Internet needs to return to being a collection of peers, for its own health and the freedom of the people who utilize it. The tech for this is gradually becoming available and useful, mostly in the form of wireless mesh networks over unlicensed airwaves -- as you've noted.
But you seem to be arguing against anonymity, or are at least displaying a lot of indifference about it. I tend to agree: Usually, I could care less about being anonymous online -- a studious researcher could easily link this old Slashdot ID back to my actual self, for instance, and it would be of little detriment to me if this were done, even though I often display a particularly callous and honest side of me here that I try hard not to display in the real world.
However, there are instances where genuine anonymity may be of great value: Researching a legal predicament, a medical issue, or (in this context) downloading pornography, along with a whole lot of other things that folks may need or want to do online, whom would be safer (or whom could be more open) if they were completely anonymous.
So, let me ask: Would it not be a good thing if it were the case that in the course of returning teh Intarwebs to their peer-based roots, that truly anonymous access were to come with it? If it were the case that it had zero technical cost vs. a non-anonymous system, would you support that?
I live in a town of about 38k people in what most city-folk would consider "rural Ohio". It's not so big. Some evenings when the weather is nice, I'll walk from one end to the other and back.
We've got two Wal-Marts, one on each side of town. They're often busy.
We've also got two Kroger stores, a Meijer, Aldies, two franchises worth of a locally-owned regional grocer (that is actually growing, and doing very well in the market), a Thai store, a Mexican store, two beer stores, a wine store, two liquor stores, and GFS. Most of these, aside from the more specialized stores toward the end of the list, are also very busy.
That's about it for food. We've also got a handful of electronics dealers (big, local, and regional), all of whom seem to be doing OK. And a whole bunch of places that sell clothes. And several pet stores, a couple of book stores, and. and. and.
I don't feel that I'm shy on available choices at all. And I find that it's often cheaper to buy food, clothes, or whatever at almost any other place than it is to do so at Wal-Mart, though I feel no shame in buying things from Wal-Mart when I find their pricing to be more agreeable.
Thanks for the breakdown. That's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to see, since nobody ever seems to discuss miles-per-dollar.
I live in Ohio. I don't know how sane our energy policy is in the grand scheme of stuff, but according to you it is very sane indeed.
Meanwhile, I take the "old Civic" route, for the most part: I drive old cars. The E36 BMW has about 183k on the clock and is a blast to drive, and maintenance has been reasonable -- I've got about $10k in the car, including purchase and repairs (including tires, brakes, oil), over 6 years. It gets OK mileage, consistently averaging about 19.5MPG. Mostly, it gets driven in town with an occasional highway stint -- 19.5MPG seems, to me, to be fairly awesome for my driving habits. It goes about 10k miles per year, and is generally* absurdly reliable.
So. Moving that BMW about 60k miles burned about 3076 gallons of premium unleaded. If we assume that it cost $3.20 per gallon, on average, then I've spent about $10k on fuel during the time I've had the car, or about $20k for fuel, maintenance, and original purchase.
Which means that it costs, so far, about $0.33 per mile to operate, or that it goes 3 miles on 1 dollar.
If a Volt costs $35,000, and gets 30 miles per dollar from the Ohio grid (and never uses the gasoline engine) then over six years and 60k miles:
$35,000 for the car, $2,000 for coal-fired electricity, and maybe another $700 in brake parts and tires (the rest, presumably, being covered by GM's warranty program), for a total of $37,700 -- or about $17,700 more than driving a fun and featureful BMW that burns dinosaurs.
Eventually, the Volt will pay for itself. But even at 10 years and 100,000 miles (assuming the BMW continues to cost $20k per 60k*), the BMW will have cost only $33k, still far less than the Volt over the same period, and I will have had more fun over that decade with the pretty-well loaded-up and easily-hackable BMW than a Chevrolet golf cart.
And, of course, after that the Volt's warranty will be gone with the wind, and it will then begin getting more expensive to operate as suspension parts need replacing, batteries age, and so on.
I don't think I'm in the market for any of these new-fangled battery-powered cars. Or, at least, I won't be until their long-term costs are actually established, and the used market for them matures and levels out.:)
*: I really don't expect that maintenance on the BMW will exceed that. All of the known weak points on the car have already been addressed, the body is in good shape, the leather is nice, and the $10k purchase+repair figure I've been working with here even includes a acquiring spare engine with half as many miles on it, along with paying someone replace the lousy 4-speed auto with a 5-speed manual. And if I ever decide to give up on the car completely, I can easily replace it with something similar, used, and maybe a bit newer for just a few $k. The window sticker from 1995 said that the list price was something like $38,000, and I'm quite happy that I'm not the loser who spent that sort of coin on a car.;)
Perceived cost: Around here, at least, diesel typically costs 10-15% more per gallon than gasoline. (Yes, I know that it's still cheaper per unit of usable energy, but the folks buying hybrids realize this.)
(Though I don't see why they don't make more diesel hybrids, instead of gas hybrids.)
Actual cost: Hybrids are already expensive. A diesel-powered hybrid would cost even more.
Perceived cost: Around here, at least, diesel typically costs 10-15% more per gallon than gasoline. (Yes, I know that it's still cheaper per unit of usable energy, but the folks buying hybrids realize this.)
Noise: A Prius is very quiet in all modes. A chattering diesel is not. (I personally don't find the modern TDI diesels to be objectionably noisy at all, but that doesn't mean that the general perception has yet changed.)
Availability of fuel: I can buy diesel in more places than I used to be able to, but it's still not everywhere that gasoline is.
Obviously, from an overall cost, simplicity, and reliability standpoint, a diesel hybrid makes perfect sense. But, currently, I don't think it would ever sell, even though I'd personally rather buy a diesel hybrid than a gas one if I were interested in hybrids at all (and I'm not).
(Warning: I live in the US. We hate diesel cars for no good reason, and the above is a brief description of the typical stereotypes in these parts. Your locale-specific stereotypes may vary.)
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GPU performance is interesting, I guess, but it's interesting for different reasons to me than it seems to be for you:
I, for one, am not surprised that PowerVR is doing better in this sector than nVidia, with the former having lost all relevance in the desktop and portable market, and the latter having spent the past few years trying to beat up ATI/AMD as top dog on the desktop. That PowerVR has a superior low-performance offering is really not very interesting.
What is interesting is that people think that it matters. I've never downloaded and used a "3D" app on my Droid other than Google Earth, whereas I've played both Doom and Madden on my iPod Touch 1g with good results.
In my experience, 3D apps/games on Android are few and far between.
And, FWIW, Google Earth is more responsive on that ancient iPod than it is on my overclocked Droid.
Funny as it seems, but overclocking could sometime save battery life as it could alter the default voltage usage of a particular frequency. At least, this is the case of Nokia N900 with Titan's Kernel Power, where we could choose 'starving' profile for overclocking with less voltage than default. Say it can run at almost half as much voltage at 600Mhz than normal. (fyi. N900 can be overclocked to 1.15GHz max. with Kernel Power)
That's not necessarily overclocking -- see also, undervolting or even underclocking.
On my Droid 1, I do all three: It runs at, IIRC, 1GHz, some of the time. Its lowest clock speed is 125MHz, where it spends most of its time (half of the default lowest rate of 250MHz). And all of these speeds are at lower voltage than default.
In the end, it's about a wash: I get a faster device for about the same battery life as I had at stock clocks. Heat generation is about the same, by my estimation, in common use.
None of this is particularly new: I have a fanless, diskless K6-2 350 that gets used for some realtime audio processing tasks using KX audio drivers. It is equipped with a big heatsink, clocked down to 200MHz, and running at low voltage. The hard drive is a CF card on an IDE bus.
It's stable as a champ, doesn't make a peep, and never gets too warm. (These days there's better options for that sort of work, with Atom and SSD, but it was the best I could come up with back then, and it still works just as well today as it did then.)
And going and doing other things (other things?) is so much more healthful.
Oh, wait. I don't get along with anyone out there than I do here. Exercise in solitude in 3..2..1...
Next!
I can't stop it.
(There! Top that!) ;)
What's the point of giving petty* thieves more than a small fine or a caution upon conviction?
Should everyone, no matter how minor or severe the infraction, be sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, where they get to make big rocks into little rocks until they die and get buried under a small white cross across the way from their cell?
Should the presence of video evidence, or the lack thereof, contribute to such sentencing? Or perhaps more importantly: Should the expense of such video evidence be a factor in the sentencing?
Discuss.
*: I wanted to use the word "minor" there, as in "minor infraction." But that might be confused with "minors," so I didn't use that word. "Petty" is the best I could come up with, though it doesn't quite fit either, but at the same time I wanted to be concise. In a twist of irony, in the course failing to conjure a better adjective than "minor" for the sake of being concise, it seems that this footnote has eliminated all concision in an attempt to explain my choice of words lest they be misconstrued by the pedants here (of which I am one). Bummer.
While I think that you are technically correct, and I thank for for introducing me to the term "Zombie Brand" (which is a concept that I had been recognizing for many years, but about which I had not had any success in succinctly surmising in any meaningful sense).
I don't know that Memorex is the best example (post-Ford Jaguar seems like a much more likely candidate), but at least now I know how to describe the phenomenon.
Tracks in the States tend to be welded, as well, unless it's a particularly old line that isn't frequently used. Our lines are not generally fenced -- generally, not at all. And, as you say, trains move relatively slowly here (generally 55MPH, IIRC).
But our trains are LOUD. Huge diesel-electric locomotives, sometimes three or four of them, all grunting along and pulling enormous quantities of cars. Our signalling system is antique in design, relying on physical gaps in the track to trigger things like crossing gates as train wheels roll over them and conductively bridge them, contributing to the loud. Our expansion joints might be a bit tapered, but it seems as if any tapering is simply the result of it being hammered down by the onslaught of heavy steel wheels, and they are therefore also quite loud. And nevermind the horns, which are hurtfully loud at close range and can be felt in the chest. Or the bright flashing light which can be blinding at absurdly-long distances. The combination of all of it makes the earth shake and the pant-legs vibrate.
Most of our car-train accidents seem to occur in rural areas where the crossing has no electric signals or gates, and folks just get complacent and don't even bother to look for a train, let alone roll down a window and listen for one, or even slow down. "Ah, nobody ever uses this line anymore... I haven't seen a train out here for years." *squish*
The only pedestrian-train accident around here that I'm aware of, recently, involved a kid getting his leg caught in a moving switch, only to be squished a short time later.
(We'd rely on schedules to justify our stupidity instead, as you say is done over there, but our trains are seldom very regular. I guess the mentality of the squished is similar, though.)
It must be nice to have quiet trains, and it does sound like a lovely bit of engineering, but I've lived relatively close to railroads for most of my life and have never been bothered by the noise. I've also walked railroads, sometimes for tens of miles at a stretch, and have never been surprised by a train (though I've encountered plenty) -- I find that they're detectable well in advance, even with headphones on, both day and night.
Whatever the case, I'd rather have loud trains than dead people.
Who is saying that this chunk of 700MHz is going to be used only for mobile devices? I guess it's strongly implied because it's "AT&T," who we all know and hate as the only GSM provider in the States that is worth anything at all, but certainly you're aware that they do a lot more than offer cellular service.
Much of rural America is still limited to v.34 dialup -- and sometimes, not even that.
For fixed installations, directional antennas work just fine. The user doesn't even have to know where to point it, since it's easy to train an installer to take care of that on the user's behalf.
(Disclaimer: I am sometimes involved with an outfit doing just this in the 700MHz band, using (of all things) DOCSIS modems. It works far better than I ever expected it to, and it is profitable.)
For as insightful as you seem to be, you seem to have never learned about directional antennas, or at least have never applied the idea in this context.
Go ahead and learn about the concept. I'll wait.
First-person shooters and real-time strategy aren't the only genres.
Who mentioned RTS? It certainly wasn't me.
Channels 52-83 were owned by TV stations for their exclusive use, and now the frequencies have been leased to a singular Cell carrier for use by that carrier's customers. How is this a bad thing? Looks like a net positive to me.
There. Fixed that for you.
(Please realize that I draw my opinion from the fact that, once upon a time, nobody owned any airwaves but the people -- and that the initial concept of outside ownership was a transfer of rights from the people to corporations, not between corporations. They are inherently our airwaves, not those of whom are represented by a stock ticker.)
Your statement is absolutely true.
But bandwidth is (by definition) limited in any band. It is better to use those bands which are actually good at traversing long distances to traverse long distances, than to use those same bands to traverse short distances when other bands could perform the same job more efficiently.
Or any scripting at all that's worth scripting, for that matter. Your argument implies that we either be programmers, or that we turn back to manual tabulation.
An Excel sheet that performs its job properly is far better than the Python script that never got written.
You gripe about spelling, but yet have no concept of paragraphical form?
I don't know if Office's electronic Grammar Nazi corrects such things or not, but if it does, you might do well to give it a shot.
Microcells?
The 700MHz band penetrates buildings and foliage better than any current cellular frequency. It's best use is for long-distance links.
1800/1900MHz would be a far better bet for an army of microcells.
And this, friends, represents the end of the glory that should have been the giant swaths of 700MHz spectrum which were liberated as part of the move from NTSC to ATSC.
RIP, dreams.
Why design a completely separate UI for the occasional split-screen battle (or quad-view Goldeneye session) when you can just create one dedicated single-user networked multiplayer mode that doesn't suck?
The current aspect ratio of TVs isn't helping things much, either: Splitting a 4:3 screen horizontally seems like it was way more useful, way back when, than splitting a 16:9 screen vertically does today, even with 1920x1080 available to play with.
And, of course, PC games have been this way for ages (one computer and display per concurrent player). I'm not aware of any two-person FPS PC games which use a split-screen method, even though Windows has supported multiple input devices for an eternity. In fact, the only PC games I can think of which involved two or more players on one system were all turn-based.
*shrug*
Impressive moderation: Underrated, Funny, and Overrated*2, with the comment finally landing back at the default score of 2 (plus Funny).
So which is it, mods? I've had karma to burn since ya'll were shooting Cheerios in the toilet, and could care less...
But so far, exactly one person (in the month or two I've been using this sig) has signed up, and we both got 250MB of storage in the S3 cloud for it, for free.
Fun stuff. Keep modding, mods, as you decide whether my late comment to a discussion is spammy or not. It's fun to watch.
An interesting idea, and one that I've long pondered myself. It is increasingly clear to me that the Internet needs to return to being a collection of peers, for its own health and the freedom of the people who utilize it. The tech for this is gradually becoming available and useful, mostly in the form of wireless mesh networks over unlicensed airwaves -- as you've noted.
But you seem to be arguing against anonymity, or are at least displaying a lot of indifference about it. I tend to agree: Usually, I could care less about being anonymous online -- a studious researcher could easily link this old Slashdot ID back to my actual self, for instance, and it would be of little detriment to me if this were done, even though I often display a particularly callous and honest side of me here that I try hard not to display in the real world.
However, there are instances where genuine anonymity may be of great value: Researching a legal predicament, a medical issue, or (in this context) downloading pornography, along with a whole lot of other things that folks may need or want to do online, whom would be safer (or whom could be more open) if they were completely anonymous.
So, let me ask: Would it not be a good thing if it were the case that in the course of returning teh Intarwebs to their peer-based roots, that truly anonymous access were to come with it? If it were the case that it had zero technical cost vs. a non-anonymous system, would you support that?
Getting an extra 250MB on Dropbox is easy. Just use the link in my sig to sign up, and you'll have a 250MB more than a normal free account.
AFAIK, all of their referral links work the same way. Feel free to Google yourself a different one.
(Yes, it's a dirty referral link. Yes, I get an extra 250MB as well. Is it spam or is it useful? *shrug*)
Define "city."
I live in a town of about 38k people in what most city-folk would consider "rural Ohio". It's not so big. Some evenings when the weather is nice, I'll walk from one end to the other and back.
We've got two Wal-Marts, one on each side of town. They're often busy.
We've also got two Kroger stores, a Meijer, Aldies, two franchises worth of a locally-owned regional grocer (that is actually growing, and doing very well in the market), a Thai store, a Mexican store, two beer stores, a wine store, two liquor stores, and GFS. Most of these, aside from the more specialized stores toward the end of the list, are also very busy.
That's about it for food. We've also got a handful of electronics dealers (big, local, and regional), all of whom seem to be doing OK. And a whole bunch of places that sell clothes. And several pet stores, a couple of book stores, and. and. and.
I don't feel that I'm shy on available choices at all. And I find that it's often cheaper to buy food, clothes, or whatever at almost any other place than it is to do so at Wal-Mart, though I feel no shame in buying things from Wal-Mart when I find their pricing to be more agreeable.
*shrug*
Thanks for the breakdown. That's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to see, since nobody ever seems to discuss miles-per-dollar.
I live in Ohio. I don't know how sane our energy policy is in the grand scheme of stuff, but according to you it is very sane indeed.
Meanwhile, I take the "old Civic" route, for the most part: I drive old cars. The E36 BMW has about 183k on the clock and is a blast to drive, and maintenance has been reasonable -- I've got about $10k in the car, including purchase and repairs (including tires, brakes, oil), over 6 years. It gets OK mileage, consistently averaging about 19.5MPG. Mostly, it gets driven in town with an occasional highway stint -- 19.5MPG seems, to me, to be fairly awesome for my driving habits. It goes about 10k miles per year, and is generally* absurdly reliable.
So. Moving that BMW about 60k miles burned about 3076 gallons of premium unleaded. If we assume that it cost $3.20 per gallon, on average, then I've spent about $10k on fuel during the time I've had the car, or about $20k for fuel, maintenance, and original purchase.
Which means that it costs, so far, about $0.33 per mile to operate, or that it goes 3 miles on 1 dollar.
If a Volt costs $35,000, and gets 30 miles per dollar from the Ohio grid (and never uses the gasoline engine) then over six years and 60k miles:
$35,000 for the car, $2,000 for coal-fired electricity, and maybe another $700 in brake parts and tires (the rest, presumably, being covered by GM's warranty program), for a total of $37,700 -- or about $17,700 more than driving a fun and featureful BMW that burns dinosaurs.
Eventually, the Volt will pay for itself. But even at 10 years and 100,000 miles (assuming the BMW continues to cost $20k per 60k*), the BMW will have cost only $33k, still far less than the Volt over the same period, and I will have had more fun over that decade with the pretty-well loaded-up and easily-hackable BMW than a Chevrolet golf cart.
And, of course, after that the Volt's warranty will be gone with the wind, and it will then begin getting more expensive to operate as suspension parts need replacing, batteries age, and so on.
I don't think I'm in the market for any of these new-fangled battery-powered cars. Or, at least, I won't be until their long-term costs are actually established, and the used market for them matures and levels out. :)
*: I really don't expect that maintenance on the BMW will exceed that. All of the known weak points on the car have already been addressed, the body is in good shape, the leather is nice, and the $10k purchase+repair figure I've been working with here even includes a acquiring spare engine with half as many miles on it, along with paying someone replace the lousy 4-speed auto with a 5-speed manual. And if I ever decide to give up on the car completely, I can easily replace it with something similar, used, and maybe a bit newer for just a few $k. The window sticker from 1995 said that the list price was something like $38,000, and I'm quite happy that I'm not the loser who spent that sort of coin on a car. ;)
I pay about $0.081/kWh.
Should I install solar panels and run my cars from them?
Why, or why not?
Perceived cost: Around here, at least, diesel typically costs 10-15% more per gallon than gasoline. (Yes, I know that it's still cheaper per unit of usable energy, but the folks buying hybrids realize this.)
| sed s/realize this/may not realize this/
Actual cost: Hybrids are already expensive. A diesel-powered hybrid would cost even more.
Perceived cost: Around here, at least, diesel typically costs 10-15% more per gallon than gasoline. (Yes, I know that it's still cheaper per unit of usable energy, but the folks buying hybrids realize this.)
Noise: A Prius is very quiet in all modes. A chattering diesel is not. (I personally don't find the modern TDI diesels to be objectionably noisy at all, but that doesn't mean that the general perception has yet changed.)
Availability of fuel: I can buy diesel in more places than I used to be able to, but it's still not everywhere that gasoline is.
Obviously, from an overall cost, simplicity, and reliability standpoint, a diesel hybrid makes perfect sense. But, currently, I don't think it would ever sell, even though I'd personally rather buy a diesel hybrid than a gas one if I were interested in hybrids at all (and I'm not).
(Warning: I live in the US. We hate diesel cars for no good reason, and the above is a brief description of the typical stereotypes in these parts. Your locale-specific stereotypes may vary.)