As the AC snarkily said, Maemo/Meego was really a dead/end, because of apps, unfortunately. It sounded like a great idea technically, but the technically superior choice frequently fails because of non-technical reasons, and that would have been the case here too: iOS and Android already had large, well-established app stores and the availability of hundreds of thousands of apps, plus TV shows, music, etc. Meego would have been just as disadvantaged as WinPhone, if not more so since it wouldn't have had MS's backing to encourage app development (which hasn't helped that much, but a lot more than nothing).
The only way Meego would have worked is if they made it compatible with Android apps, but it's unlikely they could have pulled that off, plus they probably wouldn't have gotten access to Google's Play store which is where most Android apps are found.
Nokia should have just joined the crowd and jumped on the Android bandwagon. They would probably have done better revenue-wise than with WinPhone, and with their existing expertise in phone OSes, could have become the premier Android handset maker.
Articles here about Linux don't say what the hell Linux is either. Articles here about Windows don't say what the hell Windows is either. If you don't know what CyanogenMod is, then you're woefully ignorant for a Slashdotter. Maybe you could try Google.
No, it's a pretty large market segment, especially if you factor in emerging markets (less-developed countries) where they'd rather buy a cheap, basic phone than a $600 smartphone because their annual income is so small. No, there's not a lot of profit per-device in dumbphones like that, but there's huge volume, which can easily make up for it.
By whom? Microsoft fanboys maybe, but anyone with a brain should realize it's normal business sense to jetison ventures that aren't profitable and stick to ones which are, or which have a lot of potential.
That said, I hope he doesn't get the job, because this approach might just work. I'd rather see another Ballmer take over, and squander billions on idiotic projects and marketing ideas, so that MS will eventually collapse and die. It's just too much fun watching MS flounder under Ballmer's leadership.
There was no winning strategy for BBY and Nokia, except to adopt Android and become hardware-only companies.
That's better than losing and dying.
Both these companies basically "bet the company" on a Hail Mary move of refusing Android and trying to do something different, when it was clear that iOS and Android were taking over everything in the mobile space. The only way to survive is to lower your expectations and join the crowd and hope to survive. Nokia was already known for excellent hardware, and had a strong brand name; they could have adopted Android and done a better job with it than the Asian OEMs (HTC, LG, etc.), and become the #1 or #2 Android handset maker fairly quickly, especially since they had a lot of in-house OS talent already working on Symbian and Maemo/Meego (which itself is Linux-based, just like Android, so the transition would have been easy for those guys). One of the big problems with Android phones is that they really suck in a lot of ways, not really because of the Android OS, but because of all the crapware the phone makers load on it, the crappy/buggy customizations they make (HTC Sense, etc.), and the generally poor job they do in supporting the devices, especially once they're released and they've moved on to the next model. This is why alternative roms like CyanogenMod are so popular among many users, because the handset makers and carriers screw up the Android experience so much. Nokia could have done a much better job with all their in-house talent and dominated the Android handset market. Blackberry too, perhaps; they might have come up with their own improvements or add-ons for Android to work better for enterprise use, perhaps by improving the built-in security.
Was it a commentary on "American imperialism"? No, that's quite a bit of revisionism. The main characters were not from the USA, the government was global in nature and the look of the government and the military was absolutely European.
The Europeans were practicing imperialism long before the Americans, and making it directly about Americans and the US would have been much too obvious.
Considering the bizarre timeline (3 in a couple months, all of a sudden?), the tolerances and safety features surrounding the batteries, and the publicity that all of the victims milked with copious amounts of photos and interviews, could this be an illicit attempt to get Tesla banned?
The fire rate is basically identical to that of gasoline car fires according to the previous post by ShadowRangerRIT (15k files/year in the UK out of 28.7M cars vs. Tesla's 21,500 cars with 3 fires, but many of those Teslas haven't been on the road a full year).
And at least two of the "victims" have publicly said they want new Teslas to replace their crashed ones.
The third accident link is nothing more than some incomprehensible Twitter gibberish rather than a real article, but for the first two fires, each one involved a serious, high speed collision, which in most gas cars probably would have resulted in injuries for the driver or worse. In both cases, the driver walked away even though the battery pack caught fire (which did not spread to the passenger compartment).
None of those use any siginficant amount of power, except for the caution lights which probably would cause your electric car to use more power simply because they screw up the aerodynamics so much. Using the heat or A/C will have a far greater effect on your range.
It'd be better for everyone if they did drop support for the P4. It's a horrible processor, and you really should get rid of it and get something newer. You'll recoup the costs in a few months from power savings very quickly.
That's not even a stretch, it's completely false. Commodity x86/x86-64 clearly did the overwhelming bulk of eliminating other architectures
Nope. itanic eliminated PA-RISC and Alpha, because both those architectures were owned by HP, and HP wanted to work with intel to make the itanic and replace those older architectures, and that's exactly what happened. Alpha was canned immediately after HP bought out the remnants of DEC in Compaq, and moved all the Alpha engineers to HP and Intel to work on itanic. (Remember, itanic was a joint venture between HP and Intel.) PA-RISC was eliminated sometime later after itanic got good enough to do so. Price/performance was not that much of a factor here; HP management wanted to move to itanic for various pie-in-the-sky reasons, and they couldn't simply backtrack and dump the itanic after pouring so much money into its development, since that would make HP management look stupid.
x86 architecture is actually really quite good these days, but it took a while to get there. The real architecture is hidden behind a translation layer to stay compatible with the regular x86 instructions. It's a lot like the small-block Chevy V8 engines used in today's Corvette: it was not a great design to begin with, but they kept working at it, and throwing technology at it, for decades, to the point where it actually performs quite well despite its initial design shortcomings.
itanic was supposed to take off big, and they kept talking it up with obviously wildly over-optimistic "estimates" (you know the graphs I'm talking about), only, you know, it didn't deliver, and kept on failing to deliver.... It got so bad that intel had to bow to AMD and implement AMD's x86_64 extensions (oh irony! and then double irony on you) just to keep up.
There's more than that. The reason AMD beat Intel to the 64-bit extensions is because Intel refused to make their x86 CPUs 64-bit, because they didn't want to affect their itanic business. Their answer to everyone demanding 64-bit support: buy an itanic! Finally, AMD came out with their own extensions, and for a little while Intel still refused to get on board, because again their answer was that you should just buy an itanic system if you needed 64-bit capabilities, and they poo-pooed AMD's 64-bit CPUs as unnecessary. They finally changed their tune when AMD's CPUs sold like hotcakes, performed great, and made them look stupid. I remember this pretty well since I worked at Intel at the time, and I remember all the propaganda they fed us about that and other boneheaded moves they made under Craig Barrett, such as the RAMBUS fiasco and the P4 Netburst architecture.
No, not on a gas/diesel car, the fan is the largest load. We're talking about electric power consumed here, and how much of a load the A/C puts on the alternator. On gas/diesel cars, the A/C compressor (the largest energy consumer in the system) runs from a belt connected to the engine, so it has almost no effect on the electrical system (except for the electric compressor clutch which engages it). On electric cars, this is different since the A/C compressor would need to be powered by its own electric motor.
Sorry, no: a fuse rating is not an indication of how much power something pulls, except in a relative way. A fuse has to be significantly higher than the peak current a load may draw (if you operate too close to a fuse's rating, it'll blow early even without the limit being exceeded, just due to age). And fan motors draw more current at start-up than during continuous operation. So, I'm guessing, a typical fan on a 30A fuse probably uses only about 10A continuous. That's only 120W.
As for condenser fans, this depends on the car. My old Integra has a wide radiator with dual fans; the larger fan is the main engine fan, and the slightly-smaller fan (more in terms of motor size than physical size, so it probably has a lower airflow rate) right next to it is for the A/C condenser (the condenser sits right in front of the main radiator, and is almost the same size, just a lot thinner). On this car, whenever the A/C is turned on, the condenser fan is turned on too, I believe without any thermostatic switching (and without affecting the main fan). Admittedly, it's an older car now, so other (and newer) cars probably do things a little differently and more efficiently. But as for "a bitch of power", at least on this car, the A/C fan is the smaller of the two, meaning they probably don't think the A/C condenser needs as much airflow as the main radiator when it's getting too hot and has to turn on its fan.
And for your 35A Taurus fan, that sounds ridiculously large, and even if it really does use that much power, certainly won't work on a 30A fuse for obvious reasons. I'm guessing you'd need a 50A fuse at a minimum for that, maybe 100A (I don't think there's any sizes between 50A and 100A). You sure 35A isn't just a peak figure? Fans will probably use the most current at start-up.
I dispute your claim of 60A at cruise: where is all that power going? Most cars don't have enough accessories to use that much power, except for charging current needed for the battery. Obviously, an electric car does not need to recharge the batteries while driving, since that makes no sense, but it is a minor load for ICE cars.
Electric power steering does not use any power at cruise, only at low speeds when you're actually turning the wheels and need assistance. The P/S on my current old (ICE) car is currently broken as there's a leak in the system and I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet, and once you're past 10mph, you can't even tell there's a problem, and certainly not at highway speeds (maneuvering into parking places is a bit of a PITA though). It has zero effect on highway range on any decently-engineering EPS-equipped car.
Air conditioning is not a trivial load, except that on ICE cars, it's not much of an electrical load at all! The compressor is driven directly by a belt from the engine. The only electrical loads associated are for the compressor clutch (which engages the compressor instead of letting it free-spin), the condenser fan (a few amps maybe, easily the biggest load associated), and the ventilation fan (which is usually running with or without A/C anyway, and is totally independent). So except for those two fans, that's not really adding to your claimed 60A figure, which I think is total BS.
There are a lot of electrical accessories on cars these days, but they don't use much power, except in a peaky, transient way: EPS uses a lot of power, but only in short bursts when it's providing assist, at low speeds. ABS might use some power, but only when it's actually releasing brake pressure. The other big power users (fans, headlights, other lights) haven't changed in decades, except that now they're generally more efficient (LEDs vs. incandescents, Xenon headlights vs. halogens in higher-end cars, fans haven't changed at all). The real problem with electrical accessories in modern cars is that many of them are drawing a very small but non-zero amount of power when the car is turned off ("parasitic loads"). For a car driven daily, this isn't a problem, but if you let your car sit a couple of weeks in an airport parking lot for instance, or you have a spare car you only drive on rare occasion, this can mean your car's battery is unable to start the car when you want it. While driving, they're utterly insignificant, but a few milliamps of constant draw will have a significant effect on how long your car's battery lasts, when you're letting the car sit for days, weeks, or months.
That's true too. The only place where ICE cars have any advantage at all is when you're running the cabin heater: in an electric car, it uses a non-trivial amount of power to generate heat to heat the passenger cabin, whereas in an ICE car, the heat is free since you just divert the engine's waste heat to the cabin instead of the main radiator.
Sorry, it's quadratic, not exponential. The point is the same though: the Vette will get terrible fuel economy at 132mph; if your calculation is anywhere near correct, 6.5mpg is pretty horrible, and for a 20-gallon tank yields only a measly 130 miles of range at 132mph, not too far off the other poster's contention of 100 miles.
And the headlights, and the radio, and the bluetooth adapter, and the fans for the climate control system, and the ECU, and the BCU, etc.
None of that stuff uses any significant amount of power. Headlights are about 35-40W for Xenons, radio is surely less than 10W with today's class-D amplifiers, you have to be a total moron if you think Bluetooth uses any significant power, climate control fans are maybe 10W, ECU etc. are a few watts max. Compared to the Tesla's battery pack that supplies several thousand amp-hours of energy, all that stuff is nothing. The only thing that's going to affect range in any significant way is the use of the heater or air conditioning. In real driving, your driving style is going to have far more impact on the range: whether you accelerate too much, brake too much (and don't use regenerative braking), or even if you have the sunroof open.
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As the AC snarkily said, Maemo/Meego was really a dead/end, because of apps, unfortunately. It sounded like a great idea technically, but the technically superior choice frequently fails because of non-technical reasons, and that would have been the case here too: iOS and Android already had large, well-established app stores and the availability of hundreds of thousands of apps, plus TV shows, music, etc. Meego would have been just as disadvantaged as WinPhone, if not more so since it wouldn't have had MS's backing to encourage app development (which hasn't helped that much, but a lot more than nothing).
The only way Meego would have worked is if they made it compatible with Android apps, but it's unlikely they could have pulled that off, plus they probably wouldn't have gotten access to Google's Play store which is where most Android apps are found.
Nokia should have just joined the crowd and jumped on the Android bandwagon. They would probably have done better revenue-wise than with WinPhone, and with their existing expertise in phone OSes, could have become the premier Android handset maker.
Articles here about Linux don't say what the hell Linux is either. Articles here about Windows don't say what the hell Windows is either. If you don't know what CyanogenMod is, then you're woefully ignorant for a Slashdotter. Maybe you could try Google.
No, it's a pretty large market segment, especially if you factor in emerging markets (less-developed countries) where they'd rather buy a cheap, basic phone than a $600 smartphone because their annual income is so small. No, there's not a lot of profit per-device in dumbphones like that, but there's huge volume, which can easily make up for it.
By whom? Microsoft fanboys maybe, but anyone with a brain should realize it's normal business sense to jetison ventures that aren't profitable and stick to ones which are, or which have a lot of potential.
That said, I hope he doesn't get the job, because this approach might just work. I'd rather see another Ballmer take over, and squander billions on idiotic projects and marketing ideas, so that MS will eventually collapse and die. It's just too much fun watching MS flounder under Ballmer's leadership.
There was no winning strategy for BBY and Nokia, except to adopt Android and become hardware-only companies.
That's better than losing and dying.
Both these companies basically "bet the company" on a Hail Mary move of refusing Android and trying to do something different, when it was clear that iOS and Android were taking over everything in the mobile space. The only way to survive is to lower your expectations and join the crowd and hope to survive. Nokia was already known for excellent hardware, and had a strong brand name; they could have adopted Android and done a better job with it than the Asian OEMs (HTC, LG, etc.), and become the #1 or #2 Android handset maker fairly quickly, especially since they had a lot of in-house OS talent already working on Symbian and Maemo/Meego (which itself is Linux-based, just like Android, so the transition would have been easy for those guys). One of the big problems with Android phones is that they really suck in a lot of ways, not really because of the Android OS, but because of all the crapware the phone makers load on it, the crappy/buggy customizations they make (HTC Sense, etc.), and the generally poor job they do in supporting the devices, especially once they're released and they've moved on to the next model. This is why alternative roms like CyanogenMod are so popular among many users, because the handset makers and carriers screw up the Android experience so much. Nokia could have done a much better job with all their in-house talent and dominated the Android handset market. Blackberry too, perhaps; they might have come up with their own improvements or add-ons for Android to work better for enterprise use, perhaps by improving the built-in security.
Was it a commentary on "American imperialism"? No, that's quite a bit of revisionism. The main characters were not from the USA, the government was global in nature and the look of the government and the military was absolutely European.
The Europeans were practicing imperialism long before the Americans, and making it directly about Americans and the US would have been much too obvious.
Don't forget about Florida Man.
Considering the bizarre timeline (3 in a couple months, all of a sudden?), the tolerances and safety features surrounding the batteries, and the publicity that all of the victims milked with copious amounts of photos and interviews, could this be an illicit attempt to get Tesla banned?
The fire rate is basically identical to that of gasoline car fires according to the previous post by ShadowRangerRIT (15k files/year in the UK out of 28.7M cars vs. Tesla's 21,500 cars with 3 fires, but many of those Teslas haven't been on the road a full year).
And at least two of the "victims" have publicly said they want new Teslas to replace their crashed ones.
A town of 20,000 people isn't likely to have 3 high speed crashes in 2 years either. This isn't a good way to look at statistics.
The third accident link is nothing more than some incomprehensible Twitter gibberish rather than a real article, but for the first two fires, each one involved a serious, high speed collision, which in most gas cars probably would have resulted in injuries for the driver or worse. In both cases, the driver walked away even though the battery pack caught fire (which did not spread to the passenger compartment).
This is much ado about nothing.
Yes, if you only power it on occasionally, the power savings won't be significant. I was assuming you kept it on all the time.
None of those use any siginficant amount of power, except for the caution lights which probably would cause your electric car to use more power simply because they screw up the aerodynamics so much. Using the heat or A/C will have a far greater effect on your range.
It'd be better for everyone if they did drop support for the P4. It's a horrible processor, and you really should get rid of it and get something newer. You'll recoup the costs in a few months from power savings very quickly.
It was assassinated by HP as much as by Intel.
That's not even a stretch, it's completely false. Commodity x86/x86-64 clearly did the overwhelming bulk of eliminating other architectures
Nope. itanic eliminated PA-RISC and Alpha, because both those architectures were owned by HP, and HP wanted to work with intel to make the itanic and replace those older architectures, and that's exactly what happened. Alpha was canned immediately after HP bought out the remnants of DEC in Compaq, and moved all the Alpha engineers to HP and Intel to work on itanic. (Remember, itanic was a joint venture between HP and Intel.) PA-RISC was eliminated sometime later after itanic got good enough to do so. Price/performance was not that much of a factor here; HP management wanted to move to itanic for various pie-in-the-sky reasons, and they couldn't simply backtrack and dump the itanic after pouring so much money into its development, since that would make HP management look stupid.
MIPS was indeed wiped out by x86-64.
x86 architecture is actually really quite good these days, but it took a while to get there. The real architecture is hidden behind a translation layer to stay compatible with the regular x86 instructions. It's a lot like the small-block Chevy V8 engines used in today's Corvette: it was not a great design to begin with, but they kept working at it, and throwing technology at it, for decades, to the point where it actually performs quite well despite its initial design shortcomings.
itanic was supposed to take off big, and they kept talking it up with obviously wildly over-optimistic "estimates" (you know the graphs I'm talking about), only, you know, it didn't deliver, and kept on failing to deliver. ...
It got so bad that intel had to bow to AMD and implement AMD's x86_64 extensions (oh irony! and then double irony on you) just to keep up.
There's more than that. The reason AMD beat Intel to the 64-bit extensions is because Intel refused to make their x86 CPUs 64-bit, because they didn't want to affect their itanic business. Their answer to everyone demanding 64-bit support: buy an itanic! Finally, AMD came out with their own extensions, and for a little while Intel still refused to get on board, because again their answer was that you should just buy an itanic system if you needed 64-bit capabilities, and they poo-pooed AMD's 64-bit CPUs as unnecessary. They finally changed their tune when AMD's CPUs sold like hotcakes, performed great, and made them look stupid. I remember this pretty well since I worked at Intel at the time, and I remember all the propaganda they fed us about that and other boneheaded moves they made under Craig Barrett, such as the RAMBUS fiasco and the P4 Netburst architecture.
I wonder how long the Linux kernel will continue to support all these other CPUs however. They've already dropped support for i386, since it's so ancient. I wouldn't be too surprised to see them drop support for some of the other really ancient ones too, such as Alpha. Heck, I'm surprised they haven't dropped i486 support by now. There's no telling if some of that code even works any more; I seriously doubt much of it ever gets tested since no one uses these old systems any more.
then the only choice as far as Linux goes is Debian, which never retires any CPU
Except i386; Debian is bound by what the upstream kernel supports.
No, not on a gas/diesel car, the fan is the largest load. We're talking about electric power consumed here, and how much of a load the A/C puts on the alternator. On gas/diesel cars, the A/C compressor (the largest energy consumer in the system) runs from a belt connected to the engine, so it has almost no effect on the electrical system (except for the electric compressor clutch which engages it). On electric cars, this is different since the A/C compressor would need to be powered by its own electric motor.
Sorry, no: a fuse rating is not an indication of how much power something pulls, except in a relative way. A fuse has to be significantly higher than the peak current a load may draw (if you operate too close to a fuse's rating, it'll blow early even without the limit being exceeded, just due to age). And fan motors draw more current at start-up than during continuous operation. So, I'm guessing, a typical fan on a 30A fuse probably uses only about 10A continuous. That's only 120W.
As for condenser fans, this depends on the car. My old Integra has a wide radiator with dual fans; the larger fan is the main engine fan, and the slightly-smaller fan (more in terms of motor size than physical size, so it probably has a lower airflow rate) right next to it is for the A/C condenser (the condenser sits right in front of the main radiator, and is almost the same size, just a lot thinner). On this car, whenever the A/C is turned on, the condenser fan is turned on too, I believe without any thermostatic switching (and without affecting the main fan). Admittedly, it's an older car now, so other (and newer) cars probably do things a little differently and more efficiently. But as for "a bitch of power", at least on this car, the A/C fan is the smaller of the two, meaning they probably don't think the A/C condenser needs as much airflow as the main radiator when it's getting too hot and has to turn on its fan.
And for your 35A Taurus fan, that sounds ridiculously large, and even if it really does use that much power, certainly won't work on a 30A fuse for obvious reasons. I'm guessing you'd need a 50A fuse at a minimum for that, maybe 100A (I don't think there's any sizes between 50A and 100A). You sure 35A isn't just a peak figure? Fans will probably use the most current at start-up.
I dispute your claim of 60A at cruise: where is all that power going? Most cars don't have enough accessories to use that much power, except for charging current needed for the battery. Obviously, an electric car does not need to recharge the batteries while driving, since that makes no sense, but it is a minor load for ICE cars.
Electric power steering does not use any power at cruise, only at low speeds when you're actually turning the wheels and need assistance. The P/S on my current old (ICE) car is currently broken as there's a leak in the system and I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet, and once you're past 10mph, you can't even tell there's a problem, and certainly not at highway speeds (maneuvering into parking places is a bit of a PITA though). It has zero effect on highway range on any decently-engineering EPS-equipped car.
Air conditioning is not a trivial load, except that on ICE cars, it's not much of an electrical load at all! The compressor is driven directly by a belt from the engine. The only electrical loads associated are for the compressor clutch (which engages the compressor instead of letting it free-spin), the condenser fan (a few amps maybe, easily the biggest load associated), and the ventilation fan (which is usually running with or without A/C anyway, and is totally independent). So except for those two fans, that's not really adding to your claimed 60A figure, which I think is total BS.
There are a lot of electrical accessories on cars these days, but they don't use much power, except in a peaky, transient way: EPS uses a lot of power, but only in short bursts when it's providing assist, at low speeds. ABS might use some power, but only when it's actually releasing brake pressure. The other big power users (fans, headlights, other lights) haven't changed in decades, except that now they're generally more efficient (LEDs vs. incandescents, Xenon headlights vs. halogens in higher-end cars, fans haven't changed at all). The real problem with electrical accessories in modern cars is that many of them are drawing a very small but non-zero amount of power when the car is turned off ("parasitic loads"). For a car driven daily, this isn't a problem, but if you let your car sit a couple of weeks in an airport parking lot for instance, or you have a spare car you only drive on rare occasion, this can mean your car's battery is unable to start the car when you want it. While driving, they're utterly insignificant, but a few milliamps of constant draw will have a significant effect on how long your car's battery lasts, when you're letting the car sit for days, weeks, or months.
That's true too. The only place where ICE cars have any advantage at all is when you're running the cabin heater: in an electric car, it uses a non-trivial amount of power to generate heat to heat the passenger cabin, whereas in an ICE car, the heat is free since you just divert the engine's waste heat to the cabin instead of the main radiator.
Sorry, it's quadratic, not exponential. The point is the same though: the Vette will get terrible fuel economy at 132mph; if your calculation is anywhere near correct, 6.5mpg is pretty horrible, and for a 20-gallon tank yields only a measly 130 miles of range at 132mph, not too far off the other poster's contention of 100 miles.
And the headlights, and the radio, and the bluetooth adapter, and the fans for the climate control system, and the ECU, and the BCU, etc.
None of that stuff uses any significant amount of power. Headlights are about 35-40W for Xenons, radio is surely less than 10W with today's class-D amplifiers, you have to be a total moron if you think Bluetooth uses any significant power, climate control fans are maybe 10W, ECU etc. are a few watts max. Compared to the Tesla's battery pack that supplies several thousand amp-hours of energy, all that stuff is nothing. The only thing that's going to affect range in any significant way is the use of the heater or air conditioning. In real driving, your driving style is going to have far more impact on the range: whether you accelerate too much, brake too much (and don't use regenerative braking), or even if you have the sunroof open.
I call bullshit on you. Go look at your link again. That Corvette is doing 1640rpm at 75 mph, or 120 kph. The graph doesn't go any higher than 75mph.