How many people with battery vehicles do you know today? It's going to be decades before everyone has one. In the meantime it's a good use of all that off peak wind and nuclear power. And when mains power becomes *really* expensive, there will be good reason for people to start putting 4 kW solar systems on their roofs. Hell, for charging vehicles, given the costs compared to petrol, solar panels make sense now.
Petrol in the UK is $6.50 per gallon, it costs me £35 ($63) to fill up. Something like £2,500 ($4,500) per year.
90% of my driving is around 50 - 60 miles per day. Plugging the thing into the mains at the end of the day to charge overnight would present absolutely no problem at all.
You're right about it being a toy, it's there to prove range, performance and to make a bundle of money for the builders, sportscars have *much* bigger margins than mass manufacture vehicles.
Slightly more practical and comfortable is the UEV Spyder
This may be an indication that they've found a way other than MS Office to make money. Cos it's going to be a big problem for them financially if they haven't. MS Office being one of their most profitable products.
"That's only another 2000W you're pulling from the batteries."
So you're saying that the batteries in an electric car will be devastated by having to supply 37kW instead of 35kW then?
"You already have problems with brown-outs, this would collapse your grid entirely."
And it's impossible to invest in that grid, build more power stations and improve the performance then? And that the additional cost of buying power for your car doesn't start to make having solar panels fitted more attractive either?
The AC Propulsion Tzero has been blitzing internal combustion engined cars for several years now. They recently switched it to li-ion batteries making it even lighter, faster and now with a 300 mile range.
People will always find ways of adding more widgets and wasting more power as long as they don't have constraints on the amount of power available. Let's call it Colin's rule of battery power... "Power requirements always expand to fill the power available".
That means that as long as you don't have the device plugged into the mains constantly we will always be saying, damn these batteries/fuel cells don't last very long.
As an aside, the next generation of batteries will be based on Lithium Sulphur technology which approximately triple the performance of current Li-ion batteries and surpass highly compressed hydrogen gas in terms of volumetric energy density. And I predict that within 2 years of them becoming widely available, we'll be saying "damn these batteries are crap and don't last very long".
"One day the tech will reach a point that national space agencies aren't really needed, but we are not there yet."
Not if the national space agencies have anything to do with it. They have no interest in cheap access to space, they are not developing cheap technology. That technology will come from companies like Armadillo, Scaled Composites because *they* want to make money selling spades to gold diggers.
"what makes the return trip potentially profitable"
Standing there with a musket and telling everyone else to f*ck off because you're going to be the one to exploit this particular natural resource is what will make space profitable. Yes it's ugly but guess what, the good old USA is the result of exactly this attitude.
The "Space is owned by all the people of earth" stuff in the UN treaty has left us with 40 years of no progress. Add to this the national space monopolies like NASA, ESA keeping the costs high.
Can't just leave something alone, has to tell everyone how to live their lives and try to make them change to fit his view of the world. Or is that just all French people?
Ah well frenchie, us liberal free wheeling, free market brits are coming to take over the EU presidency, you just keep an eye on your subsidies.
People write open source software for a number of reasons, the best being that they *need* that particular bit of kit for what they do.
So what if someone else makes billions out of it as well, good luck to them, that just increases the popularity and encourages others to invest, look at, support and contribute, all of which help the original author do what he does.
It also encourages others to write software in a similar manner, all of a sudden you have entire operating environments of free software, from the ground to the sky which the original author can use. Everyone who contributes to free software gets more out of it than they put in, who cares if others also get everything free as well, copying information costs bugger all.
"Oh yeah, to that other company that makes x86 consumer level operating systems."
Why ix86? PowerPC, ARM, MIPS etc are also alternatives. As they gouged their customers, and they *would* have gouged their customers other solutions become financially attractive.
Government intervention really is counter productive. Just leave them to it.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't think it's time to start making profit the primary motive for the operation?
Plus Linux ISOs, Open Office, OpenCD etc etc.
The *AA and friends basically regret that *digital* had ever been invented.
$200k Isn't far off the price of other top end sportscars; Porches, Ferraris etc.
How many people with battery vehicles do you know today? It's going to be decades before everyone has one. In the meantime it's a good use of all that off peak wind and nuclear power. And when mains power becomes *really* expensive, there will be good reason for people to start putting 4 kW solar systems on their roofs. Hell, for charging vehicles, given the costs compared to petrol, solar panels make sense now.
And costs significantly less to charge up.
Petrol in the UK is $6.50 per gallon, it costs me £35 ($63) to fill up. Something like £2,500 ($4,500) per year.
90% of my driving is around 50 - 60 miles per day. Plugging the thing into the mains at the end of the day to charge overnight would present absolutely no problem at all.
Get fleeced. Well, Doh!
Let that be a lesson to all the brand junkies.
It's linked from the front page.
ACP Press release
An actual long distance trip.
You're right about it being a toy, it's there to prove range, performance and to make a bundle of money for the builders, sportscars have *much* bigger margins than mass manufacture vehicles.
Slightly more practical and comfortable is the UEV Spyder
EV UK have a load more information on electric vehicles.
My own petrol car only gets 240 miles to a tank BTW.
This may be an indication that they've found a way other than MS Office to make money. Cos it's going to be a big problem for them financially if they haven't. MS Office being one of their most profitable products.
"That's only another 2000W you're pulling from the batteries."
So you're saying that the batteries in an electric car will be devastated by having to supply 37kW instead of 35kW then?
"You already have problems with brown-outs, this would collapse your grid entirely."
And it's impossible to invest in that grid, build more power stations and improve the performance then? And that the additional cost of buying power for your car doesn't start to make having solar panels fitted more attractive either?
The AC Propulsion Tzero has been blitzing internal combustion engined cars for several years now. They recently switched it to li-ion batteries making it even lighter, faster and now with a 300 mile range.
People will always find ways of adding more widgets and wasting more power as long as they don't have constraints on the amount of power available. Let's call it Colin's rule of battery power... "Power requirements always expand to fill the power available".
That means that as long as you don't have the device plugged into the mains constantly we will always be saying, damn these batteries/fuel cells don't last very long.
As an aside, the next generation of batteries will be based on Lithium Sulphur technology which approximately triple the performance of current Li-ion batteries and surpass highly compressed hydrogen gas in terms of volumetric energy density. And I predict that within 2 years of them becoming widely available, we'll be saying "damn these batteries are crap and don't last very long".
Set up a network of them round the house and have your house server update them with something new every so often.
"P.S. I'm posting as AC because I don't 2feel like getting modded down for being offtopic."
FFS! Slashdot karma is a piece of made up bullshit. You'd be a real help when something truly important was on the line, wouldn't you.
After f*cking my back lifting a 21" bugger on to my desk. I really do hope they are.
Bah. Real addicts have slashdot on a 60 second refresh.
I want to be able to tell the twat in front of me to put the bloody phone down and stop weaving over the bloody road.
"No one has ever tried to build a big supercomputer with these chips before,"
HTH
It's a research project for Edinburgh University, not a commercial enterprise.
"One day the tech will reach a point that national space agencies aren't really needed, but we are not there yet."
Not if the national space agencies have anything to do with it. They have no interest in cheap access to space, they are not developing cheap technology. That technology will come from companies like Armadillo, Scaled Composites because *they* want to make money selling spades to gold diggers.
"what makes the return trip potentially profitable"
Standing there with a musket and telling everyone else to f*ck off because you're going to be the one to exploit this particular natural resource is what will make space profitable. Yes it's ugly but guess what, the good old USA is the result of exactly this attitude.
The "Space is owned by all the people of earth" stuff in the UN treaty has left us with 40 years of no progress. Add to this the national space monopolies like NASA, ESA keeping the costs high.
Seriously. Top predators (us) are vulnerable to extinction. What'll be left are the rats. The next intelligent race will be the rat people.
Can't just leave something alone, has to tell everyone how to live their lives and try to make them change to fit his view of the world. Or is that just all French people?
Ah well frenchie, us liberal free wheeling, free market brits are coming to take over the EU presidency, you just keep an eye on your subsidies.
People write open source software for a number of reasons, the best being that they *need* that particular bit of kit for what they do.
So what if someone else makes billions out of it as well, good luck to them, that just increases the popularity and encourages others to invest, look at, support and contribute, all of which help the original author do what he does.
It also encourages others to write software in a similar manner, all of a sudden you have entire operating environments of free software, from the ground to the sky which the original author can use. Everyone who contributes to free software gets more out of it than they put in, who cares if others also get everything free as well, copying information costs bugger all.
"Oh yeah, to that other company that makes x86 consumer level operating systems."
Why ix86? PowerPC, ARM, MIPS etc are also alternatives. As they gouged their customers, and they *would* have gouged their customers other solutions become financially attractive.
Government intervention really is counter productive. Just leave them to it.
As a Unix admin. Linux is just another Unix box. I suppose it's interesting to see the information split out.