You mean, like virtually every grocery store in the US has been doing for ten years now?
(That's how those little digital price tags on shelves get programmed -- the lights flicker the codes down to them all day long, and slowly update the tags.)
I have used one myself to route traffic from my phone to a debugging HTTP proxy, very handy...
A lot of extra work, though -- you can go in and edit your wireless connection and add a proxy manually. Why screw around with a configuration profile?
"Typically, however, a patent application must include one or more claims defining the invention which must meet the relevant patentability requirements such as novelty and non-obviousness."'
Because these software patents do not really meet the requirements of novelty and non-obviousness. If you hadseveral software programmers attempt a solution, many would come up with something the same or similar.
/quote
That's true of virtually every patent. A big part of innovation is recognizing a problem prior to solving it. Non-obviousness has always been evaluated in the context of the time before the invention was disclosed, not after. That's one of the harder jobs of a patent examiner. Lots of patents cover "oh duh, why didn't I think of that" things -- and they're patentable precisely because it hadn't been thought of.
(And, to be clear, I'm not passing judgement on the patent system per se -- although there's a substantial amount of evidence that its a greater help than harm -- but rather trying to make a point that there's literally nothing special about these patent cases or the nature or quality of software patents in the context of any other industry today or historically.)
>>>Or maybe you're just making up friends and numbers in light of people responding who actually know what they're talking about?
Nice insult. I happened to be a member of several EV groups and read their reports on how much their cars burn. I am also a follower of ACEEE.org which says EV cars are no cleaner/efficient than a Prius or Civic Hybrid.
I also I know that saying a car gets "100MPG" like Cevy does with their Volt, and not taking into account the electricity usage is False advertising. Owners are surprised to discover their "fuel cost" (gas+electric)) is the same as a regular 40MPG car, and no money was saved versus just buying a Civic or Yaris. You see: I have zero patience for corporations that would try to defraud the customer in that fashion. I try to set the record straight when I can, so people are no misled with falsehoods.
It was an observation, not an insult. Your followup shows you still have no real experience other than these "friends". And, you're right. Chevy's claimed 100mpge is misleading, but not in the way you seem to think. (And, by the way, its a calculated value care of the EPA which is why the mpge is almost identical across all EVs.)
Here's hard numbers. My commute is 65 miles round trip.
On an average day, I use: 10.4 kwh of electricity.4 gallons of gas.
The 10.4kwh gets me typically 43 miles, at a total cost of 80 cents. The.4 gallons of gas gets me the additional 22 miles at a cost of $1.60.
So, I'm paying $2.40 a day to go 65 miles. At $4 a gallon for gas, that's the equivalent of 108mpg in *absolute cost*. The car thinks its 162mpg based on the actual gas used, but it does't know my electric cost.
Now, mind you, that commute is well above the national average. My prior commute was 28 miles, which is closer to average.
At 28 miles, I was using about 6.66 kwh. With charging overhead, that costs me about 55 cents a day. That's the cost equivalent of 203mpg in *absolute cost*.
So you're right, for the part of the country I live in, Chevy's 100mpg estimates are lies. The cost to drive is half that. And owners are definitely surprised to find they almost never get as low as 100 MPGe.
And in terms of fixed savings, a comparable car to the Volt would get maybe 30mpg, best case, although arguably there's not a good comparable car of equivalent size, power and quality, so that's really just approximate -- cars as quiet are a good bit lower in MPG.) But at 30mpg, I'd be spending $30 more a week in gas commuting. My hard savings is actually closer to $50 a week, because of weekend driving, over a 30mpg car. $200 a month.
And you really are either a dimwit or trying to twist facts to your worldview if you think a Volt is comparable to a Civic or a Yaris. A Lexus IS250 is probably closest. There aren't a lot of other luxury compacts anymore. Maybe a BMW 1 series, if they made a four door, or a Lexus CT200.
Really the problem is software patents. I think everyone can understand mechanical and chemical innovations being patented but software just doesn't seem to work as well under the patent system. Maybe if they just let copyright cover software it would solve most of the problem.
So why is a sequence of steps someone works out to transform chemicals to create a new molecule a less creative process than a sequence of steps to transform data in an algorithm? Or a sequence of steps to assemble gears and springs into a new watch mechanism?
I'm honestly curious. That differentiation seems to be at the core of the bizarre knee jerk reaction to software patents -- its almost like software engineers value their work less than the work that other engineers do, and I've always been puzzled why.
I feel the need to point out the HUGE difference between industrial patent technologies and a simple programming algorithm patented as IP. Actually I don't. If you don't understand the difference then I don't have the time, willingness, or patience to explain it to you.
That's a biasedview of it, ignorant in history, coming from the standpoint of someone versed in software. An algorithm implemented in code is more more or less obvious or "mathematical" than a physical mechanism transferring force around via gears and levers, and those are patented. There have historicaly been just as many, if not more, "obvious" patents granted on mechanics than software by a very large margin. The difference is, most of them expired a hundred years ago.
And thankfully for the US, the people responsible for rmaintaining the patent system understand that, and understand that the system is behaving as intended. I have absolutely no issue with software patents -- a new algorithm or technique is just as valid as a new combination of gears used to distribute power between axles. Its the result of the same problem solving train of thought and effort. The same is true of business process patents.
IMO, the *only* junk patents are the gene patents issued for *discovering* a gene, not *creating* a gene. Come up with a DNA sequence that creates a useful protein? Sure, patent it. Sequence some slime mold somewhere and find one? Don't think so. You don't get patents for engineering, you get patents for design.
TL;DR - Innovation does not happen because of patents, innovation happens, then patents happen.
Companies wouldn't bankroll the innovation without the protection they provide,
At a smaller scale, patent trolls were also the norm during the 19th century. It was a common practice for inventors to come up with some mechanical widget or mechanism and seek patent protection, and seek to sell it as a component of some larger mechanism the bigger companies were doing.
Ah, those urban legends that didn't happen to you either, but everybody says they experienced them first person.:-)
Yeah, those didn't happen to me either, but I've heard them many times.
I find the photocopy story a little hard to imagine, but FWIW, the staple thing I saw MANY times, and the magnet thing at least a couple times.
Of course, the staple thing wasn't really a problem most of the time -- I can't recall for sure, but I doubt I ever saw one where someone actually hit the disk itself. And, frankly, the magnet wouldn't do much either. Moving (strong) magnets are a problem, a little fridge magnet in the corner isn't going to do anything. The data density was very low and the regions were fairly strongly magnetized.
So, I guess, at that level I agree -- urban legends in as much as the stories suggest there was some data disaster associated with it.
All you needed was a paper punch. And some reasonable hand strength No disassembly required.
No, but I do recall having had to make a hard-sector disk from a soft-sector disk using a punch and taking the disk itself out.
That was so long ago, I can't remember if it worked or not, I just remember having done it. Probably means it worked, as a failure would've been more memorable.
This. I can't even begin to think of an equivocal thing that has happened throughout history. Perhaps union busting might come close, but for sweet jesus sake, the way these patent lawyers are working is just sickening. It's funny how you hear so much about tort reform and other such garbage from politicians but you don't hear a peep about patent trolling or the abuse of IP rights which is more of a hampering force on our economy than all of the malpractice lawsuits in the history of forever ever have been or will be.
I feel the need to post this on ever damn patent story on here. Read your history. This is both nothing new, and pretty tame by patent battle standards. The industrialization of the US happened both in spite of, and *because* of these sort of patent battles. The patent battles over things like programmable looms and sewing equipment made Samsung vs Apple look like something Judge Judy would preside over. And the fallout of those battles during the 19th century established the foundation of the companies that went on to fund the continued industrial growth and innovation in the US.
And the answer to how you can innovate these days is simple -- the same way every other company did over the last 200 years. License what you think is critical, ignore the things you think you can get away with, and patent as much as you can because the cheapest way to license patents has always been to cross license patents. Oh, and really study your history. They say there's nothing new under the sun, and in IP and technical litigation, that is absolutely true.
>>>$20 translates into about 1400 miles of driving.
That's about 166 kWhr which means 119 watt-hours/mile. No EV in the world gets that kind of fuel economy. Typical average according to friends who own actual EVs are 500 watthours/mile. That would be $84 on my electric schedule.
You do realize that not everyone in the country pays the same amount for electricity as you? That actually pays for about 275kwh, and I get almost exactly 4.2 miles per kwh. The 100-some-odd miles remainder comes from the occasional times I can charge at the airport or the mall or something. Now, I wish I could get lower night rates like some places in the country -- it would cut that price by 3/4, and all that electricity would cost me $5, but they don't do that where I live.
Your "friends" have broken EVs if they are using 500 watt/hours per mile. The Tesla, the Focus EV, the Leaf, and the Volt all average half that power usage per mile. Maybe they are driving around with their e-brake on? Or maybe you're just making up friends and numbers in light of people responding who actually know what they're talking about?
Is the wind and small hydro something you put together or from the grid? While noteworthy and positive, I am skeptical that there isn't some coal getting burnt to power your car.
Well, the literal energy behind the electrons going into the car probably came from nuclear -- definitely not coal. But the power company essentially buys small hydro and wind power from small producers in a quantity to cover the kwh of the customers who buy into that program. So, no, the literal energy behind the 800ish kwh I buy a month didn't come from wind and hydro, but an additional 800kwh was bought by my power company to feed into their grid.
Its sort of like people who stopped buying BP during the oil spill and didn't understand that all the refineries pump their gas into the pipelines and immediately start pulling gas out the other end. The oil one company refines and the oil that company sells is rarely the same oil. Electricity works, obviously, the same way.
I fail to see the advantage of some future 70mpg car if I'm burning-up $200 a month recharging it with electricity.
All you've done is switch the country from pollution by gasoline to pollution by coal or natural gas. Plus you're not saving energy. It's still the same consumption level. I would be more impressed with a non-plugin car that actually squeezes 70 miles out of each gallon (like my insight or a Lupo TDI).
I spend about $20 on 100% renewable (wind and small hydro) electricity (at about a 25% surcharge for it), and that eliminates about 35 gallons of gas I burn a month. Those are hard numbers -- that $20 translates into about 1400 miles of driving.
So its much cheaper, and zero pollution for those miles.
You choose to fail to see the benefit because you choose to ignore facts to try to fit reality to your beliefs.
Physics isn't going to change for the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline. My 400 pound motorcycle gets about 50mpg. It could get more if it wasn't so much fun, but I don't see much hope of a 3,000 pound car getting much more than that without changing fuel sources.
So stop burning gasoline. If you RTFA, that's the whole point of the law. You don't have to somehow magically get 55mpg on gas, you just need to burn less than a gallon of gas per 55 miles you drive. Use electrons. Use hydrogen. Lots of ways to do that.
And clearly the car companies agree. A quote from the NYT article:
Thirteen major automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, have endorsed the new standards.
At some point you just have to account for the laws of physics.
Pushing a vehicle at 80MPH down the highway is going to be hard to do and get 54.5 MPG. No matter how "hybrid" the car is, no matter how good your regenerative breaking.. once you're at highway speeds, air resistance becomes insurmountable.
I do most of my driving at around that speed, and average about 45mpg on the occasions my car is actually running on gas.
To meet the averages, it just needs to be quite a bit better at city speeds. When estimating those miles, regeneration helps quite a bit. And if you are a hybrid (series or parallel), that counts, too.
What the requirements basically are going to do is push most new cars to be EV, hybrid or EV with a series-hybrid range extender.
While it may take 12 years for those costs to come down, I fail to see the downside in that. If it was 1999, sure, but today you've got good examples in all the categories that meet a wide range of requirements.
Just be disciplined with design and code reviews and be done with it.
This doesn't sound like a plan to improve performance, it sounds like a plan to cut costs on hardware, now you can have one computer for every two devs.
I think its a technique favored by "programmers" who are averse to the process involved in "engineering". From that standpoint, its probably good. If you're not going to define requirements, properly document and review what needs to be written, and have a process in place to validate quality (in which code reviews is just one part), then putting two engineers in front of the screen helps.
I think its a false economy, though -- you're paying 2 salaries for some fraction of 2x the output of a single programmer, but are only solving two problems (distractions and productivity, and a drawn out code review). I think most teams would be far better off spending some of those dollars on the appropriate staff to manage the planning, and enforcing good engineering practices.
I think the "web 2.0" crap ten years ago was really the start of "throw bodies at the problem, we can tweak, adjust or rewrite this later" mentality. Pair programming is, IMO, just a reaction to the inherant problems with that mentality among teams that consist entirely of people who aren't experienced in engineering process.
However, if they couldn't use artificial scarcity to make money, then you could have all games for merely their cost to create (plus a little profit to run things).
Unfortunately, that's an unrealistic view of the economics of the situation. If 100% of the time you could guarantee that a particular business interest will break even plus a little profit, then it would work. But you can't, so the investment in time and resources, and the associated risk, is paid for by the reward of greater profits. When you eliminate the profit motive, you eliminate the risk-taking, and very little actually gets done. Sure, you could go the Kickstarter route and say "everyone who wants this game, pony up $60 now and when we hit $20m, we'll build it." -- that does't work in the real world either. Someone has to pay the salary of the people building it during that time, and the buyers are now shouldering the risk that they hit $20m in funding and never deliver the game. That's not a workable model, either.
This is not to belittle the accomplishment... for 3-d printing that's a very large component to print, and also the stereotype of 3-d printed stuff being weak seems to be finally going away....
Its okay to belittle it... only the marketing department at the company selling the printer would consider that much of a savings.
Anyone who has built a car from the ground up will tell you the body is the easy part. And in a car that is a shell-over-space-frame, a non-critical part.
Maybe i'm wrong but I've never seen Ford sue Chevy over the size and shape of their trucks. They all have similar features because they are friggin obvious.
That's because you're in tech. If you were in automotive engineering, you'd be laughing at the cute little patent scuffles the software space has gotten themselves into.
There are thousands, or tens of thousands, of patents covering every tiny little detail of a car you buy. Lawsuits have been the norm for a hundred years. You don't see it because there isn't a "slashcar.org" website, there are a lot fewer people in the middle of it, and most importantly there's a substantial patent thicket in the automotive industry. At this point each of the car companies has enough IP, their cross licensing agreements end up basically even and its all a wash. Innovation happens largely because it helps move that needle year-on-year. Ford and Toyota kept one-upping each other in the atkinson/electric hybrid space, and little bits of money flowed one way or the other over the years. Tesla now is making money from a bunch of companies because of their IP -- something that helps substantially when it comes to the IP they need to build their cars.
IMO, you see a lot of agression now in the consumer technology space because of Moore's law and the exponential growth going on -- you have a very narrow window to make a lot of money with something, and you need to use whatever tools you've got to justify the investment. Because of that, I expect it'll only get worse before things totally implode.
It was Samsung that chose to copy Apple designs. Most other Android handset makers did not so slavishly copy the design of the iPhone in regards to hardware and software, so they are far more immune to being sued.
You don't see Apple suing Amazon over the Kindle Fire, or Nokia over the Lumia. It is quite possible to make distinctive designs that do not mirror the iPhone, and in fact preferable for long term health. If your product just looks and acts like an iPhone, eventually people will just switch to the "real thing". Far better to make it distinctive in a way that people may grow to prefer so moving to an iPhone would feel wrong to the user because it was different.
There are cross licensing agreements with most of the big names making tablets and cell phones, which is the reason you don't see those. Google "patent thicket" -- its the norm in industry, and has been for 200 yars.
You only see litigation like this show up when the two companies involved don't have equitable patent portfolios, and the one with the lesser portfolio does't want to pay for things. That's why you see various figures for how much every Android phone makes Microsoft in licensing -- the patent cross licensing agreements are imbalanced in a direction that favors Microsoft. In other cases, Microsoft may be paying something. It all works out in the end, when people "play by the rules".
IANAL, but my blink on Samsung/Apple is that they probably had fairly comparable patent portfolios, but the places where Apple was using Samsung IP was predominantly in cases where Apple was *buying* from Samsung, leaving Samsung at a disadvantage where a cross licensing deal was concerned -- to the point where they thought it was economicaly viable to fight or ignore the patents. And Apple is stuck in a "use it or lose it" situation with their design patents. Add to it the fact that Samsung is still the bigger cell phone manufacturer, and the ecosystem around the iPad and Tablet are the only reason Apple exists at this point, and Apple is in a fight for its life. Samsung can go on just fine without tablets and phones -- Apple can't go on without the iPad and iPhone. Too much of their earnings are coupled to it.
You can bet that Apple doesn't care one tiny bit about the money -- injunctions against sales are all Apple cares about. A percent drop in market share will shave far more than a billion from Apple's value. They need to keep their market share growing as long as possible, so they can justify their stock price. Its a ponzi scheme that will fail eventually -- like every other company that has grown to its size, but the powers that be just need to keep it going long enough to get out.
Slashdot Mirror
6.1 is the kernel version, the full OS is Windows 7.
Its the same reason RedHat doesn't sell RedHat 2.3.125, but RedHat 6 or whatever.
You mean, like virtually every grocery store in the US has been doing for ten years now?
(That's how those little digital price tags on shelves get programmed -- the lights flicker the codes down to them all day long, and slowly update the tags.)
Back in my day we used to call people who snuck into buildings and stole things "burgalers".
And then they invented spell-check.
Maybe he's British. They're always spelling things wrong over there.
That's like saying "from what I've seen of the violence in Detroit, it isn't any worse than Fallujah"
It may be true, but I wouldn't go to Fallujah, either.
I have used one myself to route traffic from my phone to a debugging HTTP proxy, very handy...
A lot of extra work, though -- you can go in and edit your wireless connection and add a proxy manually. Why screw around with a configuration profile?
"Typically, however, a patent application must include one or more claims defining the invention which must meet the relevant patentability requirements such as novelty and non-obviousness."'
Because these software patents do not really meet the requirements of novelty and non-obviousness. If you hadseveral software programmers attempt a solution, many would come up with something the same or similar.
/quote
That's true of virtually every patent. A big part of innovation is recognizing a problem prior to solving it. Non-obviousness has always been evaluated in the context of the time before the invention was disclosed, not after. That's one of the harder jobs of a patent examiner. Lots of patents cover "oh duh, why didn't I think of that" things -- and they're patentable precisely because it hadn't been thought of.
(And, to be clear, I'm not passing judgement on the patent system per se -- although there's a substantial amount of evidence that its a greater help than harm -- but rather trying to make a point that there's literally nothing special about these patent cases or the nature or quality of software patents in the context of any other industry today or historically.)
>>>Or maybe you're just making up friends and numbers in light of people responding who actually know what they're talking about?
Nice insult. I happened to be a member of several EV groups and read their reports on how much their cars burn. I am also a follower of ACEEE.org which says EV cars are no cleaner/efficient than a Prius or Civic Hybrid.
I also I know that saying a car gets "100MPG" like Cevy does with their Volt, and not taking into account the electricity usage is False advertising. Owners are surprised to discover their "fuel cost" (gas+electric)) is the same as a regular 40MPG car, and no money was saved versus just buying a Civic or Yaris. You see: I have zero patience for corporations that would try to defraud the customer in that fashion. I try to set the record straight when I can, so people are no misled with falsehoods.
It was an observation, not an insult. Your followup shows you still have no real experience other than these "friends". And, you're right. Chevy's claimed 100mpge is misleading, but not in the way you seem to think. (And, by the way, its a calculated value care of the EPA which is why the mpge is almost identical across all EVs.)
Here's hard numbers. My commute is 65 miles round trip.
On an average day, I use: .4 gallons of gas.
10.4 kwh of electricity
The 10.4kwh gets me typically 43 miles, at a total cost of 80 cents. The .4 gallons of gas gets me the additional 22 miles at a cost of $1.60.
So, I'm paying $2.40 a day to go 65 miles. At $4 a gallon for gas, that's the equivalent of 108mpg in *absolute cost*. The car thinks its 162mpg based on the actual gas used, but it does't know my electric cost.
Now, mind you, that commute is well above the national average. My prior commute was 28 miles, which is closer to average.
At 28 miles, I was using about 6.66 kwh. With charging overhead, that costs me about 55 cents a day. That's the cost equivalent of 203mpg in *absolute cost*.
So you're right, for the part of the country I live in, Chevy's 100mpg estimates are lies. The cost to drive is half that. And owners are definitely surprised to find they almost never get as low as 100 MPGe.
And in terms of fixed savings, a comparable car to the Volt would get maybe 30mpg, best case, although arguably there's not a good comparable car of equivalent size, power and quality, so that's really just approximate -- cars as quiet are a good bit lower in MPG.) But at 30mpg, I'd be spending $30 more a week in gas commuting. My hard savings is actually closer to $50 a week, because of weekend driving, over a 30mpg car. $200 a month.
And you really are either a dimwit or trying to twist facts to your worldview if you think a Volt is comparable to a Civic or a Yaris. A Lexus IS250 is probably closest. There aren't a lot of other luxury compacts anymore. Maybe a BMW 1 series, if they made a four door, or a Lexus CT200.
Really the problem is software patents. I think everyone can understand mechanical and chemical innovations being patented but software just doesn't seem to work as well under the patent system. Maybe if they just let copyright cover software it would solve most of the problem.
So why is a sequence of steps someone works out to transform chemicals to create a new molecule a less creative process than a sequence of steps to transform data in an algorithm? Or a sequence of steps to assemble gears and springs into a new watch mechanism?
I'm honestly curious. That differentiation seems to be at the core of the bizarre knee jerk reaction to software patents -- its almost like software engineers value their work less than the work that other engineers do, and I've always been puzzled why.
I feel the need to point out the HUGE difference between industrial patent technologies and a simple programming algorithm patented as IP. Actually I don't. If you don't understand the difference then I don't have the time, willingness, or patience to explain it to you.
That's a biasedview of it, ignorant in history, coming from the standpoint of someone versed in software. An algorithm implemented in code is more more or less obvious or "mathematical" than a physical mechanism transferring force around via gears and levers, and those are patented. There have historicaly been just as many, if not more, "obvious" patents granted on mechanics than software by a very large margin. The difference is, most of them expired a hundred years ago.
And thankfully for the US, the people responsible for rmaintaining the patent system understand that, and understand that the system is behaving as intended. I have absolutely no issue with software patents -- a new algorithm or technique is just as valid as a new combination of gears used to distribute power between axles. Its the result of the same problem solving train of thought and effort. The same is true of business process patents.
IMO, the *only* junk patents are the gene patents issued for *discovering* a gene, not *creating* a gene. Come up with a DNA sequence that creates a useful protein? Sure, patent it. Sequence some slime mold somewhere and find one? Don't think so. You don't get patents for engineering, you get patents for design.
TL;DR - Innovation does not happen because of patents, innovation happens, then patents happen.
Companies wouldn't bankroll the innovation without the protection they provide,
At a smaller scale, patent trolls were also the norm during the 19th century. It was a common practice for inventors to come up with some mechanical widget or mechanism and seek patent protection, and seek to sell it as a component of some larger mechanism the bigger companies were doing.
I could never be proud of having a 3.5" stiffie.
Great. Now I feel like I shouldn't be proud I had my hands on quite a few 8" floppies when I was a young child ...
Ah, those urban legends that didn't happen to you either, but everybody says they experienced them first person. :-)
Yeah, those didn't happen to me either, but I've heard them many times.
I find the photocopy story a little hard to imagine, but FWIW, the staple thing I saw MANY times, and the magnet thing at least a couple times.
Of course, the staple thing wasn't really a problem most of the time -- I can't recall for sure, but I doubt I ever saw one where someone actually hit the disk itself. And, frankly, the magnet wouldn't do much either. Moving (strong) magnets are a problem, a little fridge magnet in the corner isn't going to do anything. The data density was very low and the regions were fairly strongly magnetized.
So, I guess, at that level I agree -- urban legends in as much as the stories suggest there was some data disaster associated with it.
All you needed was a paper punch. And some reasonable hand strength No disassembly required.
No, but I do recall having had to make a hard-sector disk from a soft-sector disk using a punch and taking the disk itself out.
That was so long ago, I can't remember if it worked or not, I just remember having done it. Probably means it worked, as a failure would've been more memorable.
This. I can't even begin to think of an equivocal thing that has happened throughout history. Perhaps union busting might come close, but for sweet jesus sake, the way these patent lawyers are working is just sickening. It's funny how you hear so much about tort reform and other such garbage from politicians but you don't hear a peep about patent trolling or the abuse of IP rights which is more of a hampering force on our economy than all of the malpractice lawsuits in the history of forever ever have been or will be.
I feel the need to post this on ever damn patent story on here. Read your history. This is both nothing new, and pretty tame by patent battle standards. The industrialization of the US happened both in spite of, and *because* of these sort of patent battles. The patent battles over things like programmable looms and sewing equipment made Samsung vs Apple look like something Judge Judy would preside over. And the fallout of those battles during the 19th century established the foundation of the companies that went on to fund the continued industrial growth and innovation in the US.
And the answer to how you can innovate these days is simple -- the same way every other company did over the last 200 years. License what you think is critical, ignore the things you think you can get away with, and patent as much as you can because the cheapest way to license patents has always been to cross license patents. Oh, and really study your history. They say there's nothing new under the sun, and in IP and technical litigation, that is absolutely true.
>>>$20 translates into about 1400 miles of driving.
That's about 166 kWhr which means 119 watt-hours/mile. No EV in the world gets that kind of fuel economy. Typical average according to friends who own actual EVs are 500 watthours/mile. That would be $84 on my electric schedule.
You do realize that not everyone in the country pays the same amount for electricity as you? That actually pays for about 275kwh, and I get almost exactly 4.2 miles per kwh. The 100-some-odd miles remainder comes from the occasional times I can charge at the airport or the mall or something. Now, I wish I could get lower night rates like some places in the country -- it would cut that price by 3/4, and all that electricity would cost me $5, but they don't do that where I live.
Your "friends" have broken EVs if they are using 500 watt/hours per mile. The Tesla, the Focus EV, the Leaf, and the Volt all average half that power usage per mile. Maybe they are driving around with their e-brake on? Or maybe you're just making up friends and numbers in light of people responding who actually know what they're talking about?
Is the wind and small hydro something you put together or from the grid? While noteworthy and positive, I am skeptical that there isn't some coal getting burnt to power your car.
Well, the literal energy behind the electrons going into the car probably came from nuclear -- definitely not coal. But the power company essentially buys small hydro and wind power from small producers in a quantity to cover the kwh of the customers who buy into that program. So, no, the literal energy behind the 800ish kwh I buy a month didn't come from wind and hydro, but an additional 800kwh was bought by my power company to feed into their grid.
Its sort of like people who stopped buying BP during the oil spill and didn't understand that all the refineries pump their gas into the pipelines and immediately start pulling gas out the other end. The oil one company refines and the oil that company sells is rarely the same oil. Electricity works, obviously, the same way.
I fail to see the advantage of some future 70mpg car if I'm burning-up $200 a month recharging it with electricity.
All you've done is switch the country from pollution by gasoline to pollution by coal or natural gas. Plus you're not saving energy. It's still the same consumption level. I would be more impressed with a non-plugin car that actually squeezes 70 miles out of each gallon (like my insight or a Lupo TDI).
I spend about $20 on 100% renewable (wind and small hydro) electricity (at about a 25% surcharge for it), and that eliminates about 35 gallons of gas I burn a month. Those are hard numbers -- that $20 translates into about 1400 miles of driving.
So its much cheaper, and zero pollution for those miles.
You choose to fail to see the benefit because you choose to ignore facts to try to fit reality to your beliefs.
Physics isn't going to change for the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline.
My 400 pound motorcycle gets about 50mpg. It could get more if it wasn't so much fun, but I don't see much hope of a 3,000 pound car getting much more than that without changing fuel sources.
So stop burning gasoline. If you RTFA, that's the whole point of the law. You don't have to somehow magically get 55mpg on gas, you just need to burn less than a gallon of gas per 55 miles you drive. Use electrons. Use hydrogen. Lots of ways to do that.
And clearly the car companies agree. A quote from the NYT article:
Thirteen major automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, have endorsed the new standards.
At some point you just have to account for the laws of physics.
Pushing a vehicle at 80MPH down the highway is going to be hard to do and get 54.5 MPG. No matter how "hybrid" the car is, no matter how good your regenerative breaking.. once you're at highway speeds, air resistance becomes insurmountable.
I do most of my driving at around that speed, and average about 45mpg on the occasions my car is actually running on gas.
To meet the averages, it just needs to be quite a bit better at city speeds. When estimating those miles, regeneration helps quite a bit. And if you are a hybrid (series or parallel), that counts, too.
What the requirements basically are going to do is push most new cars to be EV, hybrid or EV with a series-hybrid range extender.
While it may take 12 years for those costs to come down, I fail to see the downside in that. If it was 1999, sure, but today you've got good examples in all the categories that meet a wide range of requirements.
Just be disciplined with design and code reviews and be done with it.
This doesn't sound like a plan to improve performance, it sounds like a plan to cut costs on hardware, now you can have one computer for every two devs.
I think its a technique favored by "programmers" who are averse to the process involved in "engineering". From that standpoint, its probably good. If you're not going to define requirements, properly document and review what needs to be written, and have a process in place to validate quality (in which code reviews is just one part), then putting two engineers in front of the screen helps.
I think its a false economy, though -- you're paying 2 salaries for some fraction of 2x the output of a single programmer, but are only solving two problems (distractions and productivity, and a drawn out code review). I think most teams would be far better off spending some of those dollars on the appropriate staff to manage the planning, and enforcing good engineering practices.
I think the "web 2.0" crap ten years ago was really the start of "throw bodies at the problem, we can tweak, adjust or rewrite this later" mentality. Pair programming is, IMO, just a reaction to the inherant problems with that mentality among teams that consist entirely of people who aren't experienced in engineering process.
However, if they couldn't use artificial scarcity to make money, then you could have all games for merely their cost to create (plus a little profit to run things).
Unfortunately, that's an unrealistic view of the economics of the situation. If 100% of the time you could guarantee that a particular business interest will break even plus a little profit, then it would work. But you can't, so the investment in time and resources, and the associated risk, is paid for by the reward of greater profits. When you eliminate the profit motive, you eliminate the risk-taking, and very little actually gets done. Sure, you could go the Kickstarter route and say "everyone who wants this game, pony up $60 now and when we hit $20m, we'll build it." -- that does't work in the real world either. Someone has to pay the salary of the people building it during that time, and the buyers are now shouldering the risk that they hit $20m in funding and never deliver the game. That's not a workable model, either.
This is not to belittle the accomplishment... for 3-d printing that's a very large component to print, and also the stereotype of 3-d printed stuff being weak seems to be finally going away....
Its okay to belittle it... only the marketing department at the company selling the printer would consider that much of a savings.
Anyone who has built a car from the ground up will tell you the body is the easy part. And in a car that is a shell-over-space-frame, a non-critical part.
Maybe i'm wrong but I've never seen Ford sue Chevy over the size and shape of their trucks. They all have similar features because they are friggin obvious.
That's because you're in tech. If you were in automotive engineering, you'd be laughing at the cute little patent scuffles the software space has gotten themselves into.
There are thousands, or tens of thousands, of patents covering every tiny little detail of a car you buy. Lawsuits have been the norm for a hundred years. You don't see it because there isn't a "slashcar.org" website, there are a lot fewer people in the middle of it, and most importantly there's a substantial patent thicket in the automotive industry. At this point each of the car companies has enough IP, their cross licensing agreements end up basically even and its all a wash. Innovation happens largely because it helps move that needle year-on-year. Ford and Toyota kept one-upping each other in the atkinson/electric hybrid space, and little bits of money flowed one way or the other over the years. Tesla now is making money from a bunch of companies because of their IP -- something that helps substantially when it comes to the IP they need to build their cars.
IMO, you see a lot of agression now in the consumer technology space because of Moore's law and the exponential growth going on -- you have a very narrow window to make a lot of money with something, and you need to use whatever tools you've got to justify the investment. Because of that, I expect it'll only get worse before things totally implode.
It was Samsung that chose to copy Apple designs. Most other Android handset makers did not so slavishly copy the design of the iPhone in regards to hardware and software, so they are far more immune to being sued.
You don't see Apple suing Amazon over the Kindle Fire, or Nokia over the Lumia. It is quite possible to make distinctive designs that do not mirror the iPhone, and in fact preferable for long term health. If your product just looks and acts like an iPhone, eventually people will just switch to the "real thing". Far better to make it distinctive in a way that people may grow to prefer so moving to an iPhone would feel wrong to the user because it was different.
There are cross licensing agreements with most of the big names making tablets and cell phones, which is the reason you don't see those. Google "patent thicket" -- its the norm in industry, and has been for 200 yars.
You only see litigation like this show up when the two companies involved don't have equitable patent portfolios, and the one with the lesser portfolio does't want to pay for things. That's why you see various figures for how much every Android phone makes Microsoft in licensing -- the patent cross licensing agreements are imbalanced in a direction that favors Microsoft. In other cases, Microsoft may be paying something. It all works out in the end, when people "play by the rules".
IANAL, but my blink on Samsung/Apple is that they probably had fairly comparable patent portfolios, but the places where Apple was using Samsung IP was predominantly in cases where Apple was *buying* from Samsung, leaving Samsung at a disadvantage where a cross licensing deal was concerned -- to the point where they thought it was economicaly viable to fight or ignore the patents. And Apple is stuck in a "use it or lose it" situation with their design patents. Add to it the fact that Samsung is still the bigger cell phone manufacturer, and the ecosystem around the iPad and Tablet are the only reason Apple exists at this point, and Apple is in a fight for its life. Samsung can go on just fine without tablets and phones -- Apple can't go on without the iPad and iPhone. Too much of their earnings are coupled to it.
You can bet that Apple doesn't care one tiny bit about the money -- injunctions against sales are all Apple cares about. A percent drop in market share will shave far more than a billion from Apple's value. They need to keep their market share growing as long as possible, so they can justify their stock price. Its a ponzi scheme that will fail eventually -- like every other company that has grown to its size, but the powers that be just need to keep it going long enough to get out.