As someone with a car just under 4.5 lbs/hp, I am quite aware of that.
And with very few affordable options, there's nothing you can do about the weight of a compact car that will seat four and pass federal crash standards. You're not going to get a car like that below 3000lbs without going aluminum or carbon fiber, neither of which are affordable options in their price range. (This is particularly true when insurance is taken into account -- repair costs are an order of magnitude higher for aluminum or carbon fiber based vehicles in non-totalling accidents because of the difficulty or impossibility of repairing damage rather than replacing).
A discussion of weight doesn't change the fact that the original poster is incorrect about his assumption that performance is automatically going to be the same on an electrically-powered vehicle when running on battery, accelerating on stored charge in a capacitor bank or running directly off its generator. The amount of power available to drive the motor is different in all those scenarios, so the only way you will get identical performance is if you artificially limit all of them to the performance characteristics of the lowest performing mode of operation.
Thats not really a safe assumption to make, although it may be true in the case of the Volt.
Electric motors can draw enormous amounts of power. Even a fairly low end car these days can peak out at around 100hp, although likely not except when you mash on the gas trying to merge or something.
100hp is 75 kilowatts. With electical losses and so forth, you're going to need to pump maybe 90 kilowatts to the motor to get that equivalent amount of "oomph" when you mash on the pedal.
With the right battery pack, you can easily draw power like that for some short period of time, however if you are running purely off the generator in the car, you *can't* draw that much power unless the generator is turning out 90 kilowatts, too... or 120hp.
You won't put a 120hp generator into a car like the Volt, because of both weight and fuel efficiency issues. You want something that runs quietly, you want it to be light, and able to start up and get to its efficiency peak quickly.
So, you can design a car where the performance is same on battery or generator, however if you do so you're either lowering the power on battery to match the generator, or wasting energy during the periods you are running on battery lugging around a generator that is oversized for your application.
Having been on both sides of that -- at a company ignorantly producing software that required IE, and at companies that had to support systems still running IE because of that precide problem, its not organizations standardizing on the MS suite, the problem stemmed from the shortage of qualified web application developers at the tail end of the dot-com boom. There were vast numbers of "developers" getting into the space that had absolutely no idea what they were doing, and the non-technical companies who were hiring engineers into corporate IT departments *really* got the short stick when it came to hiring. When real software companies were snapping up anyone who could muddle through code, you can imagine the sort of engineers that were ending up at insurance companies and hospitals and companies like that.
The organizations were stuck with piles of crap because of their engineers, not because of some grand corporate policy or strategy. Find some old-timers at those companies and buy them a beer and they'll tell you all about it.
I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.
I'd be willing to bet its almost entirely loss of Firefox users (like myself), as Firefox has become a bloated, buggy, slow pile of crap that would make IE6 proud.
Considering that it generally costs $30-$40k to file a reasonable software patent, even if you're only filing it for potential defensive purposes (which is wise, these days... believe me... BTDT)... its a pretty damn good thing for the patent attorneys.
Depends where you are, and the type of reader crowd you are talking about.
I've been in cafes where the ratio of Kindle to print readers was easily 2:1, and probably higher. If you travel a lot on business, the numbers are clearly through the roof on flights. That makes sense -- lugging books on business trips is just lousy.
What Amazon has said repeatedly is among the demographic that tends to buy a lot of books, the Kindle is taking over. Its telling when they can release numbers showing that 1/3 of their sales of books where electronic copies are available are electronic.
Nothing in the article suggests its replacing paper now, they're just saying for the first time they sold more ebooks than real books on a day, regardless of the reason. Thats still a significant step.
I got an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, because Amazon has no mechanism to gift Kindle books (which is strangely shortsighted, but not the topic on hand...)
I did buy one book with it, but three other books I was going to buy the kindle copies were substantially more than the print copies (in one case, more than double the cost -- $19.97 versus something in the $8 range for a *hardcover*!)
I'm not sure if others have noticed, but lately Kindle books have been trending upwards in price, and its pretty common now that paperback editions are less than the Kindle copies, whereas six months ago they tended to be cheaper, if only by a nickel or something...)
I don't know if prices jumped on Christmas because they expected this, and will come back down, or if these higher prices I noticed on that day will persist into the new year. I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking -- gaming prices is a bad idea when you start getting competition that people actually are talking about.
Yes they did. They bought a book being sold by someone who didn't have rights to it, its every bit as stolen as buying a screener from some dude on the street in NYC.
Its better the way it is. The reading is more natural, its easier to hold, its easier to use than a book in confined settings (or laying in bed, I've found).
Just because books had facing pages for 400 years doesn't mean its automatically the ultimate user experience for reading...
If you bought a stolen physical book, that book can be taken back from you.
The fact that its unlikely to happen is not relevant to the discussion.
Amazon did better than you'd get if you bought stolen goods -- they refunded the money. If you bought virtually any other stolen item, you'd be out the item and your money.
Its actually in line with a more common cancer treatment (that some oncologists believe may have a lot of promise) that was used prior to the discovery of x-rays and other forms of radiation... back in the early 20th century, a common treatment was the injection of infectious fluid (bacteria basically) into the tumor, which (we know today, they didn't then) caused the body's immune system to go into overdrive and as a side effect take out the tumor as well.
Radiation became the norm in the 30's and 40's (when it was used to treat just about everything), and the problem is, radiation kills or weakens the immune system, so you can't use both treatments. There's been a lot more interest lately in research to determine how well immune triggers work in treating cancer, but its deemed unethical to not use radiation/chemo, which can't be used with those older techniques.
This seems to be a similar line of thought (and may be related to the increased interest in the last half dozen years) -- get the immune system "woken up" to deal with cancer, in this case presumably before cancer cells can grow into tumors.
They're a company of 40,000+ engineers, a substantial portion of which are not total douchebags, unlike how people on Slashdot seem to imagine them.
Lots of them use open source, lots of them like the idea of open source but, like many on here, have to juggle the realities of a paycheck with their own feelings on the matter.
When you're a company the size of Microsoft, even if you have an internal upswelling of support for open sourcing things, you have to fight both the business people and the lawyers. Its easier to turn a dingy than an oil supertanker, and they're not in a position (like many companies *coughSun*) that open source things in a very two-faced way, on one side claiming they follow The Faith and on the other, really just running a hail mary play in the hope that it'll shore up dwindling relevance.
I'd argue Microsoft opening up things like this is much better for Open Source, as a concept, because they're doing it because they *can*, not because they have to.
There's a reason the.NET team has been so helpful with things like Mono and Moonlight -- when the claws of the business side start to let go, its what the engineers want to be doing.
If you're looking for conspiracy theories, there's a better one that is actually backed by better facts.
Its a common activity of the federal government (and arguably not an unreasonable one) to spend billions of dollars on projects that are not intended to ever succeed in the role they are sold to the public as, but rather to support industries that are deemed critical to national interest or security.
The ISS/Space Shuttle is probably the best and most widely known example. This was hundreds of billions spent to keep engineers and, more importantly, defense contractors, employed and solvent between DoD contracts, and to ensure that the skills they collectively had weren't lost through retirement or otherwise.
The US has the same problem with the skills around nuclear (fission and fusion) research and engineering, particularly since we stopped building and testing nuclear weapons. The argument has been made before, because the scientific justification is so bad, that many of these projects like the NIF are done for the same reason, and focus deliberately shifts around projects as the need for the project to actually produce something starts to come to a head.
IMO, the NIF alone is a giant waste of money, but if it serves as an act of corporate welfare to keep the scientists and contractors involved in the project active and up to date, then perhaps its not a bad investment.
But I don't think any experts who aren't getting a paycheck related to it really expect a viable solution to fusion power to come from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just run the cord up the back of your shirt, no one can see a thing.
I... uh... mean, hypothetically.
I don't know if that has antibacterial stuff or not, but I've used silly putty to get crap out from the keys of my keyboard before.
As someone with a car just under 4.5 lbs/hp, I am quite aware of that.
And with very few affordable options, there's nothing you can do about the weight of a compact car that will seat four and pass federal crash standards. You're not going to get a car like that below 3000lbs without going aluminum or carbon fiber, neither of which are affordable options in their price range. (This is particularly true when insurance is taken into account -- repair costs are an order of magnitude higher for aluminum or carbon fiber based vehicles in non-totalling accidents because of the difficulty or impossibility of repairing damage rather than replacing).
A discussion of weight doesn't change the fact that the original poster is incorrect about his assumption that performance is automatically going to be the same on an electrically-powered vehicle when running on battery, accelerating on stored charge in a capacitor bank or running directly off its generator. The amount of power available to drive the motor is different in all those scenarios, so the only way you will get identical performance is if you artificially limit all of them to the performance characteristics of the lowest performing mode of operation.
Thats not really a safe assumption to make, although it may be true in the case of the Volt.
Electric motors can draw enormous amounts of power. Even a fairly low end car these days can peak out at around 100hp, although likely not except when you mash on the gas trying to merge or something.
100hp is 75 kilowatts. With electical losses and so forth, you're going to need to pump maybe 90 kilowatts to the motor to get that equivalent amount of "oomph" when you mash on the pedal.
With the right battery pack, you can easily draw power like that for some short period of time, however if you are running purely off the generator in the car, you *can't* draw that much power unless the generator is turning out 90 kilowatts, too... or 120hp.
You won't put a 120hp generator into a car like the Volt, because of both weight and fuel efficiency issues. You want something that runs quietly, you want it to be light, and able to start up and get to its efficiency peak quickly.
So, you can design a car where the performance is same on battery or generator, however if you do so you're either lowering the power on battery to match the generator, or wasting energy during the periods you are running on battery lugging around a generator that is oversized for your application.
If you don't trust the host computer, why would you unlock the device at all?
Once its unlocked and mounted, anything on the computer can access it anyway.
Kindle is a real word.
Whatever it is that's using 450MB of RAM and chewing up 5x the amount of time loading pages.
That's a good place to start.
Using Microsoft and using IE6 are two very different things. The discussion in question was about IE6.
These days people stay on IE6 because of apps they've got that won't work on anything else.
Having been on both sides of that -- at a company ignorantly producing software that required IE, and at companies that had to support systems still running IE because of that precide problem, its not organizations standardizing on the MS suite, the problem stemmed from the shortage of qualified web application developers at the tail end of the dot-com boom. There were vast numbers of "developers" getting into the space that had absolutely no idea what they were doing, and the non-technical companies who were hiring engineers into corporate IT departments *really* got the short stick when it came to hiring. When real software companies were snapping up anyone who could muddle through code, you can imagine the sort of engineers that were ending up at insurance companies and hospitals and companies like that.
The organizations were stuck with piles of crap because of their engineers, not because of some grand corporate policy or strategy. Find some old-timers at those companies and buy them a beer and they'll tell you all about it.
I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.
I'd be willing to bet its almost entirely loss of Firefox users (like myself), as Firefox has become a bloated, buggy, slow pile of crap that would make IE6 proud.
Considering that it generally costs $30-$40k to file a reasonable software patent, even if you're only filing it for potential defensive purposes (which is wise, these days... believe me... BTDT)... its a pretty damn good thing for the patent attorneys.
Not so much for the rest of us.
Thats what I call spooky action at a distance.
I think the GP was trying to be funny, since Phil Platt's article mentions that specifically.
DARPAs point is to fund things that are going to fail. If every project succeeds, then DARPA is failing at its mission.
Perhaps the fact that you didn't understand that was part of the problem on your project?
Depends where you are, and the type of reader crowd you are talking about.
I've been in cafes where the ratio of Kindle to print readers was easily 2:1, and probably higher. If you travel a lot on business, the numbers are clearly through the roof on flights. That makes sense -- lugging books on business trips is just lousy.
What Amazon has said repeatedly is among the demographic that tends to buy a lot of books, the Kindle is taking over. Its telling when they can release numbers showing that 1/3 of their sales of books where electronic copies are available are electronic.
Nothing in the article suggests its replacing paper now, they're just saying for the first time they sold more ebooks than real books on a day, regardless of the reason. Thats still a significant step.
I got an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, because Amazon has no mechanism to gift Kindle books (which is strangely shortsighted, but not the topic on hand...)
I did buy one book with it, but three other books I was going to buy the kindle copies were substantially more than the print copies (in one case, more than double the cost -- $19.97 versus something in the $8 range for a *hardcover*!)
I'm not sure if others have noticed, but lately Kindle books have been trending upwards in price, and its pretty common now that paperback editions are less than the Kindle copies, whereas six months ago they tended to be cheaper, if only by a nickel or something...)
I don't know if prices jumped on Christmas because they expected this, and will come back down, or if these higher prices I noticed on that day will persist into the new year. I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking -- gaming prices is a bad idea when you start getting competition that people actually are talking about.
Yes they did. They bought a book being sold by someone who didn't have rights to it, its every bit as stolen as buying a screener from some dude on the street in NYC.
Have you used an eBook, like daily?
Its better the way it is. The reading is more natural, its easier to hold, its easier to use than a book in confined settings (or laying in bed, I've found).
Just because books had facing pages for 400 years doesn't mean its automatically the ultimate user experience for reading ...
If you bought a stolen physical book, that book can be taken back from you.
The fact that its unlikely to happen is not relevant to the discussion.
Amazon did better than you'd get if you bought stolen goods -- they refunded the money. If you bought virtually any other stolen item, you'd be out the item and your money.
I think a bird watcher guide probably works better with color ...
Its actually in line with a more common cancer treatment (that some oncologists believe may have a lot of promise) that was used prior to the discovery of x-rays and other forms of radiation... back in the early 20th century, a common treatment was the injection of infectious fluid (bacteria basically) into the tumor, which (we know today, they didn't then) caused the body's immune system to go into overdrive and as a side effect take out the tumor as well.
Radiation became the norm in the 30's and 40's (when it was used to treat just about everything), and the problem is, radiation kills or weakens the immune system, so you can't use both treatments. There's been a lot more interest lately in research to determine how well immune triggers work in treating cancer, but its deemed unethical to not use radiation/chemo, which can't be used with those older techniques.
This seems to be a similar line of thought (and may be related to the increased interest in the last half dozen years) -- get the immune system "woken up" to deal with cancer, in this case presumably before cancer cells can grow into tumors.
Do you know how people get Mono?
No one on Slashdot has mono.
What is their angle?
They're a company of 40,000+ engineers, a substantial portion of which are not total douchebags, unlike how people on Slashdot seem to imagine them.
Lots of them use open source, lots of them like the idea of open source but, like many on here, have to juggle the realities of a paycheck with their own feelings on the matter.
When you're a company the size of Microsoft, even if you have an internal upswelling of support for open sourcing things, you have to fight both the business people and the lawyers. Its easier to turn a dingy than an oil supertanker, and they're not in a position (like many companies *coughSun*) that open source things in a very two-faced way, on one side claiming they follow The Faith and on the other, really just running a hail mary play in the hope that it'll shore up dwindling relevance.
I'd argue Microsoft opening up things like this is much better for Open Source, as a concept, because they're doing it because they *can*, not because they have to.
There's a reason the .NET team has been so helpful with things like Mono and Moonlight -- when the claws of the business side start to let go, its what the engineers want to be doing.
Drop off Google, and you cease to exist as far as a very large percentage of the average Internet users are concerned.
I doubt any company in Google's top 1000 is worth so little that its worth $1m cash to shut their business down.
That said, if Mark Cuban is reading this, I'll gladly remove my sites from Google for $1m.
If you're looking for conspiracy theories, there's a better one that is actually backed by better facts.
Its a common activity of the federal government (and arguably not an unreasonable one) to spend billions of dollars on projects that are not intended to ever succeed in the role they are sold to the public as, but rather to support industries that are deemed critical to national interest or security.
The ISS/Space Shuttle is probably the best and most widely known example. This was hundreds of billions spent to keep engineers and, more importantly, defense contractors, employed and solvent between DoD contracts, and to ensure that the skills they collectively had weren't lost through retirement or otherwise.
The US has the same problem with the skills around nuclear (fission and fusion) research and engineering, particularly since we stopped building and testing nuclear weapons. The argument has been made before, because the scientific justification is so bad, that many of these projects like the NIF are done for the same reason, and focus deliberately shifts around projects as the need for the project to actually produce something starts to come to a head.
IMO, the NIF alone is a giant waste of money, but if it serves as an act of corporate welfare to keep the scientists and contractors involved in the project active and up to date, then perhaps its not a bad investment.
But I don't think any experts who aren't getting a paycheck related to it really expect a viable solution to fusion power to come from it.
There is big physics that is a good place to sink money, and big physics that is not.
Only the physicists and engineers who are payed by grants in this area seem to think its a good use of money.
And unfortunately projects like this pull billions of taxpayer money from research projects that may actually benefit society.
The NIF is the ISS of the physics world.