I'm not sure I understand your example at all. I doubt you'll see a $80 or $120 microprocessor in a game console whose total BOM cost is under $200. High-end processors are, more or less by definition, not on the maximum-value part of the curve. However...
I don't know for sure how many transistors are in each of those processors, but one web reference I found had them at 54.3 million and 63.5 million, respectively. That's about a 17% increase in # of transistors.
After adjusting for inflation, the price difference is about $10, or a little under 10%. So you get 17% more processor for 10% higher cost.
As long as Moore's Law significantly outpaces inflation, you should see the cost of most consumer electronics continue to decrease, while their capability increases.
If $200 buys you X transistors this year, and 1.5X transistors in 2008, then as long as inflation doesn't exceed 22% a year, you'll be getting more capability for less money each time.
Or at least that's true as long as the cost of the chips needed for an acceptable game machine make up a significant portion of the cost of the machine. When the chips are (much) less expensive than the rest of the components, the relative cost curve will flatten out.
Fundamentally, the problem with volumetric imaging for a video game is that you expend large amounts of storage space and CPU power tracking parts of the environment that the player will never see or interact with in any way.
The more traditional vertex mesh is a much less data-intensive way of representing the parts of the world that the player actually cares about. Unless tunneling through terrain or slicing objects in half on arbitrary planes is a big part of your gameplay, it's probably not worth the effort. Of course, that ability to arbitrarily slice into a volume is precisely why medical imaging uses the voxel model.
The confusion in Intel's product names reflected the confusion inside the company, I think. At the time the various crazy "Extreme Edition", "Xeon", and "Pentium M" names came out, Intel had three (or four? I forget) separate engineering teams, working on entirely different implementations of the Pentium architecture.
It seems like the "NetBurst" design is well and truly dead now. The laptop chips are making their way into the desktop arena, and therefore it makes sense for the company to rationalize the naming, since every product in the Pentium family will be built on the new foundation.
The "Core Duo 2" name doesn't really roll off the tongue, though. It's not clear to me that they'll be any more successful in getting across that this is "new and improved" than they were with the Pentium 2,3,4 series. I wonder if my recollection that "everybody" knew the performance difference between 286, 386, and 486 chips is just an artifact of how much smaller the PC enthusiast market was those days?
The PointCast business model in a nutshell: Provide free client software for download, that maintains a constant connection to the PointCast service, even (especially) when the machine is otherwise idle. When the constant traffic from all of these (unattended) machines brings a corporate network to its knees, offer the victim an "enterprise server" product that caches the PointCast traffic locally, thereby restoring their external network bandwidth to what it was before. Oh, and while you're at it, charge your customers many thousands of dollars for this "service".
Or, if your IT department is at all on the ball, they just block access to PointCast, and remove the software from all machines in the company. I gotta tell you, selling an expensive "solution" to a problem your company created isn't going to get you in the good graces of corporate clients.
all those people who said it would be a cold day in Hell when Apple moved to Intel chips
Anybody who said that just hadn't been paying attention. The first Developer Preview of Mac OS X (Rhapsody) included an Intel version as well as a PowerPC version.
There are hundreds of references to byte-order compatibility issues all through the Apple API documentation and header files. They have even kept a version of Darwin for Intel PC's available all these years.
Okay, they never came out and publicly announced that they were switching to Intel until the work was mostly already done, but anybody who didn't see that a major architectural change was coming (eventually) was just blind.
There's no easy answer. On a traditional clocked processor, each instruction takes a certain number of clock cycles. In the async case, everything just takes however long it takes. In fact, some arithmetic operations might take variable amounts of time depending on the value of the operands.
Given an equivalent process, layout technology, and number of transistors, an async design will be at least somewhat faster and vastly more power-efficient than a clocked design.
But none of those things are going to be equivalent in the real world - except possibly the process that ARM designs to. So comparisons will be difficult.
I was diagnosed at 16 years old or so, and they told me I was too old for treatment. It took me several years of effort, but I finally managed to get to the point where my eyes now focus together more often than not.
When I was 20, I couldn't read with my left eye closed. Now (at 30), I can. Depth perception is a useful tool folks - don't give up on it without a fight!
My lazy eye wasn't diagnosed until I was 18 or so, at which point I was told nothing could be done about it, because I was too old. Once I actually understood the problem, and made an effort to use both eyes on a regular basis, I actually gotr quite a lot better.
I still have problems with one eye drifting, especially when I'm tired, but I now have stereo vision more often than not. It's pretty cool, actually.
In my case, I was working in field service for a small factory automation manufacturer (this was nearly 20 years ago, now). We get a call that a customer is having a problem with their system failing the security check at start-up.
At that time, our software was copy-protected by means of a parallel port dongle that absolutely would NOT work correctly if there was a printer daisy-chained off the dongle, and the printer was turned off. Because this was an entirely predictable failure mode, the error message read something like: "Security verification error. Make sure your software key is installed on the parallel port, and ENSURE THAT THE PRINTER IS TURNED ON (if you have one)"
So the first question I ask the guy when he gets transferred over to me is whether or not he has the key installed, and whether his printer is turned on. "Of course it is - I wouldn't be calling if I hadn't already checked that!". So I ask him exactly what the error message is, and he tells me it's the one I paraphrased above, which you will recall only happens if your printer is turned off.
Now, it's possible that his key has gone bad in a way that no other key we've had fail before ever has, but it doesn't seem terribly likely to me, so I ask him if he can check to make sure the little green light on the printer is illuminated. He claims that it is, and starts getting very agitated about how much of a problem it is for him that he can't run the analysis he needs to run, and we need to fix this pronto.
So, I load a new printer, a new key, a new cable, and anything else that might be useful into the company van, and drive out to this factory (2.5 hours one way). When I get there, I go into the plant, turn on the printer, and drive back.
Total time onsite: less than 5 minutes Total drive time: 6 hours (rush-hour on the way back) Total cost to customer: $350 (or about $600 in today's dollars)
1 hour minimum labor @ $50/hour
6 hours drive time @ $50/hour
[[ insert your own "priceless" MasterCard advertisement here ]]
Anybody remember from chem what happens when you place two dissimilar metals against each other?
Uh, nothing, unless there's an electrolyte in contact with both. I think if the back of your computer is regularly getting splashed with salt water, you might want to think about moving it to another location...
I scanned through the document, and the only thing they said was the it'll be in the next major release, and that they typically do releases every 18-24 months. So, if CS2 came out in April or May of 2005, the next version could be out anytime between this November and next May.
Of course, that's only their "typical" release schedule. If there are other factors in play (like, for example, new Pro Macs being released), they might very well do an atypical release schedule for CS3.
Azerus is one of the leading BitTorrent clients, and is written in Java, which I think is an odd language for an I/O intensive task, but it sure is popular.
Actually I/O intensive applications like a BitTorrent client are really good places to use Java. 1. Since the application gets started up very rarely (once per login session, probably), the overhead involved with launching the JVM and JITting all the code isn't as noticeable/objectionable. If you're going to be downloading stuff for hours, do you care if the application starts in 5 seconds or.5 seconds? 2. Since the application is I/O bound, and does minimal processing on the data it handles, it doesn't matter that Java execution speed is slow - all of the I/O happens in native libraries (or directly in the OS), anyway.
On the other hand, an application like Photoshop really would be a bad candidate for Java (because the performance is almost all CPU-limited), as would the various little server processes and command-line tools on UNIX systems (since they start and stop a lot).
With the exception of a very small number of high-power transmissions aimed at particular stars, there's basically zero chance of any ET civilization picking up signals from Earth.
I really ought to have hung on to the calculations I made for the last SETI discussion I participarted in, but the inverse-square law ensures that the power of an unfocused radio transmission decreases dramatically over interstellar distances.
Basically, it'd be a near thing for current SETI programs to pick up a radio signal aimed directly at the Earth from a nearby star, with a transmitter channeling a few million watts into a tight (well, relatively so) beam. There's zero chance that we'd be able to detect the equivalent of TV transmissions from 10 light years away or so.
Even if the ETs have significantly better receiving equipment, they'll still be limited by background noise. They also have to deal with the rather huge number of candidate stars to monitor - unless you're willing to devote an enormous amount of resources, you'll only be able to survey a small number of stars at any time.
Definitely true - under the right conditions
on
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I had a Windows XP machine get infected by an RPC worm while I was still in the process of re-installing Windows after a hardware crash. My former employer now has a rule that you have to install at least SP2 from a CD before you can attach to the internal network at all.
In this case, I was attached to a network subnet with multiple other machines that were already infected. In the sense that our corporate network had an active worm infstation, this is admittedly a fairly extreme case.
At home, you're probably more likely to run into this with some sorts of broadband connections. If you don't have a NAT router or firewall, and you're on a subnet with lots of other machines, you're probably at risk.
In UK English, corporations are collections of individual people, hence "Apple are...". In the US, a corporation is considered one entity, so we say "Apple is...".
I've occasionally wondered whether the difference attributes to the status of corporations as legal persons in the US as opposed to elsewhere...
Followup: I couldn't find an equivalent fuel economy site for Europe, but this official-looking site: http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/
has a bunch of data on UK fuel economy. Of course, they use a different testing methodology over there, which makes comparisons against the US figures somewhat problematic. If we assume the difference in methodology isn't critical, we can use the Prius as a calibration poiunt against the more fuel-efficient cars in their database.
Toyota shows the US Prius as having a 55 MPG combined city/highway rating. Converting that to Imperial gallons so we can compare with the data on the vcacarfueldata.org.uk site, that's 66 MPG (Imperial). Their chart shows 65.6 for the Prius, which seems like a pretty fair match.
Okay, so what gets better mileage than the Prius? * Citroen C1, C2, C3 (with 1.4 Diesel engine) * Renault Clio (with 1.5 Diesel engine) * Fiat New Panda (with 1.3 Diesel) * Honda Insight (the other high-MPG gas-electric hybrid)
Okay, ignoring the Insight (which is a two-seater, and a gas-burner, anyway), the best of these is about 5% better in overall MPG than the Prius. To be fair, some of them do have substantially higher Extra-Urban (highway) ratings. Probably any of the Citroens on the list would get better MPG on a relatively-long highway trip than my Prius does.
It's worth noting that all of these cars are substantially smaller than the Prius, though. Like 3 feet shorter, half the luggage space, that sort of thing. These are *tiny* cars.
All of the diesel cars produce roughly 5-20% more CO2/mile than the Prius, and 10-40 TIMES as much NOx pollution. With those sorts of numbers, I'm pretty sure I won't be seeing these on the roads in California any time soon...
Anyway, to get back on point - there are certainly cars available outside the US which get better gas mileage than the Toyota Prius, but there's nothing magical about these cars - they're just small cars with Diesel engines.
And it's not like the majority of cars "over there" are way more efficient than the Prius - these are specific fuel-economy-focused models of smaller cars.
You know, people keep saying that there are these super-high MPG diesels out there, but I'm just not seeing them. Maybe they're available in Europe, or something, but in the US, the absolute Diesel car with the highest fuel economy I can buy is something like Volkswagon's Jetta or Beetle Diesels, which only get ~45 MPG, which is 10% less than a Prius.
Also keep in mind that air quality standards vary from country to country, so a very-high mileage car available for sale in another country might (read: most likely won't) be legal for sale in the US.
Putting a solar panel on a hybrid car doesn't make economic sense, the last time I did the math. For discussion, say solar panels run about $4-$6 per Watt, and you'd probably be able to fit about 100 Watts worth on top of your car.
Over the course of a day, you'd generate maybe.6 KWH of electricity, which is the equivalent of about 2 ounces of gasoline. So, given the roughly $0.06 you'd save on gas every day, it'd take...approximately 18 years to break even, best case. That's not even counting the custom electronics someone would have to build to interface the panel to the high-voltage battery in the car.
On the other hand, you say you have a 20 mile round-trip commute? You might actually want to look into an all-electric car then. That might actually work out, especially if you can recharge at work.
Actually, Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive is a really sweet piece of engineering. When you compare the number of moving parts vs a conventional transmission (or better yet, an automatic), it's really quite striking how much simpler the HSD actually is.
Instead of having multiple meshed sets of gears, a clutch, and synchronizers, shift gates, and all the rest, you basically have two electric motors and a differential gear. This gives you the equivalent of an infinite number of gear ratios, as well as allowing the motor to turn completely off when it isn't needed, and enabling regenerative braking as well.
In addition to the drivetrain, the mere fact that there's all this electric power available encourages its use elsewhere on the car, as well. The Prius has electric motors instead of belt-driven pumps for the air conditioning and power steering, for example. That's two more components that don't need to have clutches between them and the engine (or a power-robbing bypass valve, in the case of the steering pump.
I don't know that all of these add up to "fewer" mechanical parts in the Prius, but I'd definitely argue that the mechanical systems are in general simpler and should be more reliable. I'd take a directly-connected electric motor over a belt-driven pump with a clutch any day of the week.
If you have a car that is at the end of it's life and has to be replaced, get a hybrid. Getting one to replace your 10 yr old Accord because they are "cool" may not be helping anyone. We need to get the 15+ yr old smog spewing, gas eating, american cars off the road. That will make the most impact on our environment.
You may want to think this through a little more. When someone does replace a 10-year old Accord with a Prius, what do you suppose happens to the Accord? In a lot of cases, it'll be sold as a used car to someone who's currently driving an ancient uber-polluting gas-guzzler.
An adequate supply of inexpensive used fuel-efficient cars helps the environment rather a lot, actually.
As I understand it, the hybrids can use engines that are more efficient (such as Miller cycles) because they don't need to work across a wide range of power and speed.
My Prius averaged just about 50MPG on a trip from San Jose to Los Angeles - that's 100% freeway driving, and more than 350 miles.
I seriously doubt there are many other cars that could make that trip with higher overall MPG.
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Moore's law has nothing to do with clock speeds - it's all about the number of transistors on a minimal-cost chip.
There's a pretty good description here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
I'm not sure I understand your example at all. I doubt you'll see a $80 or $120 microprocessor in a game console whose total BOM cost is under $200. High-end processors are, more or less by definition, not on the maximum-value part of the curve. However...
I don't know for sure how many transistors are in each of those processors, but one web reference I found had them at 54.3 million and 63.5 million, respectively. That's about a 17% increase in # of transistors.
After adjusting for inflation, the price difference is about $10, or a little under 10%. So you get 17% more processor for 10% higher cost.
QED.
As long as Moore's Law significantly outpaces inflation, you should see the cost of most consumer electronics continue to decrease, while their capability increases.
If $200 buys you X transistors this year, and 1.5X transistors in 2008, then as long as inflation doesn't exceed 22% a year, you'll be getting more capability for less money each time.
Or at least that's true as long as the cost of the chips needed for an acceptable game machine make up a significant portion of the cost of the machine. When the chips are (much) less expensive than the rest of the components, the relative cost curve will flatten out.
-Mark
Fundamentally, the problem with volumetric imaging for a video game is that you expend large amounts of storage space and CPU power tracking parts of the environment that the player will never see or interact with in any way.
The more traditional vertex mesh is a much less data-intensive way of representing the parts of the world that the player actually cares about. Unless tunneling through terrain or slicing objects in half on arbitrary planes is a big part of your gameplay, it's probably not worth the effort. Of course, that ability to arbitrarily slice into a volume is precisely why medical imaging uses the voxel model.
The confusion in Intel's product names reflected the confusion inside the company, I think. At the time the various crazy "Extreme Edition", "Xeon", and "Pentium M" names came out, Intel had three (or four? I forget) separate engineering teams, working on entirely different implementations of the Pentium architecture.
It seems like the "NetBurst" design is well and truly dead now. The laptop chips are making their way into the desktop arena, and therefore it makes sense for the company to rationalize the naming, since every product in the Pentium family will be built on the new foundation.
The "Core Duo 2" name doesn't really roll off the tongue, though. It's not clear to me that they'll be any more successful in getting across that this is "new and improved" than they were with the Pentium 2,3,4 series. I wonder if my recollection that "everybody" knew the performance difference between 286, 386, and 486 chips is just an artifact of how much smaller the PC enthusiast market was those days?
The PointCast business model in a nutshell:
Provide free client software for download, that maintains a constant connection to the PointCast service, even (especially) when the machine is otherwise idle. When the constant traffic from all of these (unattended) machines brings a corporate network to its knees, offer the victim an "enterprise server" product that caches the PointCast traffic locally, thereby restoring their external network bandwidth to what it was before. Oh, and while you're at it, charge your customers many thousands of dollars for this "service".
Or, if your IT department is at all on the ball, they just block access to PointCast, and remove the software from all machines in the company. I gotta tell you, selling an expensive "solution" to a problem your company created isn't going to get you in the good graces of corporate clients.
all those people who said it would be a cold day in Hell when Apple moved to Intel chips
Anybody who said that just hadn't been paying attention. The first Developer Preview of Mac OS X (Rhapsody) included an Intel version as well as a PowerPC version.
There are hundreds of references to byte-order compatibility issues all through the Apple API documentation and header files. They have even kept a version of Darwin for Intel PC's available all these years.
Okay, they never came out and publicly announced that they were switching to Intel until the work was mostly already done, but anybody who didn't see that a major architectural change was coming (eventually) was just blind.
With proper pipelining, you CAN get one baby after an initial nine-month delay, then a baby a month of throughput until your cache is depleted.
There's no easy answer. On a traditional clocked processor, each instruction takes a certain number of clock cycles. In the async case, everything just takes however long it takes. In fact, some arithmetic operations might take variable amounts of time depending on the value of the operands.
Given an equivalent process, layout technology, and number of transistors, an async design will be at least somewhat faster and vastly more power-efficient than a clocked design.
But none of those things are going to be equivalent in the real world - except possibly the process that ARM designs to. So comparisons will be difficult.
I was diagnosed at 16 years old or so, and they told me I was too old for treatment. It took me several years of effort, but I finally managed to get to the point where my eyes now focus together more often than not.
When I was 20, I couldn't read with my left eye closed. Now (at 30), I can. Depth perception is a useful tool folks - don't give up on it without a fight!
My lazy eye wasn't diagnosed until I was 18 or so, at which point I was told nothing could be done about it, because I was too old. Once I actually understood the problem, and made an effort to use both eyes on a regular basis, I actually gotr quite a lot better.
I still have problems with one eye drifting, especially when I'm tired, but I now have stereo vision more often than not. It's pretty cool, actually.
In my case, I was working in field service for a small factory automation manufacturer (this was nearly 20 years ago, now). We get a call that a customer is having a problem with their system failing the security check at start-up.
At that time, our software was copy-protected by means of a parallel port dongle that absolutely would NOT work correctly if there was a printer daisy-chained off the dongle, and the printer was turned off. Because this was an entirely predictable failure mode, the error message read something like: "Security verification error. Make sure your software key is installed on the parallel port, and ENSURE THAT THE PRINTER IS TURNED ON (if you have one)"
So the first question I ask the guy when he gets transferred over to me is whether or not he has the key installed, and whether his printer is turned on. "Of course it is - I wouldn't be calling if I hadn't already checked that!". So I ask him exactly what the error message is, and he tells me it's the one I paraphrased above, which you will recall only happens if your printer is turned off.
Now, it's possible that his key has gone bad in a way that no other key we've had fail before ever has, but it doesn't seem terribly likely to me, so I ask him if he can check to make sure the little green light on the printer is illuminated. He claims that it is, and starts getting very agitated about how much of a problem it is for him that he can't run the analysis he needs to run, and we need to fix this pronto.
So, I load a new printer, a new key, a new cable, and anything else that might be useful into the company van, and drive out to this factory (2.5 hours one way). When I get there, I go into the plant, turn on the printer, and drive back.
Total time onsite: less than 5 minutes
Total drive time: 6 hours (rush-hour on the way back)
Total cost to customer: $350 (or about $600 in today's dollars)
1 hour minimum labor @ $50/hour
6 hours drive time @ $50/hour
[[ insert your own "priceless" MasterCard advertisement here ]]
Anybody remember from chem what happens when you place two dissimilar metals against each other?
Uh, nothing, unless there's an electrolyte in contact with both. I think if the back of your computer is regularly getting splashed with salt water, you might want to think about moving it to another location...
I wonder why anyone would bother producing a Markov-chain gibberish generator for slashdot? It seems like we were doing fine without one.
6 48948
Someone else noticed this first:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=176375&cid=14
I scanned through the document, and the only thing they said was the it'll be in the next major release, and that they typically do releases every 18-24 months. So, if CS2 came out in April or May of 2005, the next version could be out anytime between this November and next May.
Of course, that's only their "typical" release schedule. If there are other factors in play (like, for example, new Pro Macs being released), they might very well do an atypical release schedule for CS3.
Azerus is one of the leading BitTorrent clients, and is written in Java, which I think is an odd language for an I/O intensive task, but it sure is popular.
.5 seconds?
Actually I/O intensive applications like a BitTorrent client are really good places to use Java.
1. Since the application gets started up very rarely (once per login session, probably), the overhead involved with launching the JVM and JITting all the code isn't as noticeable/objectionable. If you're going to be downloading stuff for hours, do you care if the application starts in 5 seconds or
2. Since the application is I/O bound, and does minimal processing on the data it handles, it doesn't matter that Java execution speed is slow - all of the I/O happens in native libraries (or directly in the OS), anyway.
On the other hand, an application like Photoshop really would be a bad candidate for Java (because the performance is almost all CPU-limited), as would the various little server processes and command-line tools on UNIX systems (since they start and stop a lot).
It's a gray area when the word itself is an abbreviation
No, it isn't.
Perhaps you should invest in one of these:
http://www.angryflower.com/aposter.html
With the exception of a very small number of high-power transmissions aimed at particular stars, there's basically zero chance of any ET civilization picking up signals from Earth.
I really ought to have hung on to the calculations I made for the last SETI discussion I participarted in, but the inverse-square law ensures that the power of an unfocused radio transmission decreases dramatically over interstellar distances.
Basically, it'd be a near thing for current SETI programs to pick up a radio signal aimed directly at the Earth from a nearby star, with a transmitter channeling a few million watts into a tight (well, relatively so) beam. There's zero chance that we'd be able to detect the equivalent of TV transmissions from 10 light years away or so.
Even if the ETs have significantly better receiving equipment, they'll still be limited by background noise. They also have to deal with the rather huge number of candidate stars to monitor - unless you're willing to devote an enormous amount of resources, you'll only be able to survey a small number of stars at any time.
I had a Windows XP machine get infected by an RPC worm while I was still in the process of re-installing Windows after a hardware crash. My former employer now has a rule that you have to install at least SP2 from a CD before you can attach to the internal network at all.
In this case, I was attached to a network subnet with multiple other machines that were already infected. In the sense that our corporate network had an active worm infstation, this is admittedly a fairly extreme case.
At home, you're probably more likely to run into this with some sorts of broadband connections. If you don't have a NAT router or firewall, and you're on a subnet with lots of other machines, you're probably at risk.
-Mark
In UK English, corporations are collections of individual people, hence "Apple are...". In the US, a corporation is considered one entity, so we say "Apple is...".
I've occasionally wondered whether the difference attributes to the status of corporations as legal persons in the US as opposed to elsewhere...
Followup: I couldn't find an equivalent fuel economy site for Europe, but this official-looking site:
http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/
has a bunch of data on UK fuel economy. Of course, they use a different testing methodology over there, which makes comparisons against the US figures somewhat problematic. If we assume the difference in methodology isn't critical, we can use the Prius as a calibration poiunt against the more fuel-efficient cars in their database.
Toyota shows the US Prius as having a 55 MPG combined city/highway rating. Converting that to Imperial gallons so we can compare with the data on the vcacarfueldata.org.uk site, that's 66 MPG (Imperial). Their chart shows 65.6 for the Prius, which seems like a pretty fair match.
Okay, so what gets better mileage than the Prius?
* Citroen C1, C2, C3 (with 1.4 Diesel engine)
* Renault Clio (with 1.5 Diesel engine)
* Fiat New Panda (with 1.3 Diesel)
* Honda Insight (the other high-MPG gas-electric hybrid)
Okay, ignoring the Insight (which is a two-seater, and a gas-burner, anyway), the best of these is about 5% better in overall MPG than the Prius. To be fair, some of them do have substantially higher Extra-Urban (highway) ratings. Probably any of the Citroens on the list would get better MPG on a relatively-long highway trip than my Prius does.
It's worth noting that all of these cars are substantially smaller than the Prius, though. Like 3 feet shorter, half the luggage space, that sort of thing. These are *tiny* cars.
All of the diesel cars produce roughly 5-20% more CO2/mile than the Prius, and 10-40 TIMES as much NOx pollution. With those sorts of numbers, I'm pretty sure I won't be seeing these on the roads in California any time soon...
Anyway, to get back on point - there are certainly cars available outside the US which get better gas mileage than the Toyota Prius, but there's nothing magical about these cars - they're just small cars with Diesel engines.
And it's not like the majority of cars "over there" are way more efficient than the Prius - these are specific fuel-economy-focused models of smaller cars.
You know, people keep saying that there are these super-high MPG diesels out there, but I'm just not seeing them. Maybe they're available in Europe, or something, but in the US, the absolute Diesel car with the highest fuel economy I can buy is something like Volkswagon's Jetta or Beetle Diesels, which only get ~45 MPG, which is 10% less than a Prius.
Here's the US EPA's ratings guide, in case you want to check:
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bestworst.shtml
Also keep in mind that air quality standards vary from country to country, so a very-high mileage car available for sale in another country might (read: most likely won't) be legal for sale in the US.
Putting a solar panel on a hybrid car doesn't make economic sense, the last time I did the math. For discussion, say solar panels run about $4-$6 per Watt, and you'd probably be able to fit about 100 Watts worth on top of your car.
.6 KWH of electricity, which is the equivalent of about 2 ounces of gasoline. So, given the roughly $0.06 you'd save on gas every day, it'd take...approximately 18 years to break even, best case. That's not even counting the custom electronics someone would have to build to interface the panel to the high-voltage battery in the car.
Over the course of a day, you'd generate maybe
On the other hand, you say you have a 20 mile round-trip commute? You might actually want to look into an all-electric car then. That might actually work out, especially if you can recharge at work.
Actually, Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive is a really sweet piece of engineering. When you compare the number of moving parts vs a conventional transmission (or better yet, an automatic), it's really quite striking how much simpler the HSD actually is.
I can't find a good illustration online right now, which is unfortunate. There's a pretty good description of how it works on Wikipedia, though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive
Instead of having multiple meshed sets of gears, a clutch, and synchronizers, shift gates, and all the rest, you basically have two electric motors and a differential gear. This gives you the equivalent of an infinite number of gear ratios, as well as allowing the motor to turn completely off when it isn't needed, and enabling regenerative braking as well.
In addition to the drivetrain, the mere fact that there's all this electric power available encourages its use elsewhere on the car, as well. The Prius has electric motors instead of belt-driven pumps for the air conditioning and power steering, for example. That's two more components that don't need to have clutches between them and the engine (or a power-robbing bypass valve, in the case of the steering pump.
I don't know that all of these add up to "fewer" mechanical parts in the Prius, but I'd definitely argue that the mechanical systems are in general simpler and should be more reliable. I'd take a directly-connected electric motor over a belt-driven pump with a clutch any day of the week.
If you have a car that is at the end of it's life and has to be replaced, get a hybrid. Getting one to replace your 10 yr old Accord because they are "cool" may not be helping anyone. We need to get the 15+ yr old smog spewing, gas eating, american cars off the road. That will make the most impact on our environment.
You may want to think this through a little more. When someone does replace a 10-year old Accord with a Prius, what do you suppose happens to the Accord? In a lot of cases, it'll be sold as a used car to someone who's currently driving an ancient uber-polluting gas-guzzler.
An adequate supply of inexpensive used fuel-efficient cars helps the environment rather a lot, actually.
As I understand it, the hybrids can use engines that are more efficient (such as Miller cycles) because they don't need to work across a wide range of power and speed.
:-)
My Prius averaged just about 50MPG on a trip from San Jose to Los Angeles - that's 100% freeway driving, and more than 350 miles.
I seriously doubt there are many other cars that could make that trip with higher overall MPG.
And we didn't have to stop for gas, either