The bird kill in California is often used as a anti-wind argument. (Texans still think of themselves as an oil producing state, despite having a net import of oil for about 10 years now)
In this case it is a flaw in the design of the farm... in Alton pass the turbines sit on gridded towers (like high tension lines). These towers make excellent perches, and a lot of birds hang out in them. Hawks especially have a tendency to dive at prey, and run smack into a turbine blade.(They don't get chopped up, just collide like your living room window.)
Most newer wind farms have far less turbines (its cheaper days to install a single 1MW turbine, than 10 100KW turbines. Also the industry has learned that monopole tower (a single smooth shaft, rather than a lattice) keeps the birds away. (Its cheaper to install too..)
This comment created using 100% renewable electrons via AustinEnergy GreenChoice (mostly wind)
I forward all my bills to their PO BOX, they open them, throw out the confetti, scan the actual bills and destroy the originals. Standard Billpay features kick in, and I can assign rules for payment (including mailing bills 5 days before their due... email messages notify me of their actions. Its cheaper than late fees.
At the end of the year $20 gets me a CD with all the scanned bills...fits nicely in my Tax folder.
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
Oddly enough, in Dell's case most of the Indian support is full Dell (blue badge) employees. The US support is about 50% contractor temps (red badge) and about 50% blue badged full employees. Most of the temps are "converted" to full time employees after about 1 year if they prove competent, if not they are washed out.
If you're certain of the answer, the best thing to do is simple say you tried "a known good" AC adapter or whatever and it worked. Almost all of the Dell support trees have an option for "tested with known good" and the solution is, duh, replace the part. Calls like that we could wrap up in 2-3 minutes.
Remember, far more energy is used, and more CO2 is produced in building a car than it will produce in its lifetime, so keeping old cars running is good for the environent!
Actually.. this is only true if the car is built from virgin steel, which is happening less and less. Cars are heavily recycled. And while CO2 emmissions may be less, other "worse" pollutants are not. Cars older than 10 years have to abide by less strict emissions standards, and are often poorly maintained. The worst 10% of the cars in the US produce 90% of the NOx and CO emissions.
Of course, a well maintained older vehicle can still be cleaner than a poorly maintained new car (hint, if the check engine light is on, don't open the hood, verify it is still there, and then ignore the light)
A friend of mine works for AustinEnergy (Austin, TX Municipal Utility) used their non-public information on transport losses and pollution to work out the calculations for losses and compared gasoline to electric.
Even worst case (coal fired electric plant) the electric car still came out ahead in pollution and energy efficency, and that was ignoring the energy/pollution involved in pumping, refining and transporting gasoline. (The numbers compared pump to road vs coal to road)
The best case though is much better, a gasoline car will always pollute the same (maybe even worse as emissions components wear). My electric car gets cleaner everyday as more renewable sources are added to the grid.
(Actually, its pretty clean already, since I pay a slight premium to the power company for 100% renewable energy at my home.)
The thing is, cars are so fsking complex, and each individual make/model has so many unique nuances
I went the other route and converted my MR2 to an all electric drivetrain. Everything is simple, some batteries, a 1000amp/192VDC DC controller and a motor. Transmission and brakes are the only stock mechnical componets left. If anything is wrong I can figure it out in a few seconds with a voltmeter, most of the components have warrenties way longer than the body of the car will last.
Best of all the car has at least 50HP more than stock, and 300-400lb/ft of torque at 0 RPM. Blasting Mustang's is fun, but doing it in a silent car is better still. Very geeky..
Be careful... it is true that 911 service fee and "universal access" fees are mandated by the government and pay for valuable services. But watch out, many of your phone providers charge those higher than is required.
The one that comes to mind is the payphone access charge. If I use an MCI calling card from a payphone I get hit a "government mandated $.99 payphone access fee". Actually the goverment mandates that the fee be $.24, the rest of the.99 lines MCI coffers. Ever wonder why different long distance providers seem to have widely different taxes and fees, despite being in the same markets?
Not really... in the case of stamps, each stamp is serial numbered, the bar code reader on the sorting line just checks if that serial number has already been used and rejects envelopes. New serial numbers are only activited when they are issued. Its actually easier to detect fraud then with the current stamps or postal meters.
RFID has some great possiblities, the best is true inventory control. Right now a store keeps track of how many items enter the store, and how many are sold and uses that to decide when to order more. With RFID you can install readers on the shelves and actually run a full inventory count, with few mistakes instantly. So when I go to buy something at Best Buy, the flunkie won't give me the "the computer says we have 5, but I cannot find any, and the computer won't order more till we run out" story. Benefits me and the store. This is what Gillette wants feature-wise.
But what RFID tags usually are is a unique number, now I am not just counting how many I have, but exactly which ones I have.. and if I can read that data after the user has left the store I can do all kinds of privacy invading things.
The easy thing is to say that the tags must be deactivated upon leaving the store.. but I can see this technology as being useful for a consumer as well (imagine being able to walk up to a terminal in your kitchen and get a complete list of meals that can be cooked using the food in the kitchen, or warnings that the milk is going bad... no more running out of toilet paper etc.)
I would just like to see a requirement/law that the tags be clearly identifiable and removable. No sewing them into the seams of a garment, or molding them into the handle of my toothbrush. Reading tags without someone's knowledge (aka at a store entrance) should be forbidden by polite society (it would be almost impossible to police) just as rummaging thru someone purse uninvited is (it still happens, but everyone knows its wrong and nobody wants to get caught).
It sounds like most of the problem is local agencies not monitoring the QOS of their radio systems. Most organization get a contractor to install the equipment, towers and contract for basic maintainence and then expect the system to run for years with little oversight..
Cell providers (and most commercial radio operators) know that the precise interrelationships are always changing. New buildings, new transmitters, malicious/accidental interference. Most wireless carriers send drivers with GPS/inertial locators and signal strength meters wandering about their coverage areas to locate areas of poor coverage. "..hear me now, Good!"
A friend once showed a map drawn by a wireless system installer showing that with X number of towers the entire coverage area would have maximum signal strength. Most government entities would stop here, believing the installer. But this wireless company did a standard mapping of signal strengths and found inadequate coverage all over, the number of towers had to be almost doubled from the original estimate and dead spots still exist.
Good radio operation is more than just getting a license and standing up a tower. Whining that the FCC should step in just becuase you're too lazy to fix you own stuff is irresponsible.
I thought the whole point of the Internet, being a packet-switched network, was that it could survive damage... like from nuclear war.
The original research into packet switched technologies was done with nuclear survivability in mind. The folks that built the internet however just took a good idea and ran with it. Since the internet was never designed to be a critical system, very little actual redudancy was built in. As the p2p system have found, its simplier to have "supernodes" where the majority of interconnection occurs. (I believe the internet has about 15 major points, Chicago, Mae West/Mae East, Dallas, New York, etc.
As an aside, all the telecommunications for Milwaukee Wi run thru a massive phone switch in the basement of one of buildings downtown. To take advantage of this nearly every ISP or internet company is located in the same building. When power was interrupted to the building (flooding in the power transformers) nearly all of the ISP service, and a lot of phone service was interrupted.
Does it matter, probably not. You'd piss off a lot of people, make a lot of sysadmins lives difficult, and life would continue. Infrastructure is a valuable part of a society, but people working for a common benefit is the part that matters.. and shy of killing everyone the only way to bring down society is to change every person's opinion.
No.. supporting the "ring 0" windows versions is a much larger emulation task. WinNT/2k, and XP do not tolerate not having full control of the processor. VMWare can do this, becuase it emulates the hardware. Win4lin "shares" the hardware between Linux and windows (windows never has full control of the proc).
Rumor has it that netraverse is working hard on a Win2k version of Win4lin. Hopefully they will be able to produce a solution that is not as bloated as VMWare.
While this wouldn't nessicarly apeal to the apartment dweller, I saw something on telivision regarding terrestrial heating. basicly it went like this. Antifreese in copper pipes underground. In the summer time, ground temp in most enviroments is cooler then air temp, just flow water through system, blow air over radiator, radiator = heat. In winter, assuming ground temp is greater then air temp, same deal but just add a touch of heat. The idea was to lower heating bills.
The United States EPA has recommended ground source or geothermal heatpumps for about 10 years. Basically a standard central air conditioning system, but instead of dumping the excess heat into 90-100F outside air, the heat is coupled to a water loop run 6' or more below ground where temps are about 50-60F year round. Compared to standard Central air or air source heatpumps it is about twice as efficent. In the heating cycle it is about 5 times as efficent as fossil fuels, but the higher cost of electricity makes it only slighty less expensive to run. Up front costs are about twice as expensive, but the payoff is noticible enough that many mortgage companies will let you roll the cost into your home loan. Its a great technology.. and almost no one uses it.
The fact that the conpany's only experience in road going vehicles prior to the Sparrow was making motorcycle seats might have had something to do with it.
Most people in the EV community were impressed with Corbin's success, for awhile the company had a two year backlog of orders. However Corbin built the Sparrow without consulting any "experts" in EV technology, and made a number of beginner mistakes.. Only one (expensive) battery type could be installed, and there wasn't enough battery capacity. They had terrible controller problems, mostly due to water being in places it wasn't supposed to be, and the controller manufacturer (DCP) almost went bankrupt replacing units under warrenty.
The big issue: price. Sparrows cost almost $15k to produce, and sold for $18k, too much for most people to want it, and too little profit.
10kW per house is actually very little - this is another example of "data massage". Average hair dryer takes about 2kWMost hairdryers are about 1500 watts, and only used for short (5 minute) periods of time. A standard outlet is only capable of supplying 15 amps, even when connected to a 20amp circuit.I live in a 1000sqft house in the South Central US, with high Air Conditioning bills. A "bad" month is 1300kwhrs, divide that by 720hrs in a month and you get only 1.8kw per hour on average, 10kw is actually closer to peak usage.
I *lived* in place which had 20Amp circuit brakers (which gives 20kW at 120V), and the circuit brakers were out all the time. So did I.. the entire house was on one 20amp breaker, if the fridge turned on when the TV or Microwave was on, it would trip. A breaker mostly trips on peak loads, but neither the microwave or fridge runs 24 hours. (The TV was another story). Actually a 20amp breaker is will trip if asked to give more than about 18amps for longer than 5 minutes. Plus you have to derate heavily for poor power factor loads. Most motors, electronics (TV, computers and those annoying little wall transformers have lousy PF, between.5 to.7, meaning you can only get 50 to 70 percent of the circuit's rated power into the device, with the rest being lost mostly as heat in the wires between you and the generator.
A friend is one of the energy buyers for Austin's electric utility and figured the worst case pollution: Driving an electric car powered from a coal burning power plant emits less than half the emmissions that a 27mpg gas car does.
However I buy all my power from the City's Green Choice program, so the power going into the vehicle is 100% renewable energy derived mostly from wind.
Acceleration is fine, but I have yet to see an electric vehicle that could drive on the 70MPH freeways around here...
Top speed in the electric conversion I did last year was well over 100mph (I wasn't willing to risk a ticket driving it faster than that). The EV1 was governed at 105mph and reached that easily. Most AF vehicles are similar, a friends propane pickup does just fine at 70mph freeway speeds.
Most areas across the USA are fairly rural. I know I had a 50+mile commpute to work at one point, and no charging stations in sight.
Most of the US is rural indeed... but becuase of that, very few people live there. The vast majority of Americans live within 40 miles of a city center, and the average commute to work is 12 miles. Most non-lead acid EVs are getting 100mile ranges. We consider a car with more than 12000 miles a year to be "high mileage" thats an average of 32.8 miles a day. A recent EPA study showed that 90% of the population drives less than 50 miles a day. There will always be some people that won't be able to drive electric, but for the rest of us its a quiet, cleaner, and lower maintenence solution.
And it can't take 18 hours to recharge, because it may very well be used by another member of my family for several hours at a time, after I'm done with my 100+ mile commute.
The speed of charging for most (N)EVs is controlled by the size of the outlet. On a standard 110v 15 amp outlet, 8-10hours to recharge. A 30amp 220V "dryer plug" will charge the batteries in 2-4 hours. On a 50amp "range" plug my Ranger charges from completely dead to full in 1.5 hours.
The real problem is that alternative fuel vehicles of every sort, woefully underperform even the most humble gas powered vehicle
This is a common misconception spread by people too lazy to think. If you read up, you'll find most alternative fuel (AF) vehicles outperform gasoline. GM's EV1 battery electric was 0-60mph in about 4.9sec, faster than a 5.0L mustang, and a heck of a lot more fun to drive. Check out Nedra.com for a selection of battery electric drag racers.(Electric drivetrains produce instantanous torque, over a wide range, much more power than gasoline)
Its true that most prototype AF vehicles have been slugs, alternative fuel vehicles are often designed for efficency, not performance, and the two tend to be mutually exclusive.
As for NEV's, they have a nitch, but I really don't see a huge market beyond the city center or retirement/closed communities. American's mostly buy cars based on perceived need:
"I commute to work alone in this monsterous gas guzzling SUV becuase I might buy a boat and need to tow it, or haul the soccer team to Dallas, even though I don't have kids or climb a giant mountain that might spring up in the middle of Nebraska" Advertising encourages this irrational line of thinking.
"I don't want to drive a clean, fast electric car, becuase I might want to road trip 500 miles to Tijuana on impulse once a year." Ignoring the idea that a rental car works nicely for long trips and is considerable cheaper than owing unused capacity)
The other problem is that none of the major auto manufactuers are doing anything but dabble in the AF market Its impossible for a new car company to emerge today, safety regs require you crash test quite a few cars before selling, and selling a car for 10-20k$ is nearly impossible unless you sell 100,000 of them. So the automotive newcomers/innovators are tackling the NEV market, which require less units to be profitable, safety requirements are lighter, and margins are larger.
The US centric views of slashdot are nevermore plain than the majority of comments on this topic. The above poster got it right: IP space is not terribly scarce in the US, but it is in grave shortfall oversees. MIT and utexas have more address space allocated that most asian countries. (Strictly heresay, but a friend that worked for MIT's IT staff said when machines were retired, so were their IPs, DNS entries still exists for boxes turned off a decade ago).
Plus therr are a lot of technologies for which NAT sucks. Any p2p app, including nifty stuff like voip, most gaming servers, etc. Now admittly little of this would interest a corporation, and too many ISPs have a stake in charging by the IP for IPV6 to really happen.
In my company we've been testing it, but we have a freer IT environment than most. If one of the above posts is accurate and win2k has even a halfway functional stack we will probably move into a parallel deployment, with tunnels between all our remote sites. We would roll it out in an instant if our ISP (verizon Internetworking (yuck) or Birch telecom) would offer it.
Many commercial grade GPS receivers will not provide data about groundspeed or altitude if the receiver is moving faster than 99 knots. This is to prevent pilots from using them as aircraft navigational aids, since they are not approved for it. You must buy the more expensive "aircraft grade" receivers. Garmin is the most notable manufacturer with this policy. Others will work with varying degrees of success. You may fine the receiver slow to get a initial fix, since they tend to assume you are stationary when first powered on.
I checked over 3 epox boards I have here. They
appear to be fine.
My Epox failed yesterday. It has been hard to turn on for many months (required cycling power for 5 minutes before it would start.) Close examination of the board shows half the caps leaking... Its about 3 months beyond the 1 yr warrenty. *sigh* Have to by some caps with my next digikey order.
I worked support for Dell's portable computers a year ago. Dell warrenties batteries for 1 year and expects then to fail after 1.5-2 years. The life span is mostly based on usage, more cycles, shorter life. However, batteries that are never used will still fail in about the same time frame. (The engineers were always denying this, but my guess would be it is because the system gives the battery a short charge everytime it is turned on) If you use the system often, four batteries in as many years is pretty average (most power users get less than a year). IBM and dell use batteries from the same manufacturer(s) so I'd expect simialr results. (heck, if we're being honest, almost every laptop sold is built by one company on one assembly line).
Slashdot Mirror
The bird kill in California is often used as a anti-wind argument. (Texans still think of themselves as an oil producing state, despite having a net import of oil for about 10 years now)
In this case it is a flaw in the design of the farm... in Alton pass the turbines sit on gridded towers (like high tension lines). These towers make excellent perches, and a lot of birds hang out in them. Hawks especially have a tendency to dive at prey, and run smack into a turbine blade.(They don't get chopped up, just collide like your living room window.)
Most newer wind farms have far less turbines (its cheaper days to install a single 1MW turbine, than 10 100KW turbines. Also the industry has learned that monopole tower (a single smooth shaft, rather than a lattice) keeps the birds away. (Its cheaper to install too..)
This comment created using 100% renewable electrons via AustinEnergy GreenChoice (mostly wind)
http://www.paytrust.com
...fits nicely in my Tax folder.
I forward all my bills to their PO BOX, they open them, throw out the confetti, scan the actual bills and destroy the originals. Standard Billpay features kick in, and I can assign rules for payment (including mailing bills 5 days before their due... email messages notify me of their actions. Its cheaper than late fees.
At the end of the year $20 gets me a CD with all the scanned bills
IIRC 230-400 is Aircraft use. 500-800mhz is the UHF TV channels. A good argument can be made that the band is wasted horribly but it is allocated.
Especially for the lower frequencies, the FCC is constrained somewhat by international spectrum allocation treaties.
Mark
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
Oddly enough, in Dell's case most of the Indian support is full Dell (blue badge) employees. The US support is about 50% contractor temps (red badge) and about 50% blue badged full employees. Most of the temps are "converted" to full time employees after about 1 year if they prove competent, if not they are washed out.
If you're certain of the answer, the best thing to do is simple say you tried "a known good" AC adapter or whatever and it worked. Almost all of the Dell support trees have an option for "tested with known good" and the solution is, duh, replace the part. Calls like that we could wrap up in 2-3 minutes.
Remember, far more energy is used, and more CO2 is produced in building a car than it will produce in its lifetime, so keeping old cars running is good for the environent!
Actually.. this is only true if the car is built from virgin steel, which is happening less and less. Cars are heavily recycled. And while CO2 emmissions may be less, other "worse" pollutants are not. Cars older than 10 years have to abide by less strict emissions standards, and are often poorly maintained. The worst 10% of the cars in the US produce 90% of the NOx and CO emissions.
Of course, a well maintained older vehicle can still be cleaner than a poorly maintained new car (hint, if the check engine light is on, don't open the hood, verify it is still there, and then ignore the light)
Or you could go the other route... buy and older car, convert it to an electric vehicle and get the best of both worlds.
Not yet.. working on it. Pictures are at http://www.mindbent.org/coppermine/ and my conversion diary is at http://www.livejournal.com/~mr2ev/
A friend of mine works for AustinEnergy (Austin, TX Municipal Utility) used their non-public information on transport losses and pollution to work out the calculations for losses and compared gasoline to electric.
Even worst case (coal fired electric plant) the electric car still came out ahead in pollution and energy efficency, and that was ignoring the energy/pollution involved in pumping, refining and transporting gasoline. (The numbers compared pump to road vs coal to road)
The best case though is much better, a gasoline car will always pollute the same (maybe even worse as emissions components wear). My electric car gets cleaner everyday as more renewable sources are added to the grid.
(Actually, its pretty clean already, since I pay a slight premium to the power company for 100% renewable energy at my home.)
The thing is, cars are so fsking complex, and each individual make/model has so many unique nuances
I went the other route and converted my MR2 to an all electric drivetrain. Everything is simple, some batteries, a 1000amp/192VDC DC controller and a motor. Transmission and brakes are the only stock mechnical componets left. If anything is wrong I can figure it out in a few seconds with a voltmeter, most of the components have warrenties way longer than the body of the car will last.
Best of all the car has at least 50HP more than stock, and 300-400lb/ft of torque at 0 RPM. Blasting Mustang's is fun, but doing it in a silent car is better still. Very geeky..
Be careful... it is true that 911 service fee and "universal access" fees are mandated by the government and pay for valuable services. But watch out, many of your phone providers charge those higher than is required.
.99 lines MCI coffers. Ever wonder why different long distance providers seem to have widely different taxes and fees, despite being in the same markets?
The one that comes to mind is the payphone access charge. If I use an MCI calling card from a payphone I get hit a "government mandated $.99 payphone access fee". Actually the goverment mandates that the fee be $.24, the rest of the
Digital postage is pretty close to digital money.
Not really... in the case of stamps, each stamp is serial numbered, the bar code reader on the sorting line just checks if that serial number has already been used and rejects envelopes. New serial numbers are only activited when they are issued. Its actually easier to detect fraud then with the current stamps or postal meters.
Mark
RFID has some great possiblities, the best is true inventory control. Right now a store keeps track of how many items enter the store, and how many are sold and uses that to decide when to order more. With RFID you can install readers on the shelves and actually run a full inventory count, with few mistakes instantly. So when I go to buy something at Best Buy, the flunkie won't give me the "the computer says we have 5, but I cannot find any, and the computer won't order more till we run out" story. Benefits me and the store. This is what Gillette wants feature-wise.
But what RFID tags usually are is a unique number, now I am not just counting how many I have, but exactly which ones I have.. and if I can read that data after the user has left the store I can do all kinds of privacy invading things.
The easy thing is to say that the tags must be deactivated upon leaving the store.. but I can see this technology as being useful for a consumer as well (imagine being able to walk up to a terminal in your kitchen and get a complete list of meals that can be cooked using the food in the kitchen, or warnings that the milk is going bad... no more running out of toilet paper etc.)
I would just like to see a requirement/law that the tags be clearly identifiable and removable. No sewing them into the seams of a garment, or molding them into the handle of my toothbrush. Reading tags without someone's knowledge (aka at a store entrance) should be forbidden by polite society (it would be almost impossible to police) just as rummaging thru someone purse uninvited is (it still happens, but everyone knows its wrong and nobody wants to get caught).
It sounds like most of the problem is local agencies not monitoring the QOS of their radio systems. Most organization get a contractor to install the equipment, towers and contract for basic maintainence and then expect the system to run for years with little oversight..
Cell providers (and most commercial radio operators) know that the precise interrelationships are always changing. New buildings, new transmitters, malicious/accidental interference. Most wireless carriers send drivers with GPS/inertial locators and signal strength meters wandering about their coverage areas to locate areas of poor coverage. "..hear me now, Good!"
A friend once showed a map drawn by a wireless system installer showing that with X number of towers the entire coverage area would have maximum signal strength. Most government entities would stop here, believing the installer. But this wireless company did a standard mapping of signal strengths and found inadequate coverage all over, the number of towers had to be almost doubled from the original estimate and dead spots still exist.
Good radio operation is more than just getting a license and standing up a tower. Whining that the FCC should step in just becuase you're too lazy to fix you own stuff is irresponsible.
I thought the whole point of the Internet, being a packet-switched network, was that it could survive damage... like from nuclear war.
The original research into packet switched technologies was done with nuclear survivability in mind. The folks that built the internet however just took a good idea and ran with it. Since the internet was never designed to be a critical system, very little actual redudancy was built in. As the p2p system have found, its simplier to have "supernodes" where the majority of interconnection occurs. (I believe the internet has about 15 major points, Chicago, Mae West/Mae East, Dallas, New York, etc.
As an aside, all the telecommunications for Milwaukee Wi run thru a massive phone switch in the basement of one of buildings downtown. To take advantage of this nearly every ISP or internet company is located in the same building. When power was interrupted to the building (flooding in the power transformers) nearly all of the ISP service, and a lot of phone service was interrupted.
Does it matter, probably not. You'd piss off a lot of people, make a lot of sysadmins lives difficult, and life would continue. Infrastructure is a valuable part of a society, but people working for a common benefit is the part that matters.. and shy of killing everyone the only way to bring down society is to change every person's opinion.
No.. supporting the "ring 0" windows versions is a much larger emulation task. WinNT/2k, and XP do not tolerate not having full control of the processor. VMWare can do this, becuase it emulates the hardware. Win4lin "shares" the hardware between Linux and windows (windows never has full control of the proc).
Rumor has it that netraverse is working hard on a Win2k version of Win4lin. Hopefully they will be able to produce a solution that is not as bloated as VMWare.
While this wouldn't nessicarly apeal to the apartment dweller, I saw something on telivision regarding terrestrial heating. basicly it went like this. Antifreese in copper pipes underground. In the summer time, ground temp in most enviroments is cooler then air temp, just flow water through system, blow air over radiator, radiator = heat. In winter, assuming ground temp is greater then air temp, same deal but just add a touch of heat. The idea was to lower heating bills.
The United States EPA has recommended ground source or geothermal heatpumps for about 10 years. Basically a standard central air conditioning system, but instead of dumping the excess heat into 90-100F outside air, the heat is coupled to a water loop run 6' or more below ground where temps are about 50-60F year round. Compared to standard Central air or air source heatpumps it is about twice as efficent. In the heating cycle it is about 5 times as efficent as fossil fuels, but the higher cost of electricity makes it only slighty less expensive to run. Up front costs are about twice as expensive, but the payoff is noticible enough that many mortgage companies will let you roll the cost into your home loan. Its a great technology.. and almost no one uses it.
The fact that the conpany's only experience in road going vehicles prior to the Sparrow was making motorcycle seats might have had something to do with it.
Most people in the EV community were impressed with Corbin's success, for awhile the company had a two year backlog of orders. However Corbin built the Sparrow without consulting any "experts" in EV technology, and made a number of beginner mistakes.. Only one (expensive) battery type could be installed, and there wasn't enough battery capacity. They had terrible controller problems, mostly due to water being in places it wasn't supposed to be, and the controller manufacturer (DCP) almost went bankrupt replacing units under warrenty.
The big issue: price. Sparrows cost almost $15k to produce, and sold for $18k, too much for most people to want it, and too little profit.
10kW per house is actually very little - this is another example of "data massage". Average hair dryer takes about 2kWMost hairdryers are about 1500 watts, and only used for short (5 minute) periods of time. A standard outlet is only capable of supplying 15 amps, even when connected to a 20amp circuit.I live in a 1000sqft house in the South Central US, with high Air Conditioning bills. A "bad" month is 1300kwhrs, divide that by 720hrs in a month and you get only 1.8kw per hour on average, 10kw is actually closer to peak usage.
I *lived* in place which had 20Amp circuit brakers (which gives 20kW at 120V), and the circuit brakers were out all the time. So did I.. the entire house was on one 20amp breaker, if the fridge turned on when the TV or Microwave was on, it would trip. A breaker mostly trips on peak loads, but neither the microwave or fridge runs 24 hours. (The TV was another story). Actually a 20amp breaker is will trip if asked to give more than about 18amps for longer than 5 minutes. Plus you have to derate heavily for poor power factor loads. Most motors, electronics (TV, computers and those annoying little wall transformers have lousy PF, between .5 to .7, meaning you can only get 50 to 70 percent of the circuit's rated power into the device, with the rest being lost mostly as heat in the wires between you and the generator.
A friend is one of the energy buyers for Austin's electric utility and figured the worst case pollution: Driving an electric car powered from a coal burning power plant emits less than half the emmissions that a 27mpg gas car does.
However I buy all my power from the City's Green Choice program, so the power going into the vehicle is 100% renewable energy derived mostly from wind.
Acceleration is fine, but I have yet to see an electric vehicle that could drive on the 70MPH freeways around here...
Top speed in the electric conversion I did last year was well over 100mph (I wasn't willing to risk a ticket driving it faster than that). The EV1 was governed at 105mph and reached that easily. Most AF vehicles are similar, a friends propane pickup does just fine at 70mph freeway speeds.
Most areas across the USA are fairly rural. I know I had a 50+mile commpute to work at one point, and no charging stations in sight.
Most of the US is rural indeed... but becuase of that, very few people live there. The vast majority of Americans live within 40 miles of a city center, and the average commute to work is 12 miles. Most non-lead acid EVs are getting 100mile ranges. We consider a car with more than 12000 miles a year to be "high mileage" thats an average of 32.8 miles a day. A recent EPA study showed that 90% of the population drives less than 50 miles a day. There will always be some people that won't be able to drive electric, but for the rest of us its a quiet, cleaner, and lower maintenence solution.
And it can't take 18 hours to recharge, because it may very well be used by another member of my family for several hours at a time, after I'm done with my 100+ mile commute.
The speed of charging for most (N)EVs is controlled by the size of the outlet. On a standard 110v 15 amp outlet, 8-10hours to recharge. A 30amp 220V "dryer plug" will charge the batteries in 2-4 hours. On a 50amp "range" plug my Ranger charges from completely dead to full in 1.5 hours.
The real problem is that alternative fuel vehicles of every sort, woefully underperform even the most humble gas powered vehicle
This is a common misconception spread by people too lazy to think. If you read up, you'll find most alternative fuel (AF) vehicles outperform gasoline. GM's EV1 battery electric was 0-60mph in about 4.9sec, faster than a 5.0L mustang, and a heck of a lot more fun to drive. Check out Nedra.com for a selection of battery electric drag racers.(Electric drivetrains produce instantanous torque, over a wide range, much more power than gasoline)
Its true that most prototype AF vehicles have been slugs, alternative fuel vehicles are often designed for efficency, not performance, and the two tend to be mutually exclusive.
As for NEV's, they have a nitch, but I really don't see a huge market beyond the city center or retirement/closed communities. American's mostly buy cars based on perceived need :
"I commute to work alone in this monsterous gas guzzling SUV becuase I might buy a boat and need to tow it, or haul the soccer team to Dallas, even though I don't have kids or climb a giant mountain that might spring up in the middle of Nebraska" Advertising encourages this irrational line of thinking.
"I don't want to drive a clean, fast electric car, becuase I might want to road trip 500 miles to Tijuana on impulse once a year." Ignoring the idea that a rental car works nicely for long trips and is considerable cheaper than owing unused capacity)
The other problem is that none of the major auto manufactuers are doing anything but dabble in the AF market Its impossible for a new car company to emerge today, safety regs require you crash test quite a few cars before selling, and selling a car for 10-20k$ is nearly impossible unless you sell 100,000 of them. So the automotive newcomers/innovators are tackling the NEV market, which require less units to be profitable, safety requirements are lighter, and margins are larger.
The US centric views of slashdot are nevermore plain than the majority of comments on this topic. The above poster got it right: IP space is not terribly scarce in the US, but it is in grave shortfall oversees. MIT and utexas have more address space allocated that most asian countries. (Strictly heresay, but a friend that worked for MIT's IT staff said when machines were retired, so were their IPs, DNS entries still exists for boxes turned off a decade ago).
Plus therr are a lot of technologies for which NAT sucks. Any p2p app, including nifty stuff like voip, most gaming servers, etc. Now admittly little of this would interest a corporation, and too many ISPs have a stake in charging by the IP for IPV6 to really happen.
In my company we've been testing it, but we have a freer IT environment than most. If one of the above posts is accurate and win2k has even a halfway functional stack we will probably move into a parallel deployment, with tunnels between all our remote sites. We would roll it out in an instant if our ISP (verizon Internetworking (yuck) or Birch telecom) would offer it.
Many commercial grade GPS receivers will not provide data about groundspeed or altitude if the receiver is moving faster than 99 knots. This is to prevent pilots from using them as aircraft navigational aids, since they are not approved for it. You must buy the more expensive "aircraft grade" receivers. Garmin is the most notable manufacturer with this policy.
Others will work with varying degrees of success. You may fine the receiver slow to get a initial fix, since they tend to assume you are stationary when first powered on.
I checked over 3 epox boards I have here. They appear to be fine.
My Epox failed yesterday. It has been hard to turn on for many months (required cycling power for 5 minutes before it would start.) Close examination of the board shows half the caps leaking... Its about 3 months beyond the 1 yr warrenty. *sigh*
Have to by some caps with my next digikey order.
I worked support for Dell's portable computers a year ago. Dell warrenties batteries for 1 year and expects then to fail after 1.5-2 years. The life span is mostly based on usage, more cycles, shorter life. However, batteries that are never used will still fail in about the same time frame. (The engineers were always denying this, but my guess would be it is because the system gives the battery a short charge everytime it is turned on) If you use the system often, four batteries in as many years is pretty average (most power users get less than a year). IBM and dell use batteries from the same manufacturer(s) so I'd expect simialr results. (heck, if we're being honest, almost every laptop sold is built by one company on one assembly line).
My $.02 USD
Mark