An extremely efficient gasoline-powered car gets 40 miles/gallon. At $6/gallon fuel cost, that's 6.67 miles traveled per dollar, or $0.15/mile.
Some of the worst electric cars will use 400Wh per mile. (Smaller cars will use closer to 250Wh/mile, but I'll use the conservative number.) At $0.15/KWh, that's 16.67 miles traveled per dollar, or $0.06/mile. Even if the price of electricity doubles, the EV is a hands-down winner in an energy/fuel cost comparison.
There is not, however, a free market in retail gas. Or oil for that matter. If there were, then some oil corps would be charging less, losing some profitability per barrel, and selling more barrels, making more profit - the entire point of the game for these master game players. The huge profits and same prices across the board mean they're in collusion, and there's no free market.
No one does that because there is no excess oil production capacity. And anyway, do you actually think oil companies could be making more profit if they wanted, and they just don't feel like it?
Unfortunately, although their hearts are in the right place, and I generally respect them, Clinton (and, frustratingly, Gore) both are pushing "biofuels" as the solution, when the facts speak otherwise. Check out the tesla motors blog for some smackdown on biofuels.
The Prius, though known and marketed for its fuel economy, is also marketed for its "Near Zero Emmissions" rating.
It's only "zero emissions" as long as you're not counting CO2, in which case it's no better than any other vehicle that gets ~50 miles per gallon of gasoline.
Yeah, that free market is a bitch, huh? If you don't like the oil companies, stop buying their products, and stop making excuses about how you have no choice. Buy an electric car, ride a bicycle, use more public transportation.
The oil companies are publicly traded. Do what I do: Own some of the oil companies, take their profits, and use it for good instead of evil.
We're using some of their spoils to invest in electric car manufacturers, and we just put 3000 watts of PV solar panels on the roof, which makes financial sense now even without the California subsidy.
In a free market, we would expect digital downloads to be much cheaper than $0.99, because the various distributors would compete against each other reduce the inflated margins the record companies (and iTunes) are getting based on CD priving.
True, but as you just wrote, in the same post:
People do not understand that pricing has NOTHING to do with what it costs to provide a service. It has to do with what people are willing to pay to get a service.
SGI has for years sold software under a license where you physically sign an agreement to purchase, and the license forbids resale of the software without express permission of Silicon Graphics.
Which won't solve anything. It'll just cause the poorest people in the nation to have even less discretionary income.
Availability of cheap fuel isn't a solution to poverty. If it were, the US, with its extremely low fuel prices, wouldn't have poor people. Poverty has many causes, and it's a serious problem, but keeping fuel prices artifically low isn't helping anyone in the long run.
Now all Wikipedia needs to do is to put the words "Don't Panic!" in large, friendly letters on the cover and they are going to completely trash Britannica.
As someone who works with codecs like Vorbis and MP3 for a living, here are a few technical aspects (read: shortcomings) of MP3 that drive me nuts. Typical folks' eyes glaze over when they hear this, but geeks can probably sympathise...
- MP3 has extremely limited framing capabilities. This means, for example, that there's no timecode information in a given frame, which, in turn, means that intra-file seeking is either crude, or slow.
- the MP3 de facto standard for metadata (ID3 tags) are downright frightening. The "specification" will make any good engineer cringe. By comparison, Vorbis has an elegant metadata implementation that makes few assumption and imposes few restrictions.
- MP3 files are not sample accurate. This means that when you pass a recording through an encode->decode cycle, it will change length by some small amount. (The length on decode will be rounded up to an even multiple of mpeg frames.) This is particularly troublesome for live music or any other recording that is intended to dovetail seamlessly with another track, and playing such recordings "gaplessly" requires applying some heuristic, such as truncating lead-in and lead-out data below some noise threshold.
Well I don't think PalmOS would have continued to be a viable OS for modern PDA's
Since it still is extremely viable right now as I'm typing this, what are you saying?
Modern PDA's need to be these tiny miniature PC's basically.
I respectfully disagree. Palm's success came from abandoning that idea, and from giving users nearly instantaneous access to information they needed, with and optimized US instead of the baggage of a desktop OS. While handheld devices have considerably more power than they used to, that's no excuse to just "put Windows on it and call it done".
OS X is great for desktops, laptops, and servers but it may be overkill for a PDA. BeOS could probably also run on cheaper hardware.
That's precisely the same conclusion that brought PalmSource to its knees. They abandoned the most successful thing they ever built (Palm OS 5.x) and spent year after year cramming BeOS into all sorts of places where neither developers nor end users wanted it. Oops.
But as someone mentioned, it doesn't appear this Palm entity actually owns rights to PalmOS or BeOS.
No, PalmSource owned BeOS, and they were bought by a Japanese browser company. The original Be engineers who did the most damage at PalmSource recently bailed and went to Google, having thoroughly proven their BeOS concept a failure twice.
Ironically, Palm Inc. owns the rights to the name Palm OS, but not the OS itself. I can't figure out who thought that would be a good idea.
I'm still surprised Palm didn't do ANYTHING useful with BeOS technology.
They tried. No one was asking for it. The end result sucked pretty badly, and still no one wanted it.
Actually, it's probably not true that Apple could 'just hire the good engineers' from Palm. Most companies have a non-compete clause in their hiring contracts that prevents employees from leaving to work for competitors for periods of six months to a year.
Not in California, they don't. And if they do (they don't because they know better by now) they're not enforceable.
Back in the bad old days before you could conveniently mail order hardware, you went to the COMPUTER SHOW AND SALE at the local community college gym.
I used to buy a lot of 80mm ball bearing fans, because the cheap-ass sleeve bearing fans that came stock in power supplies would always sieze up after 6-18 months. But often the ball bearing fans would wear out, too.
A little surgery revealed that many of the supposed ball bearing fans actually had cheesy bushings, and the clever Chinese simply learned how to sell their cheap wares for more by slapping "ball bearing" stickers on them. Once, to make a point, I bought an $8 fan and immediately dissected it in front of the vendor with a pair of diagonal pliers. He just shrugged.
As far as I see it the Shuttle has met it's design goals, one percent failure.
The shuttle's engineering design also specified no foam loss as a requirement. Over time, foam loss became tolerated, with a pervasive management attitude of "well it hasn't caused any problems, yet". Damage to the shuttles' carbon panels was documented on numerous missions, and was ultimately treated by management as a post-flight maintenance issue, rather than as a safety issue.
Actually, the Be heritage is extremely alive and arguably well in the Cobalt (aka 6.0) products. After four years of development, the number of Cobalt devices shipping (yeah, that'd be zero) is perhaps a testament to the lameness of BeOS in a handheld.
Slashdot Mirror
An extremely efficient gasoline-powered car gets 40 miles/gallon. At $6/gallon fuel cost, that's 6.67 miles traveled per dollar, or $0.15/mile.
Some of the worst electric cars will use 400Wh per mile. (Smaller cars will use closer to 250Wh/mile, but I'll use the conservative number.) At $0.15/KWh, that's 16.67 miles traveled per dollar, or $0.06/mile. Even if the price of electricity doubles, the EV is a hands-down winner in an energy/fuel cost comparison.
There is not, however, a free market in retail gas. Or oil for that matter. If there were, then some oil corps would be charging less, losing some profitability per barrel, and selling more barrels, making more profit - the entire point of the game for these master game players. The huge profits and same prices across the board mean they're in collusion, and there's no free market.
No one does that because there is no excess oil production capacity. And anyway, do you actually think oil companies could be making more profit if they wanted, and they just don't feel like it?
Here's a paper from AC Propulsion that explains why fuel cells are the technology that never will be. The smart money got out of fuel cells years ago.
Perspectives on Fuel Cell and Battery Electric Vehicles
Unfortunately, although their hearts are in the right place, and I generally respect them, Clinton (and, frustratingly, Gore) both are pushing "biofuels" as the solution, when the facts speak otherwise. Check out the tesla motors blog for some smackdown on biofuels.
Here is what a government should do:
1) wage war
2) pave roads
If you want road subsidies, why not rail subsidies?
The Prius, though known and marketed for its fuel economy, is also marketed for its "Near Zero Emmissions" rating.
It's only "zero emissions" as long as you're not counting CO2, in which case it's no better than any other vehicle that gets ~50 miles per gallon of gasoline.
Please post the price of electricity and liquid fuel in your area. What is your area, anyway?
Yeah, that free market is a bitch, huh? If you don't like the oil companies, stop buying their products, and stop making excuses about how you have no choice. Buy an electric car, ride a bicycle, use more public transportation.
The oil companies are publicly traded. Do what I do: Own some of the oil companies, take their profits, and use it for good instead of evil.
We're using some of their spoils to invest in electric car manufacturers, and we just put 3000 watts of PV solar panels on the roof, which makes financial sense now even without the California subsidy.
True, but as you just wrote, in the same post:
People do not understand that pricing has NOTHING to do with what it costs to provide a service. It has to do with what people are willing to pay to get a service.
Google can talk, now? What did it say, exactly?
And that strategy seems to be working really well for them.
What's the 22th? Is that short for twenty-twoth?
Availability of cheap fuel isn't a solution to poverty. If it were, the US, with its extremely low fuel prices, wouldn't have poor people. Poverty has many causes, and it's a serious problem, but keeping fuel prices artifically low isn't helping anyone in the long run.
Oh, so that's why they compared 42 articles.
- MP3 has extremely limited framing capabilities. This means, for example, that there's no timecode information in a given frame, which, in turn, means that intra-file seeking is either crude, or slow.
- the MP3 de facto standard for metadata (ID3 tags) are downright frightening. The "specification" will make any good engineer cringe. By comparison, Vorbis has an elegant metadata implementation that makes few assumption and imposes few restrictions.
- MP3 files are not sample accurate. This means that when you pass a recording through an encode->decode cycle, it will change length by some small amount. (The length on decode will be rounded up to an even multiple of mpeg frames.) This is particularly troublesome for live music or any other recording that is intended to dovetail seamlessly with another track, and playing such recordings "gaplessly" requires applying some heuristic, such as truncating lead-in and lead-out data below some noise threshold.
Since it still is extremely viable right now as I'm typing this, what are you saying?
Modern PDA's need to be these tiny miniature PC's basically.
I respectfully disagree. Palm's success came from abandoning that idea, and from giving users nearly instantaneous access to information they needed, with and optimized US instead of the baggage of a desktop OS. While handheld devices have considerably more power than they used to, that's no excuse to just "put Windows on it and call it done".
That's precisely the same conclusion that brought PalmSource to its knees. They abandoned the most successful thing they ever built (Palm OS 5.x) and spent year after year cramming BeOS into all sorts of places where neither developers nor end users wanted it. Oops.
But as someone mentioned, it doesn't appear this Palm entity actually owns rights to PalmOS or BeOS.
No, PalmSource owned BeOS, and they were bought by a Japanese browser company. The original Be engineers who did the most damage at PalmSource recently bailed and went to Google, having thoroughly proven their BeOS concept a failure twice.
Ironically, Palm Inc. owns the rights to the name Palm OS, but not the OS itself. I can't figure out who thought that would be a good idea.
I'm still surprised Palm didn't do ANYTHING useful with BeOS technology.
They tried. No one was asking for it. The end result sucked pretty badly, and still no one wanted it.
I'm guessing you never tried BeOS in its Palm OS incarnation (the never-shipping Palm OS 6 or "Cobalt"). Not exactly fast.
Not in California, they don't. And if they do (they don't because they know better by now) they're not enforceable.
Read what the GP wrote. He didn't say it isn't good. He says they have a lot of power, and it might not always be use for good purposes.
So you're saying he should sue himself, then, eh?
I used to buy a lot of 80mm ball bearing fans, because the cheap-ass sleeve bearing fans that came stock in power supplies would always sieze up after 6-18 months. But often the ball bearing fans would wear out, too.
A little surgery revealed that many of the supposed ball bearing fans actually had cheesy bushings, and the clever Chinese simply learned how to sell their cheap wares for more by slapping "ball bearing" stickers on them. Once, to make a point, I bought an $8 fan and immediately dissected it in front of the vendor with a pair of diagonal pliers. He just shrugged.
it is replacing want ads, real estate agents, auctions, music companies, publishers, etc.
it will someday replace government
And it's already replaced capital letters, too.
The shuttle's engineering design also specified no foam loss as a requirement. Over time, foam loss became tolerated, with a pervasive management attitude of "well it hasn't caused any problems, yet". Damage to the shuttles' carbon panels was documented on numerous missions, and was ultimately treated by management as a post-flight maintenance issue, rather than as a safety issue.
This sort of complacency is what killed Columbia, and is well documented in the extremely interesting Accident Investigation Board report.
Actually, the Be heritage is extremely alive and arguably well in the Cobalt (aka 6.0) products. After four years of development, the number of Cobalt devices shipping (yeah, that'd be zero) is perhaps a testament to the lameness of BeOS in a handheld.