The Prius and the Echo are very different cars, though the styling is similar at first glance. Before we bought our Prius, we test drove both and, in comparison, the Echo felt like an underpowered tin can. Not that the Prius is high performance at all; it's just more so than the Echo.
From what I've heard, the Prius is no longer subsidized to any great degree by Toyota. For the first couple of model years (the three it was out in Japan before the release in the U.S.), it was $10K more to make than the US selling price, but manufacturing competency and economies of scale have kicked in. Supposedly, they're profitable for Toyota now. (But do you trust what a car dealer says?)
You're probably right that when the batteries eventually wear out, it'll be cheaper to junk the car than replace them, but resale value of a ten-year old car is down in the noise on a new car purchase. As is the $1000-1500 saved over the life of the car on fuel costs.
Unlike the two-seater Insight, the Prius is a five-passenger sedan. In this case, it's Honda catching up to Toyota: the new Civic is only a tad larger than the Prius.
There are no restrictive leases on the Prius, Insight, or Hybrid Civic. (I think you're thinking of the pure electric vehicles, which have been lease only, though the Ford/Think Mobility will be available for purchase this fall.)
I own a Prius. It's a perfectly pleasant car, but it's not a performance car. If you covet a BMW, this is not the car for you. If, like me, you want something small, efficient, convenient to drive, it's perfect. (However, the UI to the audio system is truly awful.)
Alas, since it's not a ZEV (zero emissions vehicle), you can't drive solo in it in carpool lanes in California.
Aho, Sethi, and Ullman is fine for the front-end of a C, Fortran, or Pascal compiler, but isn't very good if you care about interesting type systems or dynamic languages, and is absolutely awful for optimization in a modern compiler.
Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation by Steve Muchnick is probably the best single book out there, if you don't care about parsing or other front-end issues. Almost all optimization issues are well covered. While writing a JIT for Java, this was the book I had open most often. My biggest criticism is that the algorithms are very high level and abstract: one I implemented ran in O(n^4) time as it was described, but with reasonable data structures was brought down to O(n log n) time.
Robert Morgan's Building an Optimizing Compiler is also quite good. It covers mostly the same material as Muchnick's, but where Muchnick gives a survey of most major techniques in a given area, Morgan picks one and takes you through a pretty real implementation. It's not nearly as good a reference, but is definitely an easier read.
Andrew Appel's Model Compiler Implementation in (ML|C|Java) is really good for the text, but the code is odd. Well, the ML code is fine and straightforward, but the Java and C versions will seem strange to people who don't write their code in ML and translate it to Java or C. If you want both front-end and back-end, though, pick one of these books. (His earlier, more hardcore Compiling with Continuations is very interesting, but not so practical anymore and only relevant for languages like ML or Lisp.)
Michael Wolfe's High Performance Compilers for Parallel Computing covers the same turf as Morgan and Muchnick, but with a focus on parallel machines (though the scalar parts of the book are good, too). Definitely the first place to go if you really want to speed up matrix operations on MP or vector hardware.
I saw the TI/DLP digital projection of Toy Story II at the AMC 1000 in San Francisco, and I've never seen anything quite like it. The clarity was just amazing.
Of course, this film was entirely computer graphics and if the projected resolution matched the resolution of the images when they were generated, you can't do any better. (Does anyone know if that's true?)
The one bit which didn't work was the credits crawl at the end. It looked to me like the speed chosen for scrolling the credits lead to an interference pattern with the frame rate of the projector, so they had a jittery effect.
All but one of the trailers I saw were for animated films, so I little no idea how it would work for live action. I suspect you need significantly higher resolution and frame rates to do as well as they did with TS2.
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The Prius and the Echo are very different cars, though the styling is similar at first glance. Before we bought our Prius, we test drove both and, in comparison, the Echo felt like an underpowered tin can. Not that the Prius is high performance at all; it's just more so than the Echo.
From what I've heard, the Prius is no longer subsidized to any great degree by Toyota. For the first couple of model years (the three it was out in Japan before the release in the U.S.), it was $10K more to make than the US selling price, but manufacturing competency and economies of scale have kicked in. Supposedly, they're profitable for Toyota now. (But do you trust what a car dealer says?)
You're probably right that when the batteries eventually wear out, it'll be cheaper to junk the car than replace them, but resale value of a ten-year old car is down in the noise on a new car purchase. As is the $1000-1500 saved over the life of the car on fuel costs.
-- Another satisfied Prius owner
Unlike the two-seater Insight, the Prius is a five-passenger sedan. In this case, it's Honda catching up to Toyota: the new Civic is only a tad larger than the Prius.
There are no restrictive leases on the Prius, Insight, or Hybrid Civic. (I think you're thinking of the pure electric vehicles, which have been lease only, though the Ford/Think Mobility will be available for purchase this fall.)
I own a Prius. It's a perfectly pleasant car, but it's not a performance car. If you covet a BMW, this is not the car for you. If, like me, you want something small, efficient, convenient to drive, it's perfect. (However, the UI to the audio system is truly awful.)
Alas, since it's not a ZEV (zero emissions vehicle), you can't drive solo in it in carpool lanes in California.
They don't. They use a derived-from-BSD TCP/IP stack, and some other ported-from-BSD code like dump, but it's a homebrew, minimalist kernel.
Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation by Steve Muchnick is probably the best single book out there, if you don't care about parsing or other front-end issues. Almost all optimization issues are well covered. While writing a JIT for Java, this was the book I had open most often. My biggest criticism is that the algorithms are very high level and abstract: one I implemented ran in O(n^4) time as it was described, but with reasonable data structures was brought down to O(n log n) time.
Robert Morgan's Building an Optimizing Compiler is also quite good. It covers mostly the same material as Muchnick's, but where Muchnick gives a survey of most major techniques in a given area, Morgan picks one and takes you through a pretty real implementation. It's not nearly as good a reference, but is definitely an easier read.
Andrew Appel's Model Compiler Implementation in (ML|C|Java) is really good for the text, but the code is odd. Well, the ML code is fine and straightforward, but the Java and C versions will seem strange to people who don't write their code in ML and translate it to Java or C. If you want both front-end and back-end, though, pick one of these books. (His earlier, more hardcore Compiling with Continuations is very interesting, but not so practical anymore and only relevant for languages like ML or Lisp.)
Michael Wolfe's High Performance Compilers for Parallel Computing covers the same turf as Morgan and Muchnick, but with a focus on parallel machines (though the scalar parts of the book are good, too). Definitely the first place to go if you really want to speed up matrix operations on MP or vector hardware.
Of course, this film was entirely computer graphics and if the projected resolution matched the resolution of the images when they were generated, you can't do any better. (Does anyone know if that's true?)
The one bit which didn't work was the credits crawl at the end. It looked to me like the speed chosen for scrolling the credits lead to an interference pattern with the frame rate of the projector, so they had a jittery effect.
All but one of the trailers I saw were for animated films, so I little no idea how it would work for live action. I suspect you need significantly higher resolution and frame rates to do as well as they did with TS2.
For details, see www.openipo.com.
A much better mechanism, IMHO. Kudos to Andover for taking the risk with a challenge to the traditional IPO system.
He's no former VC. He just changed firms. Bill Gurley used to work for Hummer Winblad, he's now with Benchmark Capital.