The buses roll through my neighborhood many times a day. I've lived here nearly thirty years.
Still, though some residents initially didn't like the buses, the talk now is we'd rather have a dozen buses than all the cars with the concomitant parking hassles. Our housing prices are up, but thanks to CA property tax law, it doesn't change what I pay.
I continue to work at home, with a sub-minute commute time. Sure pity the fools who have to wait outside for a bus in all weather and then blow another 1.5 hours on commute. I say we continue the bussing, have them bring tax revenues into San Francisco & leave the city nice and quiet during the day.
Guess that's why Google, Facebook, etc., etc. are trying to open larger offices in the city.
I'd bike up to the local Jr High School where there was an IBM 1130 in its air-conditioned room. We'd wait for the operators to reload the OS, and switch the balls on the selectrics and we'd be off programming in APL... 1971. Learned greek symbols at the same time.
'Mad Libs' was my first program. Took home the printouts and poured over them, writing changes in the margins to update the next day.
When dealing with electric vehicles, the problem isn't the "vehicle" part, it's weight, wind-resistance, and battery technology. So, if you're a gear-head, you're probably approaching this backwards.
I've driven 100% electric vehicles for eleven years, and the complexity (as the Tesla folks will tell you) is getting enough electrons into the battery faster enough a) without overheating the battery; and b) without stressing the battery chemistry. This is the problem that (continues to be) worked on by cell-phone, laptop, etc., hardware companies.
So your HUD may be fun, but make sure you've got smart guys working on the battery side.
On the plus side, you're absolutely correct: getting the gas-guzzlers to improve MPG is vastly better (more effective) than getting another 10% out of a Prius.
What's really scary is that all the elephants are making deals to not sue each other, further isolating themselves from the real harm in software patents. They retain full control of their patents thereby raising the barrier to entry for everyone else.
The power is consolidating, my friends, and if you don't have a patent war-chest you'll not be invited to play.
Note that in the "Silicon Valley Waldorf High School", which is in San Francisco, does use computers and other technologies. The philosophy is more geared towards appropriate technologies at appropriate stages of student development. The Waldorf high school kids don't seem to have problems learning how to use a mouse... (and xbox, and smartphones). So IMHO, having/not-having ipads by fourth grade isn't slowing the kids down: perhaps (perhaps...) they actually spend more time in meatspace.
I did some translation of B programs into C (a linker/loader) and B is very similar to C. The main language difference, as I recall, was the way structures & pointers were handled. Other than that, a transliteration from one to the other was nearly possible. I'm sure internals were different & stdlib was different, but if Thompson wrote B, then one can easily see his handiwork in C.
That being said, I started C & UNIX at Bell Labs over thirty years ago & always loved the simplicity of it all. Thanks Dennis & Ken.
All detailed in Anil Ananthaswamy's very readable The Edge of Physics (Book's website). They "dig" the holes using hot water from a very long hose. Pretty interesting. Anil also covers the similar (but smaller) installation in the Russia's Lake Baikal.
If that happened in these here parts, and if it weren't between midnight and 3 AM, you would definitely not be bored when you slowed everyone behind you to 15 MPH. You'd experience heart-racing, life-in-your-hands terror.
so true -- sometimes even just slowing down to 65mph...
not a Leaf, but Toyota's Rav4EV. BEV, 100miles/charge, been driving it since 2002. Seats 4, not 5 & we have a Palm app, not iPhone app. I don't have a fast charge option, so that's cool. One hopes "state of the art" exceeds what Toyota did nearly ten years ago:
Air Conditioning "costs" 5 miles per hour of use. Heat costs only a little less than that (No internal combustion engine generating heat, ya know).
Bumper-to-bumper traffic isn't a problem: Car uses nearly zero at 'idle'. The worry I have is an unexpected detour which adds 20 miles.
Heated windshield costs a few miles per hour of use. Lights, radio, heated seats are nearly free.
The "100 miles on a charge claim" corresponds in the real world to driving consistently at about 65 mph, or mixed city/highway driving. Driving at 75 mph decreases distance by ~10%. Driving at 55mph would yield > 100 miles. Driving at 35 mph (constant) would probably yield a +30% distance gain. City driving results in lots of braking & though regenerative, there is loss, so consider 90 miles in the city.
On low battery, the car goes into a special "turtle" mode whereby one cannot drive quickly. I've driven an extra 20 miles at about 15 mph in this mode after the gauges registered zero. Was unable to drain the batteries because I got bored trying.
Sure, I use another car for driving vacations, but these battery electric cars are perfect for some of us.
True, to a point -- we permit websites to be in color, despite color blindness. We permit websites to be in, say, Arabic, despite a large portion of the web's population being unable to read Arabic.
A good website (depending on target audience, of course) shouldn't depend on mouseover, as it shouldn't depend on color, but it can use these features to make the information more accessible.
I think you've hit on a more interesting point -- the iPhone's popularity will force us to reconsider interactions with the web. Our desire to attract iPhone users (and the following next-gen mobile internet users) will have us changing the interaction model.
See Peter-Paul Koch's blog on the iPhone's browser at quirksmode for more in that direction.
Plus it doesn't do mouseover/hover/tooltips -- pretty basic javascript. It's a cool device, but I find I have to re-engineer my websites to fit the iPhone's capabilities.
Sure, the web may morph so that it will fit onto the iPhone, but for now I agree with the original article.
They have built the car -- it was the GM EV-1. Fast, sexy two seater. 100 mile charge. Check out new movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" (youtube has trailer).
Toyota RAV4EV -- Mostly sold as fleet vehicles, but Toyota was nice enough to sell about 400 to the general public a few years ago. 100 miles to the charge, 70+ miles per hour, it's a real car. Yes, it's a great car.
sure, I park at work (away from home). So while I'm replying to slashdot.. I mean "working", the PV create energy and I sell it back to the power company (at peak rates). When I plug in at home, I buy back power at drastically cheaper off-peak rates: much better for everyone.
you're correct regarding all gains from passive solar & riding a bike's better too.
bio-diesel's only a marginal idea IMHO: loads of particulate pollution, and modern western farming consumes massive amounts of petrochemicals. It's a good way to consume otherwise 'waste' oil, but I don't think it scales cleanly.
plug-in hybrids would be ideal: charge overnight with lower cost electrons yet have hybrid to get range and avoid slow charge problems.
disclaimer: that's what I do(I have a electric car, so I plug it in at night).
Putting solar cells on your car is dumb:
deal with aerodynamics (not a problem with my house)
can't orient cells correctly (hard enough finding a close parking space, now you have to have one in the sun, with a WSW tilt (for us northern hemispherians)
ANY SHADE across solar panels, even a tree branch, dramatically decreases its efficiency (like having one dead battery in your flashlight: the whole thing fails).
size matters... 1kW system is about 120 square feet -- that's just not going to power much of a car. Consider 400wh to power car one mile & assume you get 5 equivalent hours/day parking & 30 square foot car top. That's enough power to drive 4 miles when the sun shines.
Having PV grid-tied, means you feed electricity onto the grid at typically peak usage times, then recharge your car at night at off peak rates.
1kg of hydrogen (H2) has power equivalent of gallon of gasoline. A 15 gallon tank of gasoline would be replaced by a 18^3 feet of H2 gas (at STP). Kinda big, even for a hummer.
Compress the H2 to "fit" in same physical dimension is very, very expensive, not to mention the resulting impact on physical weight on containing fuel tank, and high-pressure connectors on the tank.
So, we really need microbes which can fart quickly so that we don't need to store the hydrogen.
in addition to changing source of power / electricity to cleaner generation methods than petroleum, there's an added benefit of Time Shifting power generation.
Some generators are very efficient, but expensive to start/stop (nuclear, for example). Some generators are very efficient, and cheap, but not reliable (wind). Some are not so efficient, but very cheap to start/stop (hydro). Some are, well, in the middle (gas, coal).
Power, when generated must be consumed or stored, so during peak hours, Utilities bring more expensive generators on-line. At night, when few use electricity, a good deal is "wasted" as gas and coal generators idle -- keeping warm, but not generating much power.
As an electric car owner, I pay different prices for electricity purchased during the day ($.35 per kilowatt hour) and during the night ($.05 per kilowatt hour). Therefore, I charge my car at night.
Presumably, one would use "night-time" electricity to generate hydrogen fuel cells, smoothing out the day/night electrical generation mix. By smoothing out the curve, you need less "fast-jerk" power generators, which tend to be more expensive, and can use technology which may be expensive to start/stop but cheap (and clean) in the long run.
Hydrogen's not the way to go IMHO, but diss'ing it because of impact on electricity is missing the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, though some residents initially didn't like the buses, the talk now is we'd rather have a dozen buses than all the cars with the concomitant parking hassles. Our housing prices are up, but thanks to CA property tax law, it doesn't change what I pay.
I continue to work at home, with a sub-minute commute time. Sure pity the fools who have to wait outside for a bus in all weather and then blow another 1.5 hours on commute. I say we continue the bussing, have them bring tax revenues into San Francisco & leave the city nice and quiet during the day.
Guess that's why Google, Facebook, etc., etc. are trying to open larger offices in the city.
I'd bike up to the local Jr High School where there was an IBM 1130 in its air-conditioned room. We'd wait for the operators to reload the OS, and switch the balls on the selectrics and we'd be off programming in APL... 1971. Learned greek symbols at the same time.
'Mad Libs' was my first program. Took home the printouts and poured over them, writing changes in the margins to update the next day.
Anyone else remember "domino" commands, i.e., Quad-backspace-divide?
When dealing with electric vehicles, the problem isn't the "vehicle" part, it's weight, wind-resistance, and battery technology. So, if you're a gear-head, you're probably approaching this backwards.
I've driven 100% electric vehicles for eleven years, and the complexity (as the Tesla folks will tell you) is getting enough electrons into the battery faster enough a) without overheating the battery; and b) without stressing the battery chemistry. This is the problem that (continues to be) worked on by cell-phone, laptop, etc., hardware companies.
So your HUD may be fun, but make sure you've got smart guys working on the battery side.
On the plus side, you're absolutely correct: getting the gas-guzzlers to improve MPG is vastly better (more effective) than getting another 10% out of a Prius.
Good luck!
An old joke among pilots asks: what do you need to fly a modern airplane? A computer, a pilot and a dog.
The computer’s job is to fly the plane. The pilot’s job is to feed the dog. The dog’s job is to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.
What's really scary is that all the elephants are making deals to not sue each other, further isolating themselves from the real harm in software patents. They retain full control of their patents thereby raising the barrier to entry for everyone else. The power is consolidating, my friends, and if you don't have a patent war-chest you'll not be invited to play.
Note that in the "Silicon Valley Waldorf High School", which is in San Francisco, does use computers and other technologies. The philosophy is more geared towards appropriate technologies at appropriate stages of student development. The Waldorf high school kids don't seem to have problems learning how to use a mouse... (and xbox, and smartphones). So IMHO, having/not-having ipads by fourth grade isn't slowing the kids down: perhaps (perhaps...) they actually spend more time in meatspace.
I did some translation of B programs into C (a linker/loader) and B is very similar to C. The main language difference, as I recall, was the way structures & pointers were handled. Other than that, a transliteration from one to the other was nearly possible. I'm sure internals were different & stdlib was different, but if Thompson wrote B, then one can easily see his handiwork in C. That being said, I started C & UNIX at Bell Labs over thirty years ago & always loved the simplicity of it all. Thanks Dennis & Ken.
All detailed in Anil Ananthaswamy's very readable The Edge of Physics (Book's website). They "dig" the holes using hot water from a very long hose. Pretty interesting. Anil also covers the similar (but smaller) installation in the Russia's Lake Baikal.
looks like it contains only text :(
If that happened in these here parts, and if it weren't between midnight and 3 AM, you would definitely not be bored when you slowed everyone behind you to 15 MPH. You'd experience heart-racing, life-in-your-hands terror.
so true -- sometimes even just slowing down to 65mph...
Sure, I use another car for driving vacations, but these battery electric cars are perfect for some of us.
A good website (depending on target audience, of course) shouldn't depend on mouseover, as it shouldn't depend on color, but it can use these features to make the information more accessible.
I think you've hit on a more interesting point -- the iPhone's popularity will force us to reconsider interactions with the web. Our desire to attract iPhone users (and the following next-gen mobile internet users) will have us changing the interaction model.
See Peter-Paul Koch's blog on the iPhone's browser at quirksmode for more in that direction.
Plus it doesn't do mouseover/hover/tooltips -- pretty basic javascript. It's a cool device, but I find I have to re-engineer my websites to fit the iPhone's capabilities. Sure, the web may morph so that it will fit onto the iPhone, but for now I agree with the original article.
They have built the car -- it was the GM EV-1. Fast, sexy two seater. 100 mile charge. Check out new movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" (youtube has trailer).
Toyota RAV4EV -- Mostly sold as fleet vehicles, but Toyota was nice enough to sell about 400 to the general public a few years ago. 100 miles to the charge, 70+ miles per hour, it's a real car. Yes, it's a great car.
you're correct regarding all gains from passive solar & riding a bike's better too.
bio-diesel's only a marginal idea IMHO: loads of particulate pollution, and modern western farming consumes massive amounts of petrochemicals. It's a good way to consume otherwise 'waste' oil, but I don't think it scales cleanly.
plug-in hybrids would be ideal: charge overnight with lower cost electrons yet have hybrid to get range and avoid slow charge problems.
Putting solar cells on your car is dumb:
Having PV grid-tied, means you feed electricity onto the grid at typically peak usage times, then recharge your car at night at off peak rates.
1kg of hydrogen (H2) has power equivalent of gallon of gasoline. A 15 gallon tank of gasoline would be replaced by a 18^3 feet of H2 gas (at STP). Kinda big, even for a hummer.
Compress the H2 to "fit" in same physical dimension is very, very expensive, not to mention the resulting impact on physical weight on containing fuel tank, and high-pressure connectors on the tank.
So, we really need microbes which can fart quickly so that we don't need to store the hydrogen.
Some generators are very efficient, but expensive to start/stop (nuclear, for example). Some generators are very efficient, and cheap, but not reliable (wind). Some are not so efficient, but very cheap to start/stop (hydro). Some are, well, in the middle (gas, coal).
Power, when generated must be consumed or stored, so during peak hours, Utilities bring more expensive generators on-line. At night, when few use electricity, a good deal is "wasted" as gas and coal generators idle -- keeping warm, but not generating much power.
As an electric car owner, I pay different prices for electricity purchased during the day ($.35 per kilowatt hour) and during the night ($.05 per kilowatt hour). Therefore, I charge my car at night.
Presumably, one would use "night-time" electricity to generate hydrogen fuel cells, smoothing out the day/night electrical generation mix. By smoothing out the curve, you need less "fast-jerk" power generators, which tend to be more expensive, and can use technology which may be expensive to start/stop but cheap (and clean) in the long run.
Hydrogen's not the way to go IMHO, but diss'ing it because of impact on electricity is missing the point.