The Tesla Roadster goes 244 miles on a 53kWhr pack.
not at 55mph it wont. maybe at 10mph on a test track. drag goes up as velocity squared.
if your going to claim 300 miles it needs to be at 55 mph. who's driving 300 miles in the city? and if you were then it would be stop-and-go, and even if they have regenerative systems they are not going to get the full milage. so if you are going to quote 300 miles then it needs to be comparable driving conditions to a regular car.
Youre right about the 3-phase correction, I was just keepingit simple. As for the watt hours, that's just because they say it will go 300 miles. 300 miles on the highway takes about 150KW-hr. You could get by with less if you were driving slower but still on a highway (i.e. without braking or acceleration) but then it would hardly be fair to call it a 300 mile tank in comparison to a standard car.
no. the amount of energy it takes to maintain a honda accord sized car at 55mph is about 30KW. (one can argue over streamlines, tire and gear train losses, but it's going to be around 30KW no matter what the energy source)
Somehow my typing got garbled so I left out one phrase that confused you. the point is if you are going to replace 5.4 hours worth of energy in 45 minutes you need to have 5.4/0.75 times more power. since the minimum power required for the 5.4 hours is 30KW, you need 220KW to recharge it in 45 minutes. the 5.4 hours is just the time it takes to travel to cruising range at 55mph. That is the battery has a capacity of 30KW x 5.4 hours. If there inefficiencies in the recharging itself then you need even more power.
so if you drive a car for 5 hours at 30KW then want to recharge it in 10 minutes that means you need 900KW of power. it also means the wires in the car need to be able to handle 30 times the typical driving load.
if the connector was a 208V connector then that's about 4000 DC amps for ten minutes.
you'll be able to degauss your hard drive while you wait!
That's a good thought. though it adds another layer to the efficiency problem, it makes up for it by off-peak loads. all those hydro electric damns and nuc power plants can smooth out their loads.
Even better if every onehad one, you even power your house off it when your car did not need it, and pay night rates for daytime electricity.
I don't think it's possible that you could get 300 miles on a 45 minute charge off of a regular household power line.
my estimate:
to push a honda accord shaped object at 55 mph through the air takes over 30KW of energy. that would take 5.4 hours. to to recharge that would take 220 KW of power assuming no conversion loss.
if you used a 220 volt line that would be 1000 amps for 45 minutes. There's no way they would use a 480 volt line since those are catastrophically unsafe for consumers.
I don't have a 1000 amp service at my house!
So I don't think the 45 minute quick charge can be used int he same sentence as the 300 miles. But if its some lesser milage then the whole 45 minute statment seems weirdly arbitrary. Why not say it has a 5 minute quick charge?
Since the tesla folks are not stupid and have delivered in the past, I'm perplexed what is going on. Are there going to be special kilo amp charging stations. or did I bork my own math?
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
Then play Creative Commons licensed music instead.
I wish I could! it's books on tape checked out from the library. I tried to explain to them how DRM is not a good thing for them to promote but it's talking to the wall. They just rent the downloadable media from companies that serve libraries and 100% of these use WMA so they can have time-limited checkouts. I can understand the desire for time limited checkouts--it's equivalent to limiting how many copes the library has in it's collection (and thus paid for).
The net effect however is that am defacto not using the service since I cannot.
it does not gain time per se (obviously). it gains you organization by consolidating 7 days into 6. also it does gain fractionally more waking hours, provide you can stand it, like your mom.
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
What you say "should be true". It says so in the virtual box manual. How I found the devices did not show up in the network neighbor hood. So I had to use the run command. I admit I was baffled by the network neighborhood on windows. it seems like their are different views of varying completeness depending on how you get the explorer window (or whatever it's called) to bring it up. So it could be that I'm just a windows spaz. but I don't think so. I think windows is simply unreliable when exploring the VM's server interface. I tried to do it multiple times probably altogehter for a couple hours before I decided to use the run command.
and having to hand type a run-command is a frustrating experience. (sorry I just have to say I'm glad I don't use Windows a lot). here's my rant. you need to actually run the program "command" to bring up a shell that you then enter the net use x: command. if you don't and instead directly run the command itself, windows flashes a shell on the screen for 10 nanoseconds while it runs the command then closes the shell window. there is no feedback if the command ran correctly. since the command is a little complex and you have to get the long directory paths typed exactly perfectly, you need feedback.
Would it be really so hard to have the "run" command have a "run...." version that pulls up a command window right from the start window. I mean I can't even think of any use case where running a shell command and not seeing if it worked could be of any possible value. you nearly always want to see what the shell did right?
I use Virtual box on a pair of mac intel core duo 2 machines to run windows XP pro I'm very pleased with it. It essentially works perfectly. I don't care that it is only single processor since All I want is basic seemless windows functionality for those few cases where software is windows only.
it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.
it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
I've had three things I could not figure out.
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).
It will not burn a CD or DVD.
also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.
I've know people who worked 28 or 32 hour "days". That is you just treat 28 hours as you circadian rythm. it means your sleep/wake schedule drifts from the day/night cycle, but it still overlaps it so you can have productive interactions with regular humans. IN your case since you claim you are working all the time, it's obviously not a big deal if you don't perfectly sync with others socially.
if you go to that cycle then you will now have 4 or 8 extra hours of wake time in which you can exsercize. you are actually awake slightly more of the time so it's a net gain for waking activity.
people I've know who did this find it sustainable for an entire year.
if you are really productive working 15 hours a day then you probably are a candidate for this regimen.
Exactly. for most folks, and atleast initially, the netbook will be the "second computer" and really more like the "third computer" if they use one at work as well. Why would I deliberately choose an OS that was different than my other OS, especially if I were to be transferring documents and presentations I wrote on the airplane back to my main computer. For most people one of those other computers is going to be a windows computer because the OS came pre-installed on it.
Moreover, even if my other computer was a linux computer it would probably not be a vcast or moblin linux computer. So again I have two different looks and feel to deal with.
A perhaps more enticing bussiness model would be for MS to give away the OS and sell microsoft Office in Two-packs (one for the home computer and one for the netbook).
Same sort of weirdness shows up in the Mac 10.5.5 versus Ubuntu tests. all the test fluctuate a small amount except for the SQL-lite test in which the Mac creams ubuntu.
why does SQL lite show such extreme behaviour in file systems.
Ahem, you speak through your hat. Felt is the only easily created fabric you can make directly from animals without weaving technology. it's alos highly wwaterfproof and durable. As a result it have been in active use in garments and hats dating back at least 5000 years ago. It's even been found on mummies.
warm, conformal, tow tech, and waterproof clothing you can make from found sources (animals, not crops) is probably more important than fire to the development of human society, hunting and environment.
I suspect your revisionist history of DDT is equally uniformed.
TFA doesn't seem clear on this point, but what the name of the technique implies is that you can perform the operation, but neither the inputs nor the outputs are ever decrypted. So if you can't see the question, and you can't see the answer, then why would you perform the operation other than at the request of someone who can (i.e. the client)?
Example, I want the total sales figures for all the left handed employees. I cobble together the appropriate SQL processing request send it to my cloud server which rummages throught the data base summing up the figures for some subset of the fields. It sends me back just the sum, encypted. It never knows which employees it was selecting nor any of their sales figures or even the sum. It just has the encrypted result that it sends to me all processed.
otherwise I'd have to pull every encrypted record of every employee across the web to my computer. In effect doing a table dump across the net for even the smallest calculation. Yuck! let alone not working on my iphone.
Another application is encryption of ballots. The achilies heel of almost every voting encryption algorithm is that somewhere somebody has the key and to do any processing you have to decrypt the ballots. THis way you can do the sum and only decrypt the results. you could publish the encrypted sum before the key is even unsealed then publish the key. The key does not have to ever be in the hands of the central tabulators.
Current voting encryption schemes require centralized control with possession of the keys. This way the control is decentralized with the counters and the key keepers not being the same person.
Let's not forget PCBs and DDT and Mercury based felt hats and lead paint as all things that were WIDELT beleived to be safe and a boon to mankind until they turned out not to be.
Id say the jury is still out on long term problems with cell phones and powerlines. People are only now rethinking the subtle effects of heat islands produced by cities. And there's some concern that the plasticizers in water bottles is now showing up in human organs.
It was not long ago people figured out some animals use magnetic fields and polarized light to navigate. Just to make something up, suppose that polarized microwave transimission were to interferre with that. Perhaps indirectly. for example an oscillating dipole can orient molecules even if they don't strictly speaking absorb. Light scattering off oriented molecules in turn can get polarized. I'm not saying this is a problem. I'm just saying it's pretty glib to say "bah, there's no harm is such a massive experiment"
We don't know why things like asthma and toxic allergies seem to be on the rise in children. Over diagnosis seems to not be the problem so presumably their are systemic origins like say plasticizers we have yet to discover.
Yes, except for all the more and far more difficult stuff: there's also rich meta data plus real time tracking of which files are dirty, scehduling of backups, and the recovery interface. Then there's as you say hard link directories and solving all the problems with that like loops.
for backups I used to swear by rsync plus hardlinks. But since time machine came out it's oh so much much better. For one thing rsync is still a bit unstable on huge directory trees that contain lots of hard links. And it also boofs on some extended type attributes, forks and file types, though it keeps getting better (perhaps it's perfect now). Rsync + hardlinks also does not retain the ownership and privledges and ACL faithfully either.
But even if Rsync + hardlinks didn't have those troubles, time machine is so flawless it's just the thing to use. What is especially nice about time machine is the recovery and inspection process. it's not too hard to figure out what files chaged (there's even a 3rd party gui application for this) and because this info is stored in meta data it's faster and more relaible to retreive than a massive FIND command looking at time stamps. The time machine interface for partial recoveries is intuitive and easy to drill down. In many cases it's even application aware so you can drill not on the file system itself but on say your mail folders in the mail application. this is actually a pretty stunning achievement that needs to be seen to be believed how paradigm shifting it is.
And full recoveries could not be easier. you just boot off the CD and within ten clicks you have picked the souece and destination and it has done a series of idiot checks. While that might not seem too amazing, it sure is comforting. It's a mildly nerve wracking process of trying to recover from a back-up cause there's lots of ways to goof and maybe even wreck your original ( like oops, I didn't do a -delete, or I didn't tell it to reassign links, or worse I copied the wrong direction).
Here's a super nice tip: you can have two disks operating with time machine that you rotate. Actually the best way i've found is to have one constantly attached then on fridays attach the other one, redirect time machine to it, let it back up all the changes since last friday, then detatch it and let time machine go back to the main disk.
You can even use this as a way to sync your two computers though it's better as a backup than as a synch. have time machine back up just your home directory to a thumb drive, take this from home to work. plug it to the drive at work, back it up. then revert this to the backup from home. now home and work are synced plus, if there was one special file or two that was newer at work, well you have that in the backup you made! ( by the way to do this kind of thing requires fiddling with the backup cookie so two computers can share the same repository. google this if you want o know how)
I suspect these people will quickly learn the true meaning of uptime. If you deploy 100 of these to search 1000 containers on a ship and you have one of them fail on you or simply run down it's batteries, then you are going to be spending all your time in recovery operations trying to find behind what box in what container you lost the freak'in thing.
I don't expect robots to be as reliable as computers. Heck my roomba get's it self in trouble a significant number of times and it's only moving along carpet. (Frankly the roomba is amazing. the fact that it can get it self out of most trouble is an incredible feat. the fact that it still gets snagged just shows you how complex the real world is in providing unanticipated obstacles)
the model they are using is some sort of benford's law like thing. But this assumes that the distribution should be random to begin with. not likely. Moreover the kind of manipulations of concern, like shifting votes, have the same signature as legal manipulations such as bus loads of church folks showing up.
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The Tesla Roadster goes 244 miles on a 53kWhr pack.
not at 55mph it wont. maybe at 10mph on a test track. drag goes up as velocity squared.
if your going to claim 300 miles it needs to be at 55 mph. who's driving 300 miles in the city? and if you were then it would be stop-and-go, and even if they have regenerative systems they are not going to get the full milage. so if you are going to quote 300 miles then it needs to be comparable driving conditions to a regular car.
Youre right about the 3-phase correction, I was just keepingit simple. As for the watt hours, that's just because they say it will go 300 miles. 300 miles on the highway takes about 150KW-hr. You could get by with less if you were driving slower but still on a highway (i.e. without braking or acceleration) but then it would hardly be fair to call it a 300 mile tank in comparison to a standard car.
no. the amount of energy it takes to maintain a honda accord sized car at 55mph is about 30KW. (one can argue over streamlines, tire and gear train losses, but it's going to be around 30KW no matter what the energy source)
Somehow my typing got garbled so I left out one phrase that confused you.
the point is if you are going to replace 5.4 hours worth of energy in 45 minutes you need to have 5.4/0.75 times more power. since the minimum power required for the 5.4 hours is 30KW, you need 220KW to recharge it in 45 minutes. the 5.4 hours is just the time it takes to travel to cruising range at 55mph. That is the battery has a capacity of 30KW x 5.4 hours. If there inefficiencies in the recharging itself then you need even more power.
so if you drive a car for 5 hours at 30KW then want to recharge it in 10 minutes that means you need 900KW of power. it also means the wires in the car need to be able to handle 30 times the typical driving load.
if the connector was a 208V connector then that's about 4000 DC amps for ten minutes.
you'll be able to degauss your hard drive while you wait!
That's a good thought. though it adds another layer to the efficiency problem, it makes up for it by off-peak loads. all those hydro electric damns and nuc power plants can smooth out their loads.
Even better if every onehad one, you even power your house off it when your car did not need it, and pay night rates for daytime electricity.
notice the 45 minute quick charge.
I don't think it's possible that you could get 300 miles on a 45 minute charge off of a regular household power line.
my estimate:
to push a honda accord shaped object at 55 mph through the air takes over 30KW of energy. that would take 5.4 hours. to to recharge that would take 220 KW of power assuming no conversion loss.
if you used a 220 volt line that would be 1000 amps for 45 minutes. There's no way they would use a 480 volt line since those are catastrophically unsafe for consumers.
I don't have a 1000 amp service at my house!
So I don't think the 45 minute quick charge can be used int he same sentence as the 300 miles. But if its some lesser milage then the whole 45 minute statment seems weirdly arbitrary. Why not say it has a 5 minute quick charge?
Since the tesla folks are not stupid and have delivered in the past, I'm perplexed what is going on. Are there going to be special kilo amp charging stations. or did I bork my own math?
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
Then play Creative Commons licensed music instead.
I wish I could! it's books on tape checked out from the library. I tried to explain to them how DRM is not a good thing for them to promote but it's talking to the wall. They just rent the downloadable media from companies that serve libraries and 100% of these use WMA so they can have time-limited checkouts.
I can understand the desire for time limited checkouts--it's equivalent to limiting how many copes the library has in it's collection (and thus paid for).
The net effect however is that am defacto not using the service since I cannot.
thanks. maybe I'll waste some more time on the issue!
it does not gain time per se (obviously). it gains you organization by consolidating 7 days into 6. also it does gain fractionally more waking hours, provide you can stand it, like your mom.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
What you say "should be true". It says so in the virtual box manual. How I found the devices did not show up in the network neighbor hood. So I had to use the run command. I admit I was baffled by the network neighborhood on windows. it seems like their are different views of varying completeness depending on how you get the explorer window (or whatever it's called) to bring it up. So it could be that I'm just a windows spaz. but I don't think so. I think windows is simply unreliable when exploring the VM's server interface. I tried to do it multiple times probably altogehter for a couple hours before I decided to use the run command.
and having to hand type a run-command is a frustrating experience. (sorry I just have to say I'm glad I don't use Windows a lot). here's my rant. you need to actually run the program "command" to bring up a shell that you then enter the net use x: command. if you don't and instead directly run the command itself, windows flashes a shell on the screen for 10 nanoseconds while it runs the command then closes the shell window. there is no feedback if the command ran correctly. since the command is a little complex and you have to get the long directory paths typed exactly perfectly, you need feedback.
Would it be really so hard to have the "run" command have a "run...." version that pulls up a command window right from the start window. I mean I can't even think of any use case where running a shell command and not seeing if it worked could be of any possible value. you nearly always want to see what the shell did right?
I use Virtual box on a pair of mac intel core duo 2 machines to run windows XP pro I'm very pleased with it. It essentially works perfectly. I don't care that it is only single processor since All I want is basic seemless windows functionality for those few cases where software is windows only.
it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.
it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
I've had three things I could not figure out.
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).
It will not burn a CD or DVD.
also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.
I don't game so open GL means squat to me.
I've know people who worked 28 or 32 hour "days". That is you just treat 28 hours as you circadian rythm. it means your sleep/wake schedule drifts from the day/night cycle, but it still overlaps it so you can have productive interactions with regular humans. IN your case since you claim you are working all the time, it's obviously not a big deal if you don't perfectly sync with others socially.
if you go to that cycle then you will now have 4 or 8 extra hours of wake time in which you can exsercize. you are actually awake slightly more of the time so it's a net gain for waking activity.
people I've know who did this find it sustainable for an entire year.
if you are really productive working 15 hours a day then you probably are a candidate for this regimen.
...a netbook with Verizon vCast OS.
Exactly. for most folks, and atleast initially, the netbook will be the "second computer" and really more like the "third computer" if they use one at work as well. Why would I deliberately choose an OS that was different than my other OS, especially if I were to be transferring documents and presentations I wrote on the airplane back to my main computer. For most people one of those other computers is going to be a windows computer because the OS came pre-installed on it.
Moreover, even if my other computer was a linux computer it would probably not be a vcast or moblin linux computer. So again I have two different looks and feel to deal with.
A perhaps more enticing bussiness model would be for MS to give away the OS and sell microsoft Office in Two-packs (one for the home computer and one for the netbook).
Same sort of weirdness shows up in the Mac 10.5.5 versus Ubuntu tests. all the test fluctuate a small amount except for the SQL-lite test in which the Mac creams ubuntu.
why does SQL lite show such extreme behaviour in file systems.
Talk about optimization or lack of it. Take a look at the SQL lite test. EXT3 is something like 80 times faster than EXT4 or BTRFS.
What heck is going on!!!. Postgress SQL does not seem to show this performance enhancement.
really this is an insanely different score, to the effect that if it's real no one in the right mind would run SQL on anything but EXT3.
Something must be wrong with this test.
wow thanks. I had cobbled a perl deamon that mucked with my hosts file but I never liked it. this looks better.
Ahem, you speak through your hat. Felt is the only easily created fabric you can make directly from animals without weaving technology. it's alos highly wwaterfproof and durable. As a result it have been in active use in garments and hats dating back at least 5000 years ago. It's even been found on mummies.
warm, conformal, tow tech, and waterproof clothing you can make from found sources (animals, not crops) is probably more important than fire to the development of human society, hunting and environment.
I suspect your revisionist history of DDT is equally uniformed.
TFA doesn't seem clear on this point, but what the name of the technique implies is that you can perform the operation, but neither the inputs nor the outputs are ever decrypted. So if you can't see the question, and you can't see the answer, then why would you perform the operation other than at the request of someone who can (i.e. the client)?
Example, I want the total sales figures for all the left handed employees. I cobble together the appropriate SQL processing request send it to my cloud server which rummages throught the data base summing up the figures for some subset of the fields. It sends me back just the sum, encypted. It never knows which employees it was selecting nor any of their sales figures or even the sum. It just has the encrypted result that it sends to me all processed.
otherwise I'd have to pull every encrypted record of every employee across the web to my computer. In effect doing a table dump across the net for even the smallest calculation. Yuck! let alone not working on my iphone.
Another application is encryption of ballots. The achilies heel of almost every voting encryption algorithm is that somewhere somebody has the key and to do any processing you have to decrypt the ballots. THis way you can do the sum and only decrypt the results. you could publish the encrypted sum before the key is even unsealed then publish the key. The key does not have to ever be in the hands of the central tabulators.
Current voting encryption schemes require centralized control with possession of the keys. This way the control is decentralized with the counters and the key keepers not being the same person.
Let's not forget PCBs and DDT and Mercury based felt hats and lead paint as all things that were WIDELT beleived to be safe and a boon to mankind until they turned out not to be.
Id say the jury is still out on long term problems with cell phones and powerlines. People are only now rethinking the subtle effects of heat islands produced by cities. And there's some concern that the plasticizers in water bottles is now showing up in human organs.
It was not long ago people figured out some animals use magnetic fields and polarized light to navigate. Just to make something up, suppose that polarized microwave transimission were to interferre with that. Perhaps indirectly. for example an oscillating dipole can orient molecules even if they don't strictly speaking absorb. Light scattering off oriented molecules in turn can get polarized. I'm not saying this is a problem. I'm just saying it's pretty glib to say "bah, there's no harm is such a massive experiment"
We don't know why things like asthma and toxic allergies seem to be on the rise in children. Over diagnosis seems to not be the problem so presumably their are systemic origins like say plasticizers we have yet to discover.
lots of pissed birds, bats, pollen and insects too.
Yes, except for all the more and far more difficult stuff: there's also rich meta data plus real time tracking of which files are dirty, scehduling of backups, and the recovery interface. Then there's as you say hard link directories and solving all the problems with that like loops.
for backups I used to swear by rsync plus hardlinks. But since time machine came out it's oh so much much better. For one thing rsync is still a bit unstable on huge directory trees that contain lots of hard links. And it also boofs on some extended type attributes, forks and file types, though it keeps getting better (perhaps it's perfect now). Rsync + hardlinks also does not retain the ownership and privledges and ACL faithfully either.
But even if Rsync + hardlinks didn't have those troubles, time machine is so flawless it's just the thing to use. What is especially nice about time machine is the recovery and inspection process. it's not too hard to figure out what files chaged (there's even a 3rd party gui application for this) and because this info is stored in meta data it's faster and more relaible to retreive than a massive FIND command looking at time stamps. The time machine interface for partial recoveries is intuitive and easy to drill down. In many cases it's even application aware so you can drill not on the file system itself but on say your mail folders in the mail application. this is actually a pretty stunning achievement that needs to be seen to be believed how paradigm shifting it is.
And full recoveries could not be easier. you just boot off the CD and within ten clicks you have picked the souece and destination and it has done a series of idiot checks. While that might not seem too amazing, it sure is comforting. It's a mildly nerve wracking process of trying to recover from a back-up cause there's lots of ways to goof and maybe even wreck your original ( like oops, I didn't do a -delete, or I didn't tell it to reassign links, or worse I copied the wrong direction).
Here's a super nice tip: you can have two disks operating with time machine that you rotate. Actually the best way i've found is to have one constantly attached then on fridays attach the other one, redirect time machine to it, let it back up all the changes since last friday, then detatch it and let time machine go back to the main disk.
You can even use this as a way to sync your two computers though it's better as a backup than as a synch. have time machine back up just your home directory to a thumb drive, take this from home to work. plug it to the drive at work, back it up. then revert this to the backup from home. now home and work are synced plus, if there was one special file or two that was newer at work, well you have that in the backup you made! ( by the way to do this kind of thing requires fiddling with the backup cookie so two computers can share the same repository. google this if you want o know how)
I suspect these people will quickly learn the true meaning of uptime. If you deploy 100 of these to search 1000 containers on a ship and you have one of them fail on you or simply run down it's batteries, then you are going to be spending all your time in recovery operations trying to find behind what box in what container you lost the freak'in thing.
I don't expect robots to be as reliable as computers. Heck my roomba get's it self in trouble a significant number of times and it's only moving along carpet. (Frankly the roomba is amazing. the fact that it can get it self out of most trouble is an incredible feat. the fact that it still gets snagged just shows you how complex the real world is in providing unanticipated obstacles)
It's garbage in other ways.
the model they are using is some sort of benford's law like thing. But this assumes that the distribution should be random to begin with. not likely. Moreover the kind of manipulations of concern, like shifting votes, have the same signature as legal manipulations such as bus loads of church folks showing up.