Energy lose from generator to battery typically for most systems is around 10-20%, it really depends on what you are working with, but where hybrids make it up is they recapture 3-60% of the energy back through regenative breaking. This is why typically a hybrid gets much better gas mileage in the city than on the highway. Again it depends on the kind of hybrid it is. The other big advantage is that the motor is controlled by a computer which keeps it running in one of several power bands where it is at it's most efficient state.
The marketing efforts for customer education along with all the fanboy and hater noise as typical has made a complete mess of the publics understand as too what exactly is a hybrid.
All hybrid means is that it has more than one type of motor. It doesn't really have anything to do with how it transfers the mechanical energy about or even how it creates it. You could have a turbine (jet engine) internal combustion engine pair in a car (A.K.A. the Batmobile) and it would considered a hybrid too, a very cool, very bad-ass hybrid, but still a hybrid.
So lets go with an example that most people would be familiar with. Both the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight are hybrids, but they are really very little alike on how they go about it.
A Toyota Prius is a gas assisted electric car. The electric motor drives the wheels and the gas motor powers the batteries. On the other hand a Honda Insight was a electric assisted gas driven car. The gas motor drove the drive train and the electric motor kicked in with saved up breaking energy on the take off.
The neat thing is that most people don't understand is that for all intensive purposes a hybrid like the Prius is actually an electric car. It does not need the gasoline engine to get around. So if they ever decided to they could make the cars power cells and power plants modular things could get really interesting and mostly likely very confusing.
Want to be able to drive it all the time without stopping, get the big combustion engine.
Want to be completely electric forgo the engine and get a bigger battery pack with a wall charger.
Want something in between, get a much smaller engine (one that fits the strict polution requirements for your city) with the solar panel option. The motor would be big enough to help rechare the batteries but not large enough to actually propel the car along.
Really all the hybrid craze means is we are now on the verge of having truely customizeable cars where upgrading your engine really means that all you have to do is disconnect it from it's mounts and unplug it.
A little hybrid trivia: NASCAR actually put a ban out a few years ago because some clever mechanics worked out how to use the electric starters on the cars to squeak out a few extra horsepower to gain a small but very real advantage over other cars.
That is very true, but it does seem like the end goal for car developers. Even with the motors mounted on the frame near each wheel, you would have a nice low center of gravity with most of the vehicle weight at the corners.
Cars are not impossible to work on. The biggest problem most people face is that they don't have good TO's (Technical repair books). That and manufactures like to slip some custom tools in there now and then. Forget the shitty Chilton repair guides and go pick up yourself a good set of dealer repair manuals for your make and model. They aren't cheap, but they are thorough. 90% of the parts that are on your car these days are practically the extact same ones they have been using for the last 30 years. Other than some of the extra computer controls and sensors, you don't need much past your standard tools and repair guide.
Right back at you Eighnstien. If it has an electric drive train, then yes it does mean no stick, other than maybe stop, forward and backwards. You are correct though they could create a gas/electric hybrid that has a typical standard/automatic drive train. When they say hybrid it could be any of a variety of configurations.
They use big NiMH battery packs. If you were to eat one about the only thing it would do is maybe make you constipated. They are about as toxic as a hotdog, oh wait never mind, hotdogs are pretty damn toxic, but oh so good.
Really though NiMH batteries are some of the more environmentally friendly battery types out there compaired to all the rest.
Actually an electric drive train on trucks and SUV's would be more desireable than your typical transmission that we've had for the last 40-50 years. Electric motors make the most torque at zero RPMs for much better load/towing. There is also once they make the switch to independently powered wheels (an electric motor built into the wheel) you could have much more interesting steering suspension options since there would be no drive shafts getting in the way.
As far as they've said they mean all their vehicles will have hybrid drivetrains. The only sad thing is going to be our grandkids asking us what it means to drive "stick".
A-fucking-men brother. It no longer gets dark in my house as night, which has it's plusses since Zombies and Ninjas can't sneek up on me as easily, but come on does every device need 1-5 led lights these days?
In that particular case, McDonalds and just about every other resturant was a lawsuit just waiting to happen. At the time the cup might as well have disolved in her hand, since the the ones in common use were that bad. They were very thin, part of the reason they served them so hot because they would cool off quickly, and the lids would barely stay on. This is why they lost. Of course as someone else posted an apeal got the fine reduced to just cover her medical expenses and a much smaller amount for compensation.
While I whole heartedly agree that it is unwise to put nearly boiling liguids between one's legs and the lawsuit was frivolous, it did have a positive, much better coffee cups. You can pratically drop a full one and that lid isn't comming off. Now if someone would just sue the Taco Bell over their soda cups...
I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I also think it's a travesty when the courts are overflowing with cases, and innocent people rot in jail awaiting their trial while stupid things like this waste court time; I think there'd be a lot less cases like this if the loser-pays-costs model was adopted, as in the UK, but that's another issue.
Thank God we don't adopt UK methods for dealing with things. I've been living in the UK for the past year and all I can say is WOW! Do you know you people have been driving on the wrong side of the road all this time? I can't imagine what your court system is like.;)
Splitting the same monitor seems quite extreme, but for most things these days running 2 or more monitors per computer is easy enough to do. For basic office work, internet cafe, school, etc there is no reason why this couldn't work out. For families this could be pretty nice set-up. Of course you'd still have to have your own gaming rig and let the peasants (wife and kids) share a machine.
Aerospace is more cyclic than twenty years. 20 years represent the BIG projects, such as the F-22. Which is currently winding down. Pretty funny that a "brand new" fighter is almost 20 years old.
Getting off the subject, most projects last from 6 months to 5 years max, upgrades, add-ons and such. Very few companies can afford to hold on too all their employes full time so it turns into contract work. Yes they always seem unemployed, but they get picked right back up as soon as the next contract start, typically with no more that a few month gape. I bet he tinkered with the glove idea for fun and then get really involved and decided to simply finish it rather than go back to another full time slot on the next contract.
You are absolutley correct PV power generation will never be a viable large-scale power source, but what it is extremely good at is being a small-scale power source. Why go cover a big piece of land with solar cells when there are millions of empty roofs around the country. Considering the prices of homes these days and the nominal amount of improvement in output and price of home PV systems, the only thing that is holding back a solar explosion is the attitude the customers, the power company, and the government. They could easily be installed on new homes and could be sized as such that they would be almost unoticeable in terms of cost. A system as small as 100watts is extremely feaseable and could be had for around $600 dollars. As an impact on one person's monthly bills it would be almost unoticeable, but as a requirement for every new home built in the US it would have a dramatic impact. Solar has improved alot over the last 20 years. It's ready to go, it's just that people haven't seem to have gotten the message yet.
Everything since then has been about cleaning up problems, adding features, and new hardware support. Even though I mostly despise Macs, a little too yuppy, a little too smug, a little to cute, and completley overrated to me, they do have a smart way of doing things.
Apple throws an OS out there that does practically nothing usefull (Cheetah), but keeps it's older OS. Two years later after letting all the early adopters (Cheetah/Puma) pay for the priveldge of being Beta testers and getting all the bugs out they dump OS9 and make OSX default. The big thing is this give plenty of time for 3rd part software/hardware providers to get their act together. This last point is where MS has been going wrong.
Vista (and Xp before it) came out with everything from the get go including a near total lack of driver and patch support from 3rd parties. They could have saved themselves alot of pain if they didn't try to push the migration and just let things move at their own pace. The end result is a bad reputation and at best mediocre perforance.
My upgrade to Vista has been fairly easy and the problems, other than video drivers (FUCK YOU Nvidia!), few. Unlike the jump to XP, most software that ran on XP runs fairly well on Vista. Still that doesn't mean the average user, who tends to be fairly computer illiterate and less patient will have a happy experience. Apple and MS over the years have spent a lot of time copying each other, but in this seems that MS was not paying attention.
Actually it's just the opposite, we have a saying that is rapidly gaining traction in the Air Force
"Aircraft Maintenance - It takes a High School diploma to fix what a College degree fucked up."
Hi-tech aircraft are typically 10-20 years behind bleeding edge . Even the "new fangled" F-22 is getting close to 20 years old. Now as far as being "technically minded" I'll take a red-neck over a college nerd any day of the week. The college nerd will fiddle fart around all day trying to make the system work and fail, while the red-neck will point out almost immediately that the system doesn't work to well in the "Official Mode" (Aka OFF)
The only tragedy is that people still get worked up over rare occurances. 32 people dead, sad but not a tragedy. This sort of thing happens what once every ten years?
In the US before the day is done 150 people will be dead and a few thousand wounded in car accidents. A person will be dead before I can even finish typing out this short comment. If you really gave a flying fuck about pointless deaths then you'd be out crying for tougher restictions on cars and how people operate them. Since I don't see the great "Cars are the devil" and "Hybrids Kill" going on to stop the daily auto massacre anytime soon I'll take that as a confirmation.
Anyone who think guns are the cause of death and crime are as much a part of the problem as the people out there doing horrible things with them.
Yes the exchange rate is wonderful, but that has less to do with our economy in the US being bad. Exchange rates are practically an economic game onto themselves. Between the taxes, exchange rate rules, and the markets you guys participate in that we don't even go anywhere near, plus the simple fact that the UK doesn't buy all that much from the US. You guys grow most of your own food and the EU makes it's own aircraft, pretty much our two biggest exports
The UK economy may be strong, but it's pretty much at the expense of the residents. You guys literally are paying 2-5x as much for the same stuff that we get in the US and you tend to have much lower saleries and have tripple the sales tax rates. Yeah twenty dollars an hour working in a coffee shop, about 10 quid, may seem like kick ass pay to a teenager in the states, but considering a pack of cigarettes costs $12.00, a DVD $30, a movie ticket $17, and a gallon of gas $8.00 sudddenly it doesn't seem like a whole heck of alot. Plus the fact that you wont be fighting to get that job from another teenage, but an adult since the unemployment rate is considerably higher here.
I'll give you this though were the UK spanks the pants off the US. A pint of beer at the pub costs about the same as a bottle of beer at a bar in the States, but you get roughly 30-40% more alcohol! Better beer, more of it, stronger, same price! Three cheers for the UK!
A DRM-net would last about 3-7 business days, the average time it takes Newegg.com to deliver a 500gb external hard drive and then the DRM-free sneaker-net/postal-net would grow 10,000% overnight.
Personally I still don't know why so many of you out there still fool with P2P over the net, other than getting your latest bittorrent TV fix, it's slow, fraught with malware, and could land you in court.
I love the sneaker-net for my downloading needs. I can see why so many shy away from it. It does require you to go...you know outside...that place where the giant burning ball of doom lives (terrifing!), and talk to those strange things called people. I tend to find it much more efficient, though there is that one guy you have to watch out for (the one with 26,384 viruses on his machine) since most of the stuff tends to already be filtered and organized, and boy there is nothing like USB 2/Firewire/Wireless G/100bT/1000bT tranfer rates!
I think you're being a little optomistic in thinking that the US doesn't want to control what people can do. Given enough time i'd pretty much expect the internet to become the christianet if it was just up to the US.
Naw that's alot of bluff coming from the kind of people that barely know the difference between evolutionary ancestors and modern day monkeys. They actually represent a very small minority in the US, they just happen to get alot of press time since the Liberal media likes to rub it in the Prez's face every time they start talking out of their arses.
For the most part your typical American likes their privacy (aka porn and dirty chat talk) and could care less about the Bible thumpers. Besides people keep forgetting the internet will always be the internet. The beauty of the system is that it was designed to route around obsticals. If worse comes to worse, we can just build another and give the bird to the hyper-religious.
Actually it's far more than several, hundreds in fact, which is part of the problem and they still in many places touch the regular internet, which again is part of the problem.
You don't count, you live in the land of funny money, where reality, exchange rate, and reasonable pricing for computer and electronic components rarely meet. Drop me a line and I'll order you a full copy of Vista Ultimate for 190 quid.
God, I just really hate people that hate microsoft. I'm so sick and tired of their shoddy attitude, obnoxiously repetative bitching, and anti-anyone that actually expect to get paid for their product, except Apple of course.
Slashdot Mirror
You are absolutely correct.
The marketing efforts for customer education along with all the fanboy and hater noise as typical has made a complete mess of the publics understand as too what exactly is a hybrid.
All hybrid means is that it has more than one type of motor. It doesn't really have anything to do with how it transfers the mechanical energy about or even how it creates it. You could have a turbine (jet engine) internal combustion engine pair in a car (A.K.A. the Batmobile) and it would considered a hybrid too, a very cool, very bad-ass hybrid, but still a hybrid.
So lets go with an example that most people would be familiar with. Both the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight are hybrids, but they are really very little alike on how they go about it.
A Toyota Prius is a gas assisted electric car. The electric motor drives the wheels and the gas motor powers the batteries. On the other hand a Honda Insight was a electric assisted gas driven car. The gas motor drove the drive train and the electric motor kicked in with saved up breaking energy on the take off.
The neat thing is that most people don't understand is that for all intensive purposes a hybrid like the Prius is actually an electric car. It does not need the gasoline engine to get around. So if they ever decided to they could make the cars power cells and power plants modular things could get really interesting and mostly likely very confusing.
Want to be able to drive it all the time without stopping, get the big combustion engine.
Want to be completely electric forgo the engine and get a bigger battery pack with a wall charger.
Want something in between, get a much smaller engine (one that fits the strict polution requirements for your city) with the solar panel option. The motor would be big enough to help rechare the batteries but not large enough to actually propel the car along.
Really all the hybrid craze means is we are now on the verge of having truely customizeable cars where upgrading your engine really means that all you have to do is disconnect it from it's mounts and unplug it.
A little hybrid trivia: NASCAR actually put a ban out a few years ago because some clever mechanics worked out how to use the electric starters on the cars to squeak out a few extra horsepower to gain a small but very real advantage over other cars.
That is very true, but it does seem like the end goal for car developers. Even with the motors mounted on the frame near each wheel, you would have a nice low center of gravity with most of the vehicle weight at the corners.
Cars are not impossible to work on. The biggest problem most people face is that they don't have good TO's (Technical repair books). That and manufactures like to slip some custom tools in there now and then. Forget the shitty Chilton repair guides and go pick up yourself a good set of dealer repair manuals for your make and model. They aren't cheap, but they are thorough. 90% of the parts that are on your car these days are practically the extact same ones they have been using for the last 30 years. Other than some of the extra computer controls and sensors, you don't need much past your standard tools and repair guide.
Right back at you Eighnstien. If it has an electric drive train, then yes it does mean no stick, other than maybe stop, forward and backwards. You are correct though they could create a gas/electric hybrid that has a typical standard/automatic drive train. When they say hybrid it could be any of a variety of configurations.
Really though NiMH batteries are some of the more environmentally friendly battery types out there compaired to all the rest.
As far as they've said they mean all their vehicles will have hybrid drivetrains. The only sad thing is going to be our grandkids asking us what it means to drive "stick".
A-fucking-men brother. It no longer gets dark in my house as night, which has it's plusses since Zombies and Ninjas can't sneek up on me as easily, but come on does every device need 1-5 led lights these days?
While I whole heartedly agree that it is unwise to put nearly boiling liguids between one's legs and the lawsuit was frivolous, it did have a positive, much better coffee cups. You can pratically drop a full one and that lid isn't comming off. Now if someone would just sue the Taco Bell over their soda cups...
I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I also think it's a travesty when the courts are overflowing with cases, and innocent people rot in jail awaiting their trial while stupid things like this waste court time; I think there'd be a lot less cases like this if the loser-pays-costs model was adopted, as in the UK, but that's another issue.
Thank God we don't adopt UK methods for dealing with things. I've been living in the UK for the past year and all I can say is WOW! Do you know you people have been driving on the wrong side of the road all this time? I can't imagine what your court system is like. ;)
Splitting the same monitor seems quite extreme, but for most things these days running 2 or more monitors per computer is easy enough to do. For basic office work, internet cafe, school, etc there is no reason why this couldn't work out. For families this could be pretty nice set-up. Of course you'd still have to have your own gaming rig and let the peasants (wife and kids) share a machine.
Getting off the subject, most projects last from 6 months to 5 years max, upgrades, add-ons and such. Very few companies can afford to hold on too all their employes full time so it turns into contract work. Yes they always seem unemployed, but they get picked right back up as soon as the next contract start, typically with no more that a few month gape. I bet he tinkered with the glove idea for fun and then get really involved and decided to simply finish it rather than go back to another full time slot on the next contract.
Grampa if you don't get me a pony and take me to the zoo, I'm going to recharge my ipod! Then you'll be sorry!
You are absolutley correct PV power generation will never be a viable large-scale power source, but what it is extremely good at is being a small-scale power source. Why go cover a big piece of land with solar cells when there are millions of empty roofs around the country. Considering the prices of homes these days and the nominal amount of improvement in output and price of home PV systems, the only thing that is holding back a solar explosion is the attitude the customers, the power company, and the government. They could easily be installed on new homes and could be sized as such that they would be almost unoticeable in terms of cost. A system as small as 100watts is extremely feaseable and could be had for around $600 dollars. As an impact on one person's monthly bills it would be almost unoticeable, but as a requirement for every new home built in the US it would have a dramatic impact. Solar has improved alot over the last 20 years. It's ready to go, it's just that people haven't seem to have gotten the message yet.
Everything since then has been about cleaning up problems, adding features, and new hardware support. Even though I mostly despise Macs, a little too yuppy, a little too smug, a little to cute, and completley overrated to me, they do have a smart way of doing things.
Apple throws an OS out there that does practically nothing usefull (Cheetah), but keeps it's older OS. Two years later after letting all the early adopters (Cheetah/Puma) pay for the priveldge of being Beta testers and getting all the bugs out they dump OS9 and make OSX default. The big thing is this give plenty of time for 3rd part software/hardware providers to get their act together. This last point is where MS has been going wrong.
Vista (and Xp before it) came out with everything from the get go including a near total lack of driver and patch support from 3rd parties. They could have saved themselves alot of pain if they didn't try to push the migration and just let things move at their own pace. The end result is a bad reputation and at best mediocre perforance.
My upgrade to Vista has been fairly easy and the problems, other than video drivers (FUCK YOU Nvidia!), few. Unlike the jump to XP, most software that ran on XP runs fairly well on Vista. Still that doesn't mean the average user, who tends to be fairly computer illiterate and less patient will have a happy experience. Apple and MS over the years have spent a lot of time copying each other, but in this seems that MS was not paying attention.
It's not saying much that your machine that you bought in 2000 runs OSX just fine, OSX (OSX server) was released in 1999.
"Aircraft Maintenance - It takes a High School diploma to fix what a College degree fucked up."
Hi-tech aircraft are typically 10-20 years behind bleeding edge . Even the "new fangled" F-22 is getting close to 20 years old. Now as far as being "technically minded" I'll take a red-neck over a college nerd any day of the week. The college nerd will fiddle fart around all day trying to make the system work and fail, while the red-neck will point out almost immediately that the system doesn't work to well in the "Official Mode" (Aka OFF)
In the US before the day is done 150 people will be dead and a few thousand wounded in car accidents. A person will be dead before I can even finish typing out this short comment. If you really gave a flying fuck about pointless deaths then you'd be out crying for tougher restictions on cars and how people operate them. Since I don't see the great "Cars are the devil" and "Hybrids Kill" going on to stop the daily auto massacre anytime soon I'll take that as a confirmation.
Anyone who think guns are the cause of death and crime are as much a part of the problem as the people out there doing horrible things with them.
Oops left out a line. Ment to say lower average saleries. Minimum wage is higher than the States, but higher pay jobs are less common.
The UK economy may be strong, but it's pretty much at the expense of the residents. You guys literally are paying 2-5x as much for the same stuff that we get in the US and you tend to have much lower saleries and have tripple the sales tax rates. Yeah twenty dollars an hour working in a coffee shop, about 10 quid, may seem like kick ass pay to a teenager in the states, but considering a pack of cigarettes costs $12.00, a DVD $30, a movie ticket $17, and a gallon of gas $8.00 sudddenly it doesn't seem like a whole heck of alot. Plus the fact that you wont be fighting to get that job from another teenage, but an adult since the unemployment rate is considerably higher here.
I'll give you this though were the UK spanks the pants off the US. A pint of beer at the pub costs about the same as a bottle of beer at a bar in the States, but you get roughly 30-40% more alcohol! Better beer, more of it, stronger, same price! Three cheers for the UK!
That was more than obvious. :P
Personally I still don't know why so many of you out there still fool with P2P over the net, other than getting your latest bittorrent TV fix, it's slow, fraught with malware, and could land you in court.
I love the sneaker-net for my downloading needs. I can see why so many shy away from it. It does require you to go...you know outside...that place where the giant burning ball of doom lives (terrifing!), and talk to those strange things called people. I tend to find it much more efficient, though there is that one guy you have to watch out for (the one with 26,384 viruses on his machine) since most of the stuff tends to already be filtered and organized, and boy there is nothing like USB 2/Firewire/Wireless G/100bT/1000bT tranfer rates!
Naw that's alot of bluff coming from the kind of people that barely know the difference between evolutionary ancestors and modern day monkeys. They actually represent a very small minority in the US, they just happen to get alot of press time since the Liberal media likes to rub it in the Prez's face every time they start talking out of their arses.
For the most part your typical American likes their privacy (aka porn and dirty chat talk) and could care less about the Bible thumpers. Besides people keep forgetting the internet will always be the internet. The beauty of the system is that it was designed to route around obsticals. If worse comes to worse, we can just build another and give the bird to the hyper-religious.
Actually it's far more than several, hundreds in fact, which is part of the problem and they still in many places touch the regular internet, which again is part of the problem.
You don't count, you live in the land of funny money, where reality, exchange rate, and reasonable pricing for computer and electronic components rarely meet. Drop me a line and I'll order you a full copy of Vista Ultimate for 190 quid.
[/humor]