The Toyota Prius (pious?) uses more fuel than a good small diesel car, and is less functional. Please elaborate, because I don't believe you.
I don't see any diesel cars on the market (or any diesels for that matter) that are similar in fuel economy, functionality and emissions, let alone more efficient or less polluting.
Did you try posting your problem to the pgsql-performance mailing list or at least searching the archives? If so, you likely would have likely found that the problem you experience is a fairly common one and if you were using an old version of PostgreSQL (anything older than 8.2).
You very likely were experiencing table or index bloat due to the constant insert rate. Did you have the autovacuum daemon turned on? Did you schedule regular vacuums of your heavily inserted tables? Any other maintenance?
Because this is a fairly common problem, the next major version of PostgreSQL (8.3) will very likely include some fixes to help address this issue (more aggressive autovacuum daemon and the "HOT" patches).
might be able to get similar performance etc with PostgreSQL, but it will definitely not be simple to do simple things and it requires constant tweaking and probably the blood of sacrificially slain goat to work reliable performance wise. Please do some actual research on any halfway recent version of Pg before making comments like that.
Ease of configuration and performance has gone up leaps and bounds and is continuing to improve.
PostgreSQL at the very worst may perform slightly slower than MySQL, but for many workloads it performs much better. MySQL, for example has a couple well known performance bugs that causes throughput to take an absolute dump after reaching a certain load when PostgreSQL does not and continues to maintain throughput very nicely.
The best option for asynchronous PostgreSQL replication is Slony-I. It's extremely flexible and so far has proven to work very well. The devs supporting it are also very good. I do admit that there is a bit of a learning curve to get it configured and running, but this is something they are working on for the next major revision.
If you need to cluster PostgreSQL, have a look at pgpool and pgpool-II.
I hope so. Though Postgres needs serious work in the n00b friendly area. I've used both Postgres and MySQL and haven't found Postgres any harder to acclimate to than MySQL. If you know of any such areas where Postgres is deficient, I'm sure that the Postgres devs would love to know about it and address the issue.
GMail's spam filters are over 99.9% perfect after about a week of training from the user.
While GMail's spam filters are pretty good, I do find an annoying amount of emails from a couple mailing lists (dspam and postfix mailing lists) marked as spam fairly regularly. I probably get a 2-5 of these false positives a week.
Luckily it's easy for me to see those emails since I have filters which label those messages.
Given the volume of mail I receive on my gmail account it probably is 99.9% effective, but I would prefer a few more false negatives than false positives.
It's well known that to maximize life out of rechargeable batteries, you need to avoid draining the battery to completely empty and avoid overcharging the battery. NiCad batteries are especially sensitive to overcharging which results in the mythical "memory effect".
So if you frequently plug your phone in for a bit here, or a bit there and infrequently letting the battery fully discharge or charge that's ideal. Or perhaps you phone/charger is very good at preventing the battery from becoming fully discharged or overcharging the battery.
In applications where battery life is critical (for example, hybrid and electric cars where cell charge is usually maintained between something like 30-80% of full capacity) battery management is critical to maintaining cell capacity. And because the life of a battery shortens significantly when it is fully discharged or charged, that means that you will give up some capacity to increase battery life.
To elaborate on the parent's post, p4-clockmod doesn't actually change the core clock of the CPU. All it does is force the CPU to run idle more of the time when it's in use.
p4-clockmod will actually end up causing you to use more power since it's usually more efficient to get the work done faster at a higher CPU utilization and it takes a bit of time for p4-clockmod to "ramp up" the virtual clockspeed again.
If you're running the latest kernel (2.6.21 or later) with dynticks enabled, you can install and run PowerTop which will let you identify programs and configuration issues which prevent your CPU from reaching the lowest power states.
Prius Curb Weight: 2900-3000lbs HP: ~110 (hybrid net power)
Civic Hybrid Curb Weight: ~2900lbs HP: ~110 (hybrid net power)
I've driven a Metro, and it's like driving a tin-can. If you ever get into an accident, you are a lot more likely to be hurt in it. It gets tossed around on the highway when passing larger vehicles.
If those are acceptable tradeoffs, then go find yourself a used Metro. But a Prius or Civic Hybrid is a lot more comfortable and safer than the Metro.
Given that both cars weigh nearly twice as much as the Metro and get approximately the same mileage, I'm not sure what you're laughing at.
I'm sure if you put a hybrid drivetrain in a Metro you'd be getting 60-70mpg in it.
How close are you to the nearest access node? Unless you are within 100 meters or closer with no large objects in between you are unlikely to be able to connect without buying a high powered WiFi router.
My parents live in Mountain View and had to use a router with a directional antenna pointed directly at the nearest node around 250 meters away to get reliable access.
C'mon what are we talking about here, a few minutes? AFAIK, better power savings comes through a good acpi config, which I don't see a whole lot of discussion on.
The biggest and easiest power savings come from CPU frequency scaling (if your processor supports it). Linux has long done a good pretty good job of putting the CPU to sleep and low power states when it can.
For older Athlon/Duron processors installing/running athcool makes a significant difference in power consumption (as long as it runs stable on your hardware, which it isn't guaranteed to do). On one of our old servers it reduced idle power draw from 100w to 65w.
My guess is where this kind of thing would make a dollars/cents difference is in the NOC. But this kind of detail isn't very sexy or very high on most NOC operators radar.
It might depending on how idle your servers are. The more idle they are, the bigger the possibility for power savings. While they are obviously targeting laptop battery consumption, all Linux machines running this tool (and kernel 2.6.21 or later which has the dynticks feature) will be identify what is waking up their processor from low power states.
Much of the work put into optimizing battery life on laptops will also apply to desktops and servers alike.
You know, I've had Time Warner RoadRunner for just about 10 years now and aside from a few issues related to a flaky cable modem during the first couple years, it's really been flawless!
I've really had no issues with RoadRunner that I can remember for the last 5 years.
Of course, from what I've heard Time Warner / RoadRunner San Diego is one of the best.
Exactly. When you have a datacenter (or even a room) full of servers, the amount of heat you have to dissipate is very important.
Electricity and cooling costs are huge. And unlike a server which you buy once and may use for 3-5 years, you pay for electricity and cooling all the time. The electricy/cooling costs over the lifetime of a product can often cost more than the server itself, so anyone not looking at the power consumption of their systems as a high priority item (desktop, server, anything) is doing themselves a disservice.
AMD is still kicking Intel's ass when it comes to power savings where it matters: Idle CPU power thanks to Cool'n'Quiet. Comparable AMD/Intel processors will have the AMD processor idling at 20-30w less than the Intel counterpart. That is a 30-40% power reduction, huge! Imagine if you have an office full of desktop computers and how much money that will save you in electricity, not to mention cooling costs in the summer.
Think about it, how much of your day is spent with your processor doing actual work compared to doing waiting for user input? If you're a typical desktop user, 70-90% of the time your computer is on is sitting there doing nothing.
Performance and price of the two systems is very similar (with the AMD system being a bit cheaper and also tending to perform a bit better thanks to it's integrated Nvidia graphics card), but the power savings of the AMD is simply staggering with it idling below 50w and the Intel system idling over 75w.
AMD processors are the processor of choice for anyone looking to build a low power system that still performs well.
Then compare the Camry hybrid to the non-hybrid version or the Altima to the non-hybrid version or the Highlander to the non-hybrid version.
All similarly specced in terms of features are are well under $10k more expensive.
BTW, who cares if the Civic Hybrid system is that much cheaper than the Toyota system? Apparently it is still very effective looking at it's mileage numbers.
Look at how long laptop batteries last; the Prius batteries aren't that different, and they work in environments much worse than laptop batteries.
The lifecycle of a hybrid battery is _very_ different than the lifecycle of your average laptop battery.
A rechargable battery's life is significantly reduced in 4 different cases:
1. When batteries are discharged to very low levels. 2. When batteries are charged to 100% capacity (or close to it). 3. When batteries are subjected to extremely high charge rates. 4. When batteries are subjected to extremely high discharge rates.
We can ignore cases 3 and 4 since it's safe to assume that in both cases (laptop/hybrid car) the manufacturer designs the battery and load to handle those cases appropriately.
Now for cases 1 and 2 - The typical use case for a laptop is to charge it all the way up and then fully discharge it. Even if you don't let it fully discharge, it's very common to plug it in frequently to make sure there is a 100% charge available.
Hybrid cars generally never allow the cells to discharge past 40-50% and more than 80-85%. While this does reduce the usable capacity of the cell, the tradeoff is that the battery will last many more charge/discharge cycles.
This is one of the difficulties of building a 100% electric car with today's battery technology - To maximize range you need to charge and discharge the battery as much as possible. Unfortunately in doing so, you significantly reduce the number of charges you can make before capacity becomes significantly degraded.
To account for this, all hybrids (and new generation electic cars, go read about the Tesla electric car on their blog) have rather sophisticated battery monitoring and charge/discharge logic built in to maximize performance and battery life.
What makes you think that a car comparable to the Prius is $10k less? Perhaps if you compare the Prius to the Yaris, but they aren't even in the same class of vehicle.
If you directly compare something like a Civic to a Civic hybrid, you will find that the price difference is much lower.
On the other hand, you're _certainly_ replacing the battery pack in a Prius by 100,000 miles, and the battery pack is the nastiest thing to make.
You are _certainly not_ replacing the battery pack in a Prius by 100k miles. There are plenty of people with even more than 200k mi on their battery packs without any issues.
Please research your wild claims before making them.
Water injection primary benefit is to increase knock resistance. If power output isn't being limited by knock, then you won't pick up any additional power by injecting water. It will steam clean your combustion chamber and it can reduce emissions, though.
Water injection will also typically slow down combustion so that more timing is required for the same amount of air/fuel, though.
I am still surprised that there isn't any manufacturer selling cars with water injection. You can often even inject plain old washer fluid. People usually remember to keep that filled, don't they?
Well, most modern diesels are direct injection now, and a lot are turbo charged, too. But yes, once they figure out NOx and particulate emissions, combined with a hybrid would also be a good combination for an efficient car that would still be peppy to drive.
Turbo charging a car isn't that expensive. I can't see how it's much more expensive than a supercharger. If anything the price seems fairly similar.
If you are experiencing turbo lag, it's because the engineers traded off low-end torque for high-end torque by sizing a bigger turbo which requires more exhaust pressure to spool. With a properly sized turbo, turbo-lag is a non-issue. Add direct injection which lets you increase the compression ratio and you gain a large amount of torque that you would have lost since most high output turbo charged cars significantly lower the compression to avoid detonation with high boost pressures.
If superchargers were better than turbos on small engines, why is it that most small engines these days are turbo charged and not supercharged? I can name a half-dozen 4-cylinder turbocharged cars sold today but can't think of any supercharged cars. If they made the same power, same fuel efficiency, same reliability and were cheaper, I can guarantee that you would only see superchargers instead of turbos.
People have long known that ethanol fuels have high octane ratings (the measure of how knock resistant a fuel is).
People have also long known that turbo charging an engine is a great way to extract more power out of a small engine.
People have also known that direct injection allows you to reduce the tendency to knock since it lets you inject fuel into the hot engine at the very last second - reducing the amount of time the air/fuel mixture has to heat up.
And guess what? Mazda produces cars today that has both direct injection and is turbo charged. For example, the MazdaSpeed 3.
It's 2.3 liter engine produces 263hp and 280lb/ft of torque and has an EPA fuel economy rating of 20/28mpg. So yes, while it does provide good power and decent gas mileage, it's nothing earth shattering compared to turbocharged cars without direct injection.
The engine has a very high compression ratio for a turbo charged gasoline engine (9.5:1), especially one that pushes over 15psi of boost into the cylinders. That is direct injection working for you.
For example, the slightly bigger turbo charged 2.5 liter Subaru WRX engine has a compression ratio of 8.4:1 and maximum boost of 11.6psi is rated at 230hp/235lb/ft of torque (though it is admittedly underrated) with similar fuel economy as the Mazdaspeed 3 considering that it is all-wheel-drive (20/26mpg EPA). The more powerful WRX STi has the same 2.5l displacement, 8.2:1 compression ratio and a bigger turbo pushing 14.5 psi is rated at 293hp/290lb/ft of torque but less fuel economy, 18/24mpg.
Unless there is a lot of potential still to be found by combining these 2 technologies, I see it as more of an evolution rather than a revolution. Perhaps a 1.0 liter engine would be able to muster 120+ hp/torque but I find it hard to believe that it could achieve mileage ratings significantly higher than a hybrid. And you still can't turn the engine off when idling or coasting down hill.
So how about a direct-injection, turbo-charged, atkinson cycle hybrid and combine the best of all technologies?
Get into our offices and it is a different story. We have dual t1s coming in and only 60+ employees, but we are constantly saturated. Combine that with the fact that Cisco Pixes have horrible throttling support and you end up with times when I can't even access basic websites very quickly.
Sounds like you need to get yourself a halfway decent QoS box and start throttling traffic on your end. Throttling traffic at the ISP level isn't going to do a damn thing for you.
Better throw in a content cache in there, too (Squid) if you haven't already and force everyone to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any diesel cars on the market (or any diesels for that matter) that are similar in fuel economy, functionality and emissions, let alone more efficient or less polluting.
Did you try posting your problem to the pgsql-performance mailing list or at least searching the archives? If so, you likely would have likely found that the problem you experience is a fairly common one and if you were using an old version of PostgreSQL (anything older than 8.2).
You very likely were experiencing table or index bloat due to the constant insert rate. Did you have the autovacuum daemon turned on? Did you schedule regular vacuums of your heavily inserted tables? Any other maintenance?
Because this is a fairly common problem, the next major version of PostgreSQL (8.3) will very likely include some fixes to help address this issue (more aggressive autovacuum daemon and the "HOT" patches).
similar performance etc with PostgreSQL, but it will definitely not be simple to do simple things and
it requires constant tweaking and probably the blood of sacrificially slain goat to work reliable performance wise. Please do some actual research on any halfway recent version of Pg before making comments like that.
Ease of configuration and performance has gone up leaps and bounds and is continuing to improve.
PostgreSQL at the very worst may perform slightly slower than MySQL, but for many workloads it performs much better. MySQL, for example has a couple well known performance bugs that causes throughput to take an absolute dump after reaching a certain load when PostgreSQL does not and continues to maintain throughput very nicely.
Here are a couple links:
http://tweakers.net/reviews/674/8
http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/6
http://tweakers.net/reviews/649/7
http://tweakers.net/reviews/646/11
The best option for asynchronous PostgreSQL replication is Slony-I. It's extremely flexible and so far has proven to work very well. The devs supporting it are also very good. I do admit that there is a bit of a learning curve to get it configured and running, but this is something they are working on for the next major revision.
If you need to cluster PostgreSQL, have a look at pgpool and pgpool-II.
While GMail's spam filters are pretty good, I do find an annoying amount of emails from a couple mailing lists (dspam and postfix mailing lists) marked as spam fairly regularly. I probably get a 2-5 of these false positives a week.
Luckily it's easy for me to see those emails since I have filters which label those messages.
Given the volume of mail I receive on my gmail account it probably is 99.9% effective, but I would prefer a few more false negatives than false positives.
What are your phone charging discharging habits?
It's well known that to maximize life out of rechargeable batteries, you need to avoid draining the battery to completely empty and avoid overcharging the battery. NiCad batteries are especially sensitive to overcharging which results in the mythical "memory effect".
So if you frequently plug your phone in for a bit here, or a bit there and infrequently letting the battery fully discharge or charge that's ideal. Or perhaps you phone/charger is very good at preventing the battery from becoming fully discharged or overcharging the battery.
In applications where battery life is critical (for example, hybrid and electric cars where cell charge is usually maintained between something like 30-80% of full capacity) battery management is critical to maintaining cell capacity. And because the life of a battery shortens significantly when it is fully discharged or charged, that means that you will give up some capacity to increase battery life.
To elaborate on the parent's post, p4-clockmod doesn't actually change the core clock of the CPU. All it does is force the CPU to run idle more of the time when it's in use.
p4-clockmod will actually end up causing you to use more power since it's usually more efficient to get the work done faster at a higher CPU utilization and it takes a bit of time for p4-clockmod to "ramp up" the virtual clockspeed again.
If you're running the latest kernel (2.6.21 or later) with dynticks enabled, you can install and run PowerTop which will let you identify programs and configuration issues which prevent your CPU from reaching the lowest power states.
Lets see:
Geo Metro
Curb Weight: 1650-1700lbs
HP: ~50
Prius
Curb Weight: 2900-3000lbs
HP: ~110 (hybrid net power)
Civic Hybrid
Curb Weight: ~2900lbs
HP: ~110 (hybrid net power)
I've driven a Metro, and it's like driving a tin-can. If you ever get into an accident, you are a lot more likely to be hurt in it. It gets tossed around on the highway when passing larger vehicles.
If those are acceptable tradeoffs, then go find yourself a used Metro. But a Prius or Civic Hybrid is a lot more comfortable and safer than the Metro.
Given that both cars weigh nearly twice as much as the Metro and get approximately the same mileage, I'm not sure what you're laughing at.
I'm sure if you put a hybrid drivetrain in a Metro you'd be getting 60-70mpg in it.
How close are you to the nearest access node? Unless you are within 100 meters or closer with no large objects in between you are unlikely to be able to connect without buying a high powered WiFi router.
My parents live in Mountain View and had to use a router with a directional antenna pointed directly at the nearest node around 250 meters away to get reliable access.
The biggest and easiest power savings come from CPU frequency scaling (if your processor supports it). Linux has long done a good pretty good job of putting the CPU to sleep and low power states when it can.
For older Athlon/Duron processors installing/running athcool makes a significant difference in power consumption (as long as it runs stable on your hardware, which it isn't guaranteed to do). On one of our old servers it reduced idle power draw from 100w to 65w.
It might depending on how idle your servers are. The more idle they are, the bigger the possibility for power savings. While they are obviously targeting laptop battery consumption, all Linux machines running this tool (and kernel 2.6.21 or later which has the dynticks feature) will be identify what is waking up their processor from low power states.
Much of the work put into optimizing battery life on laptops will also apply to desktops and servers alike.
You know, I've had Time Warner RoadRunner for just about 10 years now and aside from a few issues related to a flaky cable modem during the first couple years, it's really been flawless!
I've really had no issues with RoadRunner that I can remember for the last 5 years.
Of course, from what I've heard Time Warner / RoadRunner San Diego is one of the best.
Exactly. When you have a datacenter (or even a room) full of servers, the amount of heat you have to dissipate is very important.
Electricity and cooling costs are huge. And unlike a server which you buy once and may use for 3-5 years, you pay for electricity and cooling all the time. The electricy/cooling costs over the lifetime of a product can often cost more than the server itself, so anyone not looking at the power consumption of their systems as a high priority item (desktop, server, anything) is doing themselves a disservice.
AMD is still kicking Intel's ass when it comes to power savings where it matters: Idle CPU power thanks to Cool'n'Quiet. Comparable AMD/Intel processors will have the AMD processor idling at 20-30w less than the Intel counterpart. That is a 30-40% power reduction, huge! Imagine if you have an office full of desktop computers and how much money that will save you in electricity, not to mention cooling costs in the summer.
Think about it, how much of your day is spent with your processor doing actual work compared to doing waiting for user input? If you're a typical desktop user, 70-90% of the time your computer is on is sitting there doing nothing.
Here's an article comparing to nearly identical AMD/Intel desktop systems on SilentPCReview.com:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article735-page1.ht
Performance and price of the two systems is very similar (with the AMD system being a bit cheaper and also tending to perform a bit better thanks to it's integrated Nvidia graphics card), but the power savings of the AMD is simply staggering with it idling below 50w and the Intel system idling over 75w.
AMD processors are the processor of choice for anyone looking to build a low power system that still performs well.
Then compare the Camry hybrid to the non-hybrid version or the Altima to the non-hybrid version or the Highlander to the non-hybrid version.
All similarly specced in terms of features are are well under $10k more expensive.
BTW, who cares if the Civic Hybrid system is that much cheaper than the Toyota system? Apparently it is still very effective looking at it's mileage numbers.
The lifecycle of a hybrid battery is _very_ different than the lifecycle of your average laptop battery.
A rechargable battery's life is significantly reduced in 4 different cases:
1. When batteries are discharged to very low levels.
2. When batteries are charged to 100% capacity (or close to it).
3. When batteries are subjected to extremely high charge rates.
4. When batteries are subjected to extremely high discharge rates.
We can ignore cases 3 and 4 since it's safe to assume that in both cases (laptop/hybrid car) the manufacturer designs the battery and load to handle those cases appropriately.
Now for cases 1 and 2 - The typical use case for a laptop is to charge it all the way up and then fully discharge it. Even if you don't let it fully discharge, it's very common to plug it in frequently to make sure there is a 100% charge available.
Hybrid cars generally never allow the cells to discharge past 40-50% and more than 80-85%. While this does reduce the usable capacity of the cell, the tradeoff is that the battery will last many more charge/discharge cycles.
This is one of the difficulties of building a 100% electric car with today's battery technology - To maximize range you need to charge and discharge the battery as much as possible. Unfortunately in doing so, you significantly reduce the number of charges you can make before capacity becomes significantly degraded.
To account for this, all hybrids (and new generation electic cars, go read about the Tesla electric car on their blog) have rather sophisticated battery monitoring and charge/discharge logic built in to maximize performance and battery life.
What makes you think that a car comparable to the Prius is $10k less? Perhaps if you compare the Prius to the Yaris, but they aren't even in the same class of vehicle.
If you directly compare something like a Civic to a Civic hybrid, you will find that the price difference is much lower.
You are _certainly not_ replacing the battery pack in a Prius by 100k miles. There are plenty of people with even more than 200k mi on their battery packs without any issues.
Please research your wild claims before making them.
Water injection primary benefit is to increase knock resistance. If power output isn't being limited by knock, then you won't pick up any additional power by injecting water. It will steam clean your combustion chamber and it can reduce emissions, though.
Water injection will also typically slow down combustion so that more timing is required for the same amount of air/fuel, though.
I am still surprised that there isn't any manufacturer selling cars with water injection. You can often even inject plain old washer fluid. People usually remember to keep that filled, don't they?
You must mean spraying water onto the intercooler, not into. Neither the STi or the EVO has water injection.
Well, most modern diesels are direct injection now, and a lot are turbo charged, too. But yes, once they figure out NOx and particulate emissions, combined with a hybrid would also be a good combination for an efficient car that would still be peppy to drive.
Turbo charging a car isn't that expensive. I can't see how it's much more expensive than a supercharger. If anything the price seems fairly similar.
If you are experiencing turbo lag, it's because the engineers traded off low-end torque for high-end torque by sizing a bigger turbo which requires more exhaust pressure to spool. With a properly sized turbo, turbo-lag is a non-issue. Add direct injection which lets you increase the compression ratio and you gain a large amount of torque that you would have lost since most high output turbo charged cars significantly lower the compression to avoid detonation with high boost pressures.
If superchargers were better than turbos on small engines, why is it that most small engines these days are turbo charged and not supercharged? I can name a half-dozen 4-cylinder turbocharged cars sold today but can't think of any supercharged cars. If they made the same power, same fuel efficiency, same reliability and were cheaper, I can guarantee that you would only see superchargers instead of turbos.
You are right. I totally missed the fact that they are injecting ethanol separately from the rest of the fuel.
Is injecting pure ethanol that much better at cooling as it vaporizes than regular old gas mixed with ethanol? I can't imagine it being so...
People have long known that ethanol fuels have high octane ratings (the measure of how knock resistant a fuel is).
People have also long known that turbo charging an engine is a great way to extract more power out of a small engine.
People have also known that direct injection allows you to reduce the tendency to knock since it lets you inject fuel into the hot engine at the very last second - reducing the amount of time the air/fuel mixture has to heat up.
And guess what? Mazda produces cars today that has both direct injection and is turbo charged. For example, the MazdaSpeed 3.
It's 2.3 liter engine produces 263hp and 280lb/ft of torque and has an EPA fuel economy rating of 20/28mpg. So yes, while it does provide good power and decent gas mileage, it's nothing earth shattering compared to turbocharged cars without direct injection.
The engine has a very high compression ratio for a turbo charged gasoline engine (9.5:1), especially one that pushes over 15psi of boost into the cylinders. That is direct injection working for you.
For example, the slightly bigger turbo charged 2.5 liter Subaru WRX engine has a compression ratio of 8.4:1 and maximum boost of 11.6psi is rated at 230hp/235lb/ft of torque (though it is admittedly underrated) with similar fuel economy as the Mazdaspeed 3 considering that it is all-wheel-drive (20/26mpg EPA). The more powerful WRX STi has the same 2.5l displacement, 8.2:1 compression ratio and a bigger turbo pushing 14.5 psi is rated at 293hp/290lb/ft of torque but less fuel economy, 18/24mpg.
Unless there is a lot of potential still to be found by combining these 2 technologies, I see it as more of an evolution rather than a revolution. Perhaps a 1.0 liter engine would be able to muster 120+ hp/torque but I find it hard to believe that it could achieve mileage ratings significantly higher than a hybrid. And you still can't turn the engine off when idling or coasting down hill.
So how about a direct-injection, turbo-charged, atkinson cycle hybrid and combine the best of all technologies?
Sounds like you need to get yourself a halfway decent QoS box and start throttling traffic on your end. Throttling traffic at the ISP level isn't going to do a damn thing for you.
Better throw in a content cache in there, too (Squid) if you haven't already and force everyone to use it.