Yes, I'm in that position with my small notebook. In my case, I imaged the drive when I first got it. I have Windows Backup set to backup to an NAS and I have iDrive installed for offsite backup. Most people don't need to go so crazy - they can get away with running Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. as their primary "Documents" folder and then letting Geek Squad put in a new drive and reinstall Windows. But even "most people" need to have backups of some kind. If they can't image a disk, they certainly won't be savvy enough to rescue data from a dying spinning hard drive.
Uh, for the massive performance boost you get from an SSD, they are totally worth setting up a backup job. Image the disk, set periodic backups to a server or even iDrive/Crashplan/Dropbox/etc and carry on with life. Hell, even leave the spinning disk in place and backup to that. For $60 you can extend the life of an old PC by several years simply by swapping in an SSD.
I agree, but this has no practical benefit to me. When the HDD starts to throw errors, I pull it out of the RAID and stick in a new one. If the SSD completely up and dies, I pull it out of the RAID and stick in a new one. If more drives die or start to throw errors than there is redundancy, I restore from backup. If I can't restore from backup, well, then maybe then I'd appreciate the slowly-dying hard drive:)
I presume you haven't flown into little airstrips at "airports" that are currently served by tiny planes like this? In the Belize example above you literally look both ways and then walk across the runway to leave the airport. A $1.6 million battery would be the most expensive thing at the airport, including most of the planes (OK, technically a brand new Caravan would cost $2 million...). If we were talking even a small regional airport it would be a different matter.
Anyway, despite you harassing me about asking the question I think the solutions are obvious - either you charge a spare battery and swap it out or you store energy in a powerwall-type device. Either way requires new capital equipment, but it's a solvable problem. We don't get information from the manufacturer, so it's undoubtedly unflatteringly expensive and significantly increases total cost of ownership.
Yes, a powerwall is a solution. To do a half charge in 20 minutes is also feasible. For that you would need 450kW-h in 20 minutes or 1350kW continuous power. Powerwalls can put out roughly 1/3 of their total capacity every hour, so you'd need a 4MW-h powerwall for this application. The good news is that should feed a lot of airplanes. The bad news is that you would need to have a lot of airplanes to recover the capital cost. At roughly $400/kW-h (it's more at retail but figure there would be an industrial discount) this super-powerwall would be an extra $1.6 million per site.
Yes, you can certainly store electricity at the airport, in batteries or in rubber bands. This is why I'm curious about how they will handle turnaround time - there are a lot of details here, and they are interesting details. Searching Google does not help, so I pose the question here. I'm interested in knowing how you support a completely new type of aircraft fueling infrastructure and how that affects its cost and feasibility.
It's not a problem to charge an arbitrarily large battery from any electrical system - you just feed it slowly. That's no good for aircraft turnaround time. But if you want to do it quickly, you need the equivalent of 1500 homes worth of power for 40 minutes or so. That's no problem in developed area - but the utility of a 9-seat plane in a developed area is a lot less compelling when they can easily fill a 50-seater. But maybe I just lack imagination and this will spark new uses...
Oooo, that's a good point on the noise. Governments might impose electric-only hours or other restrictions that make these things more attractive if they knock down the noise levels by a few decibels.
And like I said it could be a battery swap rather than a charge.
Yeah, that was the point of my question - it almost certainly needs to be a swap to be feasible. Even a "trickle charge" of a 900kW-h battery is a massive amount of electrical capacity! The charging facility would need to have a 4-5kV feed. No problem in industrial areas, where even a larger feed would not be unusual - but probably reserved for only the largest centers in Belize - let alone other points in the Caribbean where this kind of transportation is common.
Much (probably 25% or so) of the energy is used on takeoff, so probably the charge is good for 2 or 3 flights, no matter the duration. They would need to have a pretty impressive charging station either one or two hops away. Charging a 900kW-h battery to 80% in 40 minutes like a Supercharger does would require about a megawatt delivered over that 40 minutes. I looked and they do have 35kV lines running into San Pedro Town, for instance - but when a single instance of this plane is charging, it would be consuming about 5% of the electrical capacity of the entire line. I can't even imagine what the infrastructure for that would cost at the airport - maybe they could score a government grant or something.
I wonder how they plan on handling turnaround times? Certainly they don't expect Maya Island to have something akin to a Super Charger with 8x capacity (or even reliable electricity at all)? Even then, an 80% charge takes 40 minutes. I wonder if they do battery swaps rather than try to charge in-place?
Every fucking product I've bought in the last few years has a slip of paper that says something like "this product contains chemicals known to the state of CA to cause cancer". Totally worthless regulation, as it clearly does not harm the sales of said products and creates extra waste.
You can see a major snowfall accumulation 3 times a week some years, and a major snowstorm every 4-5 days.
My point isn't whether my solution will or will not work for you. So CAA isn't an option for you... do whatever you do today when your car won't start, runs out of gas, has a bad battery, etc. and simply do the exact same thing when you forget to charge your electric car. From the few electric car owners I know, charging is not something they often forget to do. I think Tesla even sends you a text when you forget to plug it in.
Edge case? Then why are the response times from say AAA or CAA over 6 hours on average after an event like that?
I'm saying that the Venn diagram of "Times I forget to charge" and "Times there is a major snowstorm" is going to have a very tiny overlap.
Right now it's only -3C with a windchill of -9C.
That's not too bad. You could go all day in that. Ontario is fairly temperate by Canadian standards, right? That sounds like the weather here in Philly yesterday (it was between -3 and 1)... I walked my kid a mile to school just for the exercise. Anyway, the point is that you don't run out of gas very often because it's such a pain in the ass... you remember the lesson!
Well, it's hard to argue with your sample size of two:)
I haven't purchased an Apple product since 2009 - but it was a very nice laptop. I did kill the first power cord after a few years, and I also killed the power supply a few years after that. But I got 8 years out of the thing, so I really can't complain. Thinkpads are also really nice. Actually, most stuff above the $800 threshold is pretty decent IMHO. I'm using an HP Envy at the moment, and I'd say it doesn't feel as solid as a MacBook, but it is still a nice machine.
But I don't have pets, so stuff doesn't really get clogged up - Mac or otherwise. Even my vacuum cleaner is elderly by pet-owner standards.
If you think every other device works fine, you need to pop by my dad's non-Apple home where every damn thing with vents or fans is overheating. The poor laptops never stop running their fans in a vain attempt to breath. Everything I've ever taken apart there was full of dog/cat hair.
Yes, of course I normally jump my own car and change my own tire. My wife does not, and I've used the free AAA towing for more serious problems. I think you missed the point, which is that car owners already have strategies for when their car doesn't work.
It's not just Apple products. Every laptop, desktop, vacuum cleaner, or any device that moves air gets caked with pet hair and dander. It's fine to live that way - our immune systems are more than up to it and it may even be better for us to live in some degree of filth. But don't fucking sue to make all products bigger and heavier just because you choose to have a "fur baby". Vacuum cleaners are now being sold as "pet" specific, so maybe there is a niche for other products as well?
Mine too, but that just meant that once they clogged up the PC would start using the floppy, DVD drives, USB ports, etc as intakes and fill those with dust.
Animal people are usually in denial about how nasty their house is. Sure, they need special vacuum cleaners and their laptops overheat from getting clogged up with the same stuff they breath. Sure, you can smell animals when you walk in. But it's the crappy laptop, or the crappy vacuum cleaner's fault.
No worse than running your battery out, finding a flat tire, car won't start, etc. People who drive already have a backup plan - for me it's a call to AAA and an Uber. I drive cars into the ground so I'm pretty good at this by now. "Forgetting to charge" has a pretty stiff feedback loop, so I don't think it will be that frequent. Like "forgetting to fill up", which happened to me once - after a 3 mile walk with a gas can I remembered not to do that again.
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Yes, I'm in that position with my small notebook. In my case, I imaged the drive when I first got it. I have Windows Backup set to backup to an NAS and I have iDrive installed for offsite backup. Most people don't need to go so crazy - they can get away with running Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. as their primary "Documents" folder and then letting Geek Squad put in a new drive and reinstall Windows. But even "most people" need to have backups of some kind. If they can't image a disk, they certainly won't be savvy enough to rescue data from a dying spinning hard drive.
Uh, for the massive performance boost you get from an SSD, they are totally worth setting up a backup job. Image the disk, set periodic backups to a server or even iDrive/Crashplan/Dropbox/etc and carry on with life. Hell, even leave the spinning disk in place and backup to that. For $60 you can extend the life of an old PC by several years simply by swapping in an SSD.
You should have backups anyway.
I agree, but this has no practical benefit to me. When the HDD starts to throw errors, I pull it out of the RAID and stick in a new one. If the SSD completely up and dies, I pull it out of the RAID and stick in a new one. If more drives die or start to throw errors than there is redundancy, I restore from backup. If I can't restore from backup, well, then maybe then I'd appreciate the slowly-dying hard drive :)
I presume you haven't flown into little airstrips at "airports" that are currently served by tiny planes like this? In the Belize example above you literally look both ways and then walk across the runway to leave the airport. A $1.6 million battery would be the most expensive thing at the airport, including most of the planes (OK, technically a brand new Caravan would cost $2 million...). If we were talking even a small regional airport it would be a different matter.
Anyway, despite you harassing me about asking the question I think the solutions are obvious - either you charge a spare battery and swap it out or you store energy in a powerwall-type device. Either way requires new capital equipment, but it's a solvable problem. We don't get information from the manufacturer, so it's undoubtedly unflatteringly expensive and significantly increases total cost of ownership.
Yes, a powerwall is a solution. To do a half charge in 20 minutes is also feasible. For that you would need 450kW-h in 20 minutes or 1350kW continuous power. Powerwalls can put out roughly 1/3 of their total capacity every hour, so you'd need a 4MW-h powerwall for this application. The good news is that should feed a lot of airplanes. The bad news is that you would need to have a lot of airplanes to recover the capital cost. At roughly $400/kW-h (it's more at retail but figure there would be an industrial discount) this super-powerwall would be an extra $1.6 million per site.
Yes, you can certainly store electricity at the airport, in batteries or in rubber bands. This is why I'm curious about how they will handle turnaround time - there are a lot of details here, and they are interesting details. Searching Google does not help, so I pose the question here. I'm interested in knowing how you support a completely new type of aircraft fueling infrastructure and how that affects its cost and feasibility.
It's not a problem to charge an arbitrarily large battery from any electrical system - you just feed it slowly. That's no good for aircraft turnaround time. But if you want to do it quickly, you need the equivalent of 1500 homes worth of power for 40 minutes or so. That's no problem in developed area - but the utility of a 9-seat plane in a developed area is a lot less compelling when they can easily fill a 50-seater. But maybe I just lack imagination and this will spark new uses...
Oooo, that's a good point on the noise. Governments might impose electric-only hours or other restrictions that make these things more attractive if they knock down the noise levels by a few decibels.
And like I said it could be a battery swap rather than a charge.
Yeah, that was the point of my question - it almost certainly needs to be a swap to be feasible. Even a "trickle charge" of a 900kW-h battery is a massive amount of electrical capacity! The charging facility would need to have a 4-5kV feed. No problem in industrial areas, where even a larger feed would not be unusual - but probably reserved for only the largest centers in Belize - let alone other points in the Caribbean where this kind of transportation is common.
Much (probably 25% or so) of the energy is used on takeoff, so probably the charge is good for 2 or 3 flights, no matter the duration. They would need to have a pretty impressive charging station either one or two hops away. Charging a 900kW-h battery to 80% in 40 minutes like a Supercharger does would require about a megawatt delivered over that 40 minutes. I looked and they do have 35kV lines running into San Pedro Town, for instance - but when a single instance of this plane is charging, it would be consuming about 5% of the electrical capacity of the entire line. I can't even imagine what the infrastructure for that would cost at the airport - maybe they could score a government grant or something.
Fly through a thunderstorm.
I realize the engines shouldn’t have to be at full throttle for most of a flight
Yeah, not even close to full throttle. More like 60% at cruise for a jet, and then as low as they will go while still running for descent.
The electrics would have the advantage of being at zero (or even recovering charge) during descent.
I wonder how they plan on handling turnaround times? Certainly they don't expect Maya Island to have something akin to a Super Charger with 8x capacity (or even reliable electricity at all)? Even then, an 80% charge takes 40 minutes. I wonder if they do battery swaps rather than try to charge in-place?
Name one?
Every fucking product I've bought in the last few years has a slip of paper that says something like "this product contains chemicals known to the state of CA to cause cancer". Totally worthless regulation, as it clearly does not harm the sales of said products and creates extra waste.
You can see a major snowfall accumulation 3 times a week some years, and a major snowstorm every 4-5 days.
My point isn't whether my solution will or will not work for you. So CAA isn't an option for you... do whatever you do today when your car won't start, runs out of gas, has a bad battery, etc. and simply do the exact same thing when you forget to charge your electric car. From the few electric car owners I know, charging is not something they often forget to do. I think Tesla even sends you a text when you forget to plug it in.
Edge case? Then why are the response times from say AAA or CAA over 6 hours on average after an event like that?
I'm saying that the Venn diagram of "Times I forget to charge" and "Times there is a major snowstorm" is going to have a very tiny overlap.
Right now it's only -3C with a windchill of -9C.
That's not too bad. You could go all day in that. Ontario is fairly temperate by Canadian standards, right? That sounds like the weather here in Philly yesterday (it was between -3 and 1)... I walked my kid a mile to school just for the exercise. Anyway, the point is that you don't run out of gas very often because it's such a pain in the ass... you remember the lesson!
Well, it's hard to argue with your sample size of two :)
I haven't purchased an Apple product since 2009 - but it was a very nice laptop. I did kill the first power cord after a few years, and I also killed the power supply a few years after that. But I got 8 years out of the thing, so I really can't complain. Thinkpads are also really nice. Actually, most stuff above the $800 threshold is pretty decent IMHO. I'm using an HP Envy at the moment, and I'd say it doesn't feel as solid as a MacBook, but it is still a nice machine.
But I don't have pets, so stuff doesn't really get clogged up - Mac or otherwise. Even my vacuum cleaner is elderly by pet-owner standards.
If you think every other device works fine, you need to pop by my dad's non-Apple home where every damn thing with vents or fans is overheating. The poor laptops never stop running their fans in a vain attempt to breath. Everything I've ever taken apart there was full of dog/cat hair.
So your only concern is that I forget to charge... during a snowstorm? LOL, that there is what we call an edge case.
Yeah, my 3 miles was in warm weather and it still sucked. Actually the walk with the empty can was OK...
Yes, of course I normally jump my own car and change my own tire. My wife does not, and I've used the free AAA towing for more serious problems. I think you missed the point, which is that car owners already have strategies for when their car doesn't work.
It's not just Apple products. Every laptop, desktop, vacuum cleaner, or any device that moves air gets caked with pet hair and dander. It's fine to live that way - our immune systems are more than up to it and it may even be better for us to live in some degree of filth. But don't fucking sue to make all products bigger and heavier just because you choose to have a "fur baby". Vacuum cleaners are now being sold as "pet" specific, so maybe there is a niche for other products as well?
It's an update to the old monkey's paw story.
Every desktop I've ever owned had inlet filters.
Mine too, but that just meant that once they clogged up the PC would start using the floppy, DVD drives, USB ports, etc as intakes and fill those with dust.
Animal people are usually in denial about how nasty their house is. Sure, they need special vacuum cleaners and their laptops overheat from getting clogged up with the same stuff they breath. Sure, you can smell animals when you walk in. But it's the crappy laptop, or the crappy vacuum cleaner's fault.
a very bad day the next.
No worse than running your battery out, finding a flat tire, car won't start, etc. People who drive already have a backup plan - for me it's a call to AAA and an Uber. I drive cars into the ground so I'm pretty good at this by now. "Forgetting to charge" has a pretty stiff feedback loop, so I don't think it will be that frequent. Like "forgetting to fill up", which happened to me once - after a 3 mile walk with a gas can I remembered not to do that again.