Volt is not going to be very successful. It's too expensive for that (estimated to cost around $30000 with tax breaks in effect) - battery costs too much and nobody (including small players like Tesla) has experience in making durable lithium batteries for cars.
But Volt's successors are going to be cheap _and_ reliable enough. GM has a very good chance to beat other significant players to the market.
PS: GM has not stopped or slowed Volt's development program _even_ _now_ when GM doesn't have enough spare cash to buy a bottle of Pepsi.
1) They are testing the battery, tuning software, preparing production lines for mass production (i.e. hundreds of thousands of cars, not 100 or 10000). It's not a fast process.
2) Smaller company won't have much capacity for large-scale projects.
E-Flex cars are now their top priority in funding. Also, IMO the 'generic' design for Volts is a plus. GM tells us Volts are not going to be exotic items, but rather a good old boring automobile which will JustWork(tm).
Also, I don't expect much success with the first models. They are probably going to explode/burn/crash too much. GM is in a better position here - they are performing thorough testing of battery and drivetrain. I don't expect the same level of testing on Chinese models.
It's funny, but just a month ago I helped to decode a program in Fortran from old 8" disks. It used an ancient Russian charset encoding in comments and that required several minutes of Yandexing to find a translator program which supported this encoding.
Apart from that, we recovered ~35 years old program just fine. We were even able to run it in another 40 minutes!
As for my data, I don't store anything in proprietary formats. Plain text and PDFs for documents, JPEG/PNG for pictures, etc.
If you're very paranoid then store technical specs in plain ASCII text for these formats on your media.
Have they tuned Linux for SSD? Like setting no-op IO scheduler (which gives about 20% speedup on some workloads)?
I suspect that Win2000 and Win98 win because they have the most simple (and stupid) IO schedulers. That's a problem for conventional HDDs, but it's an advantage for SSDs.
Also, they are talking about "Win98 doesn't support wear-levelling technology". But that's incredibly stupid since modern 'disk-like' SSDs do wear-leveling in hardware.
There's a difference - Coriolis-negating thrusters need not to have high power. We can use small effective ion engines with high ISP. They can't be used for launching rockets from the Earth.
It might be possible to save more general capacity by using small thrusters. I'm trying to calculate it right now.
For example, in my native city (in Russia) various providers at first tried to lay down their own cables. But it soon proved that very often there's just no capacity in the cable canalization and no way to dig new channels.
So they worked out agreement - all providers have equal access to a shared core network and exclusive 2-year access to the cables they lay down themselves.
Most of population in US is concentrated in fairly compact settlements along the two coasts. They have higher population density than most of European countries.
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No. G1 is not more expensive than an iPhone.
However, not all people want or need full keyboard. And iPhone is just so much _slicker_ than G1.
Volt is not going to be very successful. It's too expensive for that (estimated to cost around $30000 with tax breaks in effect) - battery costs too much and nobody (including small players like Tesla) has experience in making durable lithium batteries for cars.
But Volt's successors are going to be cheap _and_ reliable enough. GM has a very good chance to beat other significant players to the market.
PS: GM has not stopped or slowed Volt's development program _even_ _now_ when GM doesn't have enough spare cash to buy a bottle of Pepsi.
1) They are testing the battery, tuning software, preparing production lines for mass production (i.e. hundreds of thousands of cars, not 100 or 10000). It's not a fast process.
2) Smaller company won't have much capacity for large-scale projects.
Nope. GM gambled pretty much everything on Volt's success: http://gm-volt.com/2008/12/15/gm-plans-to-build-a-strong-hybrid-small-vehicle-but-will-spend-twice-as-much-developing-e-flex-cars/
E-Flex cars are now their top priority in funding. Also, IMO the 'generic' design for Volts is a plus. GM tells us Volts are not going to be exotic items, but rather a good old boring automobile which will JustWork(tm).
Also, I don't expect much success with the first models. They are probably going to explode/burn/crash too much. GM is in a better position here - they are performing thorough testing of battery and drivetrain. I don't expect the same level of testing on Chinese models.
Android has good chances, but it has arrived a bit late. For most practical purposes it STILL has not arrived (G1 device is too 'niche').
It's funny, but just a month ago I helped to decode a program in Fortran from old 8" disks. It used an ancient Russian charset encoding in comments and that required several minutes of Yandexing to find a translator program which supported this encoding.
Apart from that, we recovered ~35 years old program just fine. We were even able to run it in another 40 minutes!
As for my data, I don't store anything in proprietary formats. Plain text and PDFs for documents, JPEG/PNG for pictures, etc.
If you're very paranoid then store technical specs in plain ASCII text for these formats on your media.
No. Flash drives will ALMOST 100%-likely die.
Flash cells are essentially small capacitors. And they slowly leak. So 3-5 years are probably the maximum life for USB drives.
Also, I can read a CD printed in 1985. That's 28 years already. So I'm fairly certain that most media can survive 20-30 years.
And after 20-30 years it'll be easy to re-encode it into different format.
Rospatent has already invalidated this trademark because it's a generic image and doesn't offer Superfone any brand recognition.
Which might not be the best, since Intel drives do NRQ which might be faster than delaying requests for reads coalescing.
Have they tuned Linux for SSD? Like setting no-op IO scheduler (which gives about 20% speedup on some workloads)?
I suspect that Win2000 and Win98 win because they have the most simple (and stupid) IO schedulers. That's a problem for conventional HDDs, but it's an advantage for SSDs.
Also, they are talking about "Win98 doesn't support wear-levelling technology". But that's incredibly stupid since modern 'disk-like' SSDs do wear-leveling in hardware.
No. You're thinking about the distance vs. time curve.
That's because ion drives create a very small force, which gives only a very small acceleration.
But Coriolis force itself is not large, so ion drives might have just enough thrust.
There's a difference - Coriolis-negating thrusters need not to have high power. We can use small effective ion engines with high ISP. They can't be used for launching rockets from the Earth.
It might be possible to save more general capacity by using small thrusters. I'm trying to calculate it right now.
Why not compensate for Coriolis force by using rockets?
Coriolis force is tiny, so we won't need a lot of reaction mass.
Probably, it can be used together with multiple loads choreography for greater effect.
The reason is: nobody cares about Darfur.
It's nowhere powerful or/and resource-rich to be interesting for the West powers.
It's not as easy as you think...
For example, in my native city (in Russia) various providers at first tried to lay down their own cables. But it soon proved that very often there's just no capacity in the cable canalization and no way to dig new channels.
So they worked out agreement - all providers have equal access to a shared core network and exclusive 2-year access to the cables they lay down themselves.
It worked out just fine in the end...
And now compare it with _capitals_ or big cities of these countries.
Why? Technically there'll be no difference between connections, so it's kinda hard to justify discriminatory pricing.
Most of population in US is concentrated in fairly compact settlements along the two coasts. They have higher population density than most of European countries.
Yet.... Still lagging behind.
Here's some soap. Go and wash your brain of Georgian propaganda.
The whole thing is way more complex than you think.
Nope. All gases mix freely in all proportions.
1 liter of LN2 is about 800 grams. Molar mass of N2 is 28g/mol, so 1 liter of LN2 is about 28 moles.
1 mole of ideal gas takes about 22.4 liters at STP, so 28 moles will displace about 600 liters of air. Not nice.
Oh, and the first sign of hypoxia is loss of consciousness.
How about "selling your DNA to insurance companies"?
Or in case of Great Britain - losing a USB stick with all your private data _and_ DNA data.
A collision in the Oort cloud is a VERY unlikely situation. More plausible scenario is capture of this comet by a giant planet.
But it's still very unlikely.
The Sun alone can't capture a 'stray' comet - it'll just give it a gravity assist. You need at least three-bodies interaction for the orbital capture.
Ahh... Do you remember accusations about Poland participating in US 'rendition flights'?
I fail to see how Europe is inherently more human-rights safe.