You made sense until your last word. Ultra-capacitors aren't happening. As batteries steadily get cheaper, you can use a bigger battery. A bigger battery can handle more power, so it can cope with more braking regen and recharge faster (and deliver more horsepower); and it's not cycled as much as a smaller battery, so it lasts longer. That reduces the fast-charge and longevity benefits of ultracaps, which are still far more expensive and heavier than a lithium-ion battery of the energy. Ionova claims 10 Wh/kg for their ultracaps while li-on is over 100 Wh/kg. In theory you can recharge an ultracap in seconds, but the future fast charger to recharge a Model S battery in a minute has to deliver 7000 amps at 500V instead of ~240 amps, so it's going to cost a fortune.
Ultracaps still have a chance in hybrids, the Prius only has a 1.3 kWh battery. Only price keeps ultracaps from replacing that battery. But again, as batteries get cheaper, more people will expect to be able to plug in.
Others have commented how this will lead to dumbed-down movies with videogame features and Mario/Angry Birds franchise tie-ins, such as
Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!
... all with the face and voice of Jar Jar Binks...
But this would actually be fantastic if if the movie watcher got to control the remix. There are cut-scenes in Red Dead Redemption that are rival anything in a movie (Marston's last encounter with Bonnie, so polite, so suffused with longing!) and then you can enter the world as one of the characters. Why limit your favorite characters to one setting, legal threats from George Lucas notwithstanding?
In a marvelous talk 10 years ago to the Director's Guild of America (read it!), William Gibson explores the long past of movie-making as storytelling, and predicts the future of it.
Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.
Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.
Somewhere in the countless preferences in Johnny’s system there’s one that puts high-rez, highly expressive dog-heads on all of the characters. He doesn’t know that this setting is based on a once-popular Edwardian folk-motif of poker-playing dogs, but that’s okay; he’s not a history professor, and if he needed to know, the system would tell him. You get complete breed-selection, too, with the dog-head setting, but that was all something he enjoyed more when he was still a little kid.
But later in the afternoon he’s run across something called The Hours, and he’s not much into it at all, but then he wonders how these women would look if he put the dog-heads on them. And actually it’s pretty good, then, with the dog-heads on, so then he opts for the freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest...
Because I see Johnny falling asleep now in his darkened bedroom, and atop the heirloom Ikea bureau, the one that belonged to his grandmother, which his mother has recently had restored, there is a freshly-extruded resin action-figure, another instantaneous product of Johnny’s entertainment system.
It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.
What you said, definitely. DVD extras (the best part of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) show preproduction steadily evolving. Nearly all movies are story-boarded before production, and animation houses have always made animatics showing the key frames and shifts of the camera. Nowadays effects-heavy movie scenes are pre-visualized on a computer: someone builds a 3-D world for the scene, puts some 3-D character models in it, animates the models, and then moves a virtual camera around to create a computer animation of the sequence of shots. The result is a clunky computer videogame cut-scene version of the sequence.
Which raises the interesting prospect that as computer graphics continue to improve, film makers will stop at the pre-visualization and declare victory. Why make a movie at all when it already exists? Five years ago after watching the "making of" featurette for the effects-heavy movie Hancock I wrote
You see Charlize Theron watching the pre-viz on a Mac notebook, watching her 3-D character to learn what she's supposed to do in the shot!... The cameramen, the actors, even the director, all watch a movie that already exists that dictates what they need to do.
So record the actors at the table reading of the script, lip-sync the existing character models with their voices, and you have the movie. Perhaps if the real-world actors can do a better job emoting than the pre-viz animators (a big "if" for some actors!), film them and composite into the existing movie.
Bloody university PR departments presenting every research project as if it's some Eureka moment.
"For over a decade, cookstove experts and enthusiasts have gathered at Aprovecho [Research Center]". In 2009 The New Yorker had a long article about stove enthusiasts designing better stoves, what's changed since then? The Chinese are already cranking out Rocket stoves in volume; other commenters have linked to www.cleancookstoves.org, Biolite, etc.. The problem isn't engineering, it's economics and cultural.
Meanwhile, any stove still requires spending hours collecting firewood, contributing to deforestation and CO2 emissions. As an adjunct people can put food in a black pot in an insulated container heated by a cheap solar reflector. But now you've got two $20 purchases per family, one of which only works part of the time. Meanwhile the U.N. spends millions trucking fuel into refugee camps. Again, the problems are NOT engineering ones.
The scripting is all html/css/javascript using the Enyo framework.
It's cool that they open-sourced the webOS calculator, contacts, email, notes, etc., but it's not the complete phone image, I couldn't find the system settings, dialer, etc. The APIs that the published webOS apps use seem disconnected from any standardization efforts, and some apps seem to contact a local nodejs server instead of making simple JavaScript function calls. If it's all HTML/CSS/JavaScript, why is there a copy of Qt in the tree? Google suggests "much of the actual webOS GUI is (in webOS 2) Qt-based". The best explanation of Open webOS development I've found says
* JavaScript applications with HTML5 and CSS3 using cross-platform Enyo framework * PDK for native C++ applications using OpenGL/ES, typically for games * JavaScript services implemented with node.js * System services implemented in either C++ or Javascript (node.js) ** Web access vs. performance * Standard applications use Enyo framework * User interface is a series of Qt C++ applications, libraries and services with some QML
That's one way to do it and Tizen is similar, but compared with Firefox OS's everything in JavaScript calling web APIs, it's far more elaborate and less in the "everything scriptable" approach that TFA wants.
Unless the phone's system apps are all open source and written in JavaScript, so necessarily there are Web APIs to everything. Firefox OS walks the walk.
PhoneGap will shrink to be a compatibility shim on decent standards-compliant smartphones; the problem is Apple will always favor native IOS over web apps because Apple Inc. wants the resulting lock-in and can get away with it while they have market dominance.
Surely Dave Winer can't be that out of touch. Firefox OS nails it.
In Firefox OS everything is written in JavaScript, the most widely-deployed scripting language that developers already know. Unlike all the other also-rans to IOS and Android, its system applications — calendar, on-screen keyboard, music player, etc. — are likewise written in JavaScript. To permit this, and unlike BBX, OpenWebOS, Tizen, Windows 8, and everyone else saying "Write apps for our failing platform using HTML/CSS/JavaScript", it has Web APIs to most phone features (battery status, Bluetooth, camera, SMS, etc.), all on various tracks towards standardization. Like lots of phones you can run your apps on the desktop in an emulator; unlike lots of phones the Firefox OS Simulator runs in your browser. Unlike any other smartphone many of the apps you write for the phone will also run and install unchanged as apps on desktops (and Android) running Firefox, many will also work as Chrome apps with minimal effort, and anyone can run an app store, you just put an install button for your app on a web page on your site.
Unlike Slashdot commenters, most Americans live in multiple-car households. If your regular driving is less than the range you're set, because you use the family gas hog for those occasional journeys, or Zipcar.
From the surprisingly favorable Top Gear review, "BMW reckons nearly all i3 buyers will use it as a second car so won't be doing long journeys, and it's optimised to make them efficient and fun."
The Tesla Roadster was the first and for a while the cheapest car to use all CFRP body panels, but Tesla's site talks of its "monocoque chassis, constructed of resin-bonded and riveted extruded aluminum."
From TFA the i3 is "the first mass-produced auto with a carbon fiber-reinforced plastic passenger cell mounted onto an aluminum chassis"
You don't dispose of lithium-ion, you recycle it. CFRP (Carbon fiber reinforced plastic) isn't recycled much, though there are initial plants that can recycle the fibers into a lesser grade.
But you're focusing on the wrong thing. A 1.5 ton 35mpg car is going to burn through 10 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles, and that gasoline is very polluting to produce, spill, refine, and deliver before it all goes up in smoke. All reputable studies find that 75-90% of the pollution from a car comes from operating it, not manufacturing it.
As to whether you should ditch your 39 mpg car for an i3, so long as you sell it to someone who junks their gas guzzler then it's a win for the environment. The average fuel efficiency of the automotive fleet goes up.
Sure, everyone thinks they know what that better language is. There is no consensus, there never will be, and other browser makers will resist attempts like Dart and NaCl and pNaCl by one vendor to impose a new language or runtime. So realistically, how will it occur? Every web site has been free to send <script type="text/python" src="foo.py"> or <script type="bin/mybytecode_x64" src="foo.llvm"> pages for close to 15 years now, but no one does because it's a complete non-starter to require end-users to install a special browser or hack in support for a new language module.
Meanwhile in the real world JavaScript (+ HTML + CSS + Canvas + SVG + WebGL + audio processing + sensor support + notifications + real-time communications +...) keeps improving, despite calls to "stop hijacking" it and to "stay off my lawn".
Let's compare * find web site promoting some application * go to download link * find it's not available for Mac/Linux/your phone/Windows XP * or it is, but you need to download a different Qt/GTK/SDL/DotNet/JDK runtime * but that's not available for your machine, or it's 32-bit not 64-bit * now download, save, run installer, wait for virus checker * now finally run the bloody thing * (Windows-only) wonder why there's another task running, it's the %^$#! Check for updates service * A week later. Yay, there's an update. Repeat all these steps.
vs. * find web site promoting some application * click link * you're running today's build. It just works.
You have to be a clueless, blind, future-fearing Luddite, yet simultaneously have the skills to master the download-find-install-run-maintain loop to find the former preferable. The 0.1% of the world population who fit that niche all hang out on Slashdot and vote up "bloated browser" comments.
Meanwhile a Mercedes E-Class (is everyone driving that a "limousine whatever" too?) is a lot slower and at around 25 mpg will consume 15 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles.
That argument might resonate with Mercedes buyers who tend to be wealthier and therefore would care more about the environment because they're in a position to afford luxury goods. However, the Mercedes E class is also offered in a hybrid configuration for those buyers who are concerned about their carbon footprint...
Before arguing fatuous points, go visit fueleconomy.gov. 2013 Mercedes-Benz E400 Hybrid gets 26 mpg. Still 15 tons of gasoline.
... or being seen as "green" in a chic sort of way.
More snide comments about other drivers. What happened to you?
Bringing up financing just introduces more flaws in BP's model.
Leasing an EV is a good idea, if you have a regular 40 mile commute get a Volt or Leaf right now and you may save money. But Better Place didn't lease you "your" battery, because it regularly gets swapped for something else. They sold you electric miles (Shai Agassi made it sound like he was freeing you from that expensive battery pack, you'd just pay to drive around cheaply on electricity). But that means buying a car becomes a messy three-way between you, the car manufacturer, and the "provider of a charged battery". And since most people can (and want to) recharge at home for most of their driving, BP had to stop you from plugging into a wall outlet for cheap kWh in order to make their finances work. Others here allege they used a unique connector, my understanding is they would meter your home EV charging station separately, and you could only recharge at Better Place's public stations. It was a complete mess. The genuine benefit of a quick swap during a long trip costs big money to deliver, and BP's model could only do it by making all your regular recharge and driving much more expensive, eliminating the "cheap running costs" benefit of EVs. A few hundred people in Israel found the tradeoff worthwhile, but it was always going to be a tough sell.
Capable? Yes, it could probably be done. Will it be done? No. Elon is a smart man and he knows how to say the right things to the right audience to get what he wants.
More importantly, he's selling his second-generation made-in-USA car to thousands of buyers, and winning awards.
However, as a practical matter the Model S already has difficulty competing with fossil fuel powered vehicles on range and even then only by making the batteries fully integrated components molded into every bit of spare room in the vehicle frame.
The Model S chassis is a thing of beauty. A compact high-power motor and reduction gearing, and a flat battery pack fills the frame because there's nothing else down there. No muffler, catalytic converter, oil pan, etc. Why not use the lot for batteries instead of taking away trunk space?
In fact it's more like an alternative to the S class Mercedes for limousine liberals...
Don't oversell your straw man. The $95,000 S Class is more expensive and quite a bit more luxurious.
... who want to appear green using our green (aka money). Tell me again why my tax dollars should be subsidizing Musk and Tesla?
Tesla just repaid its $465M loan under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program set up under the G.W. Bush administration; Ford and Nissan received billions under the same program. If you're referring to the $7500 tax credit, it lets buyers keep more of their money for the worthwhile goal of "ending America's addiction to foreign oil", as every Republican president since Nixon has intoned. Tell me again why my tax dollars should be subsidizing your home mortgage, or any other tax rebate?
Your sneering tone about "appearing green" ignores the genuine increase in efficiency from an electric drive. No doubt you'll bleat about coal powered cars, ignoring the increasing role of cleaner natural gas in USA's electricity generating mix, and that many buyers will install solar PV to reduce their carbon footprint further. Meanwhile a Mercedes E-Class (is everyone driving that a "limousine whatever" too?) is a lot slower and at around 25 mpg will consume 15 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles. Plug in cars are definitely better for the environment.
EV batteries are big, but adding swap capability only adds minor additional space.. The Model S pack is swappable. The problem is standardization. Better Place burned through all that money for only one battery design that only one car adopted, and even then the Renault Fluence had to have its trunk extended to make the Z.E. version fit BP's QuickDrop pack. BP hoped that customers would demand swap capability so other car companies would adopt it, but it didn't happen, and car manufactures have instead adopted many different chemistries, layouts, placement within the car, air vs. water cooling...
EV batteries are built up from multiple slabs or sheets. Already if your battery breaks, you only replace the defective module. You could imagine swapping the individual modules for charged ones, but each still weighs around 40 pounds and has be reattached to high-voltage high-current wiring and the cooling system. It's an order of magnitude harder than prying out 8 D cells from your boombox, and again there's no "D cell" standard for EVs.
Maybe there could be a standard for a battery extender, a cage in the trunk where you can add several of these modules to your city EV for a long trip. That avoids the problem of swapping your $12,000 pristine battery for a clapped-out beater. But all the cost-time-weight-safety-standardization tradeoffs work against it. Skip the hassle and rent a long-range car for those trips, or use the other car that's already in the garage of most American households.
Since Elon has said that the Model S ( and presumably the Model X) is capable of conversion to battery swap
It's not automated, but yes, jack the car up at a dealer, detach the battery pack, attach a charged one. Tesla Motors has been vague on the details. Since owners own the car and its expensive warrantied battery pack, most likely a dealer will give you a loaner battery as a courtesy for a long trip, and you'll later return to pick up your original. Obsessive fans at Tesla Motors Club debate more elaborate swapping networks but as yet there's no evidence that Tesla will go for it. Musk has shown he'll do whatever it takes for his EVs to compete, but it seems Tesla is busy building out the Supercharger Network (relatively fast DC quick charge stations spread along major routes, unless you're a dumbass New York Times reporter).
perhaps Tesla will try to get the Better Place switch station tech - despite the company's failure, they did have solid working tech as Tesla could benefit tremendously by not having to reinvent, er, the wheel.
BP's intellectual property includes their outdated battery pack design (Tesla's flat sheet is better), the QuickDrop technology for attaching the battery (Tesla's is better), and automating the battery swap with robots. The last seems only worth a few million, unless evil patents are involved.
Batteries are the way you get a decent boost to the efficiency of burning anything in an inefficient combusion engine, viz hybrid powertrains. Keep dreaming that ethanol from anything will become so cheap that you don't care about efficiency. Meanwhile plugging in is the cheapest, most efficient, and least-polluting way to make a car go the first XX miles right now.
I'm not against ethanol from biomass, though it's a far less efficient way to get energy from an area than covering it with solar panels, and the processes all require substantial energy inputs. If and when ethanol from anything is cost-effective it'll serve as a fine fuel for the range-extender engines of plug-in cars that mostly run off their batteries.
Nobody is making a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine. BMW only made 100 7-series hydrogen models in 2006, and the Mazda hydrogen Wankel (2008) was never produced in quantity. It's tough to store a lot of it hydrogen a car, so you need a more efficient powerplant than blowing up a fuel to make heat and a little forward motion. That powerplant is a fuel cell, essentially reversing electrolysis to drive an electric motor. Fuel cell vehicles are out there, Honda has leased a few dozen FCX Claritys in Southern California, the only place in the USA with a handful of public H2 refueling stations.
The latest optimistic date for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to be finally really genuinely truly here is 2015, and Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz and maybe Toyota are most serious about offering models. But the relative success of the Volt and the Ford and Toyota plug-in vehicles shows far more people are happy to plug in at home for their regular commute and use a conventional gas engine as an occasional range extender. "Early adopters ready to spend big money" will mostly buy Teslas with huge battery packs that can recharge (slowly) anywhere. The market of rich environmentalists who don't have access to a plug and live near the handful of H2 refueling stations and who regularly drive long distances is TINY, and will remain so until fossil fuel becomes vastly more expensive.
"At least some at Google [cnet.com] want to embrace a Mozilla-backed project to speed up Web apps written with JavaScript -- even though it competes directly with Google's own Native Client and Dart programming technology. "
We have too many layers of cruft/abstraction layers/API's to deal with.
WebGL sends shader programs to the GPU which executes them. There isn't a layer underneath it.
A properly designed "world browser" that actually starts in the 3D environment and perhaps renders flat 2D web pages as such would make a lot more sense instead of trying to shoehorn 3D into a 2D "web page"
People had no interest in such world browsers, several companies including Microsoft offered them in the 90s and they all died. Microsoft's 1997 technology was called Chrome (yes, really), and they promised "Chromeffects would turn a web browser into a rippling, 3D space with audio and video playback".
Meanwhile people do like 3D games, they do love running things in their browser, and the fullscreen API lets the game canvas go fullscreen. Enjoy your lawn.
With luck there will eventually be a push for a standardized tablet platform that is open enough to permit users to select their own OS.
That standard platform is the Android kernel.
porting Ubuntu touch:
To rapidly support a wide range of devices, our architecture reuses some of the drivers and hardware enablement available for Android.
porting Firefox OS:
Boot to Gecko (Firefox OS) uses a kernel derived from Android, with a Gecko-based user interface on top of it.
Meanwhile Plasma Active, Salifish, and Tizen are based on a traditional Linux platform, and the Mer project hopes to be the common core distribution for them.
For the tiny fraction of users who "select their own OS", device popularity and an unlocked bootloader matter far more than standardization. If you buy an unsuccessful phone, it won't have a community providing images for it and jailbreaking its bootloader if necessary.
The standardized platform is vital for all these also-ran OSes to get lots of apps. Aaron Seigo's post about standardizing the QML compontents across KDE Plasma, Jolla Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 and Ubuntu is a good sign, but they still suffer from inconsistent device APIs and different packaging requirements. That's where Firefox OS has a theoretical edge: apps for it are just web pages with a manifest. The number of web developers (incuding "app" developers who just put a wrapper around an HTML app) is orders of magnitude more than QML developers.
The Mozilla Open Web Apps project proposes some small additions to existing sites to turn them into apps that run in a rich, fun, and powerful computing environment. These apps run on desktop browsers and mobile devices, and are easier for a user to discover and launch than Web sites. They have access to a growing set of novel features, such as synchronizing across all of a user's devices.
Most likely this will come from the second tier Chinese manufacturers who would benefit most from a common reference standard.
There's a big difference between going to a web site and being able to run it offline, vs. downloading then running a setup.exe (and re-installing the Java or.NET runtime you got rid of in 2011). HTML5 delivers a universal zero-install runtime that eliminates any "installation" step, and when the user is connected there is no "upgrade" step either. It ought to be the future. I may never get a Firefox OS phone, but I'm looking forward to its app stores and Mozilla's advocacy to make any web page an app.
Slashdot Mirror
You made sense until your last word. Ultra-capacitors aren't happening. As batteries steadily get cheaper, you can use a bigger battery. A bigger battery can handle more power, so it can cope with more braking regen and recharge faster (and deliver more horsepower); and it's not cycled as much as a smaller battery, so it lasts longer. That reduces the fast-charge and longevity benefits of ultracaps, which are still far more expensive and heavier than a lithium-ion battery of the energy. Ionova claims 10 Wh/kg for their ultracaps while li-on is over 100 Wh/kg. In theory you can recharge an ultracap in seconds, but the future fast charger to recharge a Model S battery in a minute has to deliver 7000 amps at 500V instead of ~240 amps, so it's going to cost a fortune.
Ultracaps still have a chance in hybrids, the Prius only has a 1.3 kWh battery. Only price keeps ultracaps from replacing that battery. But again, as batteries get cheaper, more people will expect to be able to plug in.
Others have commented how this will lead to dumbed-down movies with videogame features and Mario/Angry Birds franchise tie-ins, such as
Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!
... all with the face and voice of Jar Jar Binks ...
But this would actually be fantastic if if the movie watcher got to control the remix. There are cut-scenes in Red Dead Redemption that are rival anything in a movie (Marston's last encounter with Bonnie, so polite, so suffused with longing!) and then you can enter the world as one of the characters. Why limit your favorite characters to one setting, legal threats from George Lucas notwithstanding?
In a marvelous talk 10 years ago to the Director's Guild of America (read it!), William Gibson explores the long past of movie-making as storytelling, and predicts the future of it.
What you said, definitely. DVD extras (the best part of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) show preproduction steadily evolving. Nearly all movies are story-boarded before production, and animation houses have always made animatics showing the key frames and shifts of the camera. Nowadays effects-heavy movie scenes are pre-visualized on a computer: someone builds a 3-D world for the scene, puts some 3-D character models in it, animates the models, and then moves a virtual camera around to create a computer animation of the sequence of shots. The result is a clunky computer videogame cut-scene version of the sequence.
Which raises the interesting prospect that as computer graphics continue to improve, film makers will stop at the pre-visualization and declare victory. Why make a movie at all when it already exists? Five years ago after watching the "making of" featurette for the effects-heavy movie Hancock I wrote
So record the actors at the table reading of the script, lip-sync the existing character models with their voices, and you have the movie. Perhaps if the real-world actors can do a better job emoting than the pre-viz animators (a big "if" for some actors!), film them and composite into the existing movie.
Bloody university PR departments presenting every research project as if it's some Eureka moment.
"For over a decade, cookstove experts and enthusiasts have gathered at Aprovecho [Research Center]". In 2009 The New Yorker had a long article about stove enthusiasts designing better stoves, what's changed since then? The Chinese are already cranking out Rocket stoves in volume; other commenters have linked to www.cleancookstoves.org, Biolite, etc.. The problem isn't engineering, it's economics and cultural.
Meanwhile, any stove still requires spending hours collecting firewood, contributing to deforestation and CO2 emissions. As an adjunct people can put food in a black pot in an insulated container heated by a cheap solar reflector. But now you've got two $20 purchases per family, one of which only works part of the time. Meanwhile the U.N. spends millions trucking fuel into refugee camps. Again, the problems are NOT engineering ones.
Ouch. I wonder what the experience is like when you build and install Firefox OS on a decent Android 4.x smartphone.
It's cool that they open-sourced the webOS calculator, contacts, email, notes, etc., but it's not the complete phone image, I couldn't find the system settings, dialer, etc. The APIs that the published webOS apps use seem disconnected from any standardization efforts, and some apps seem to contact a local nodejs server instead of making simple JavaScript function calls. If it's all HTML/CSS/JavaScript, why is there a copy of Qt in the tree? Google suggests "much of the actual webOS GUI is (in webOS 2) Qt-based". The best explanation of Open webOS development I've found says
* JavaScript applications with HTML5 and CSS3 using cross-platform Enyo framework
* PDK for native C++ applications using OpenGL/ES, typically for games
* JavaScript services implemented with node.js
* System services implemented in either C++ or Javascript (node.js)
** Web access vs. performance
* Standard applications use Enyo framework
* User interface is a series of Qt C++ applications, libraries and services with some QML
That's one way to do it and Tizen is similar, but compared with Firefox OS's everything in JavaScript calling web APIs, it's far more elaborate and less in the "everything scriptable" approach that TFA wants.
Unless the phone's system apps are all open source and written in JavaScript, so necessarily there are Web APIs to everything. Firefox OS walks the walk.
PhoneGap will shrink to be a compatibility shim on decent standards-compliant smartphones; the problem is Apple will always favor native IOS over web apps because Apple Inc. wants the resulting lock-in and can get away with it while they have market dominance.
Surely Dave Winer can't be that out of touch. Firefox OS nails it.
In Firefox OS everything is written in JavaScript, the most widely-deployed scripting language that developers already know. Unlike all the other also-rans to IOS and Android, its system applications — calendar, on-screen keyboard, music player, etc. — are likewise written in JavaScript. To permit this, and unlike BBX, OpenWebOS, Tizen, Windows 8, and everyone else saying "Write apps for our failing platform using HTML/CSS/JavaScript", it has Web APIs to most phone features (battery status, Bluetooth, camera, SMS, etc.), all on various tracks towards standardization. Like lots of phones you can run your apps on the desktop in an emulator; unlike lots of phones the Firefox OS Simulator runs in your browser. Unlike any other smartphone many of the apps you write for the phone will also run and install unchanged as apps on desktops (and Android) running Firefox, many will also work as Chrome apps with minimal effort, and anyone can run an app store, you just put an install button for your app on a web page on your site.
Unlike Slashdot commenters, most Americans live in multiple-car households. If your regular driving is less than the range you're set, because you use the family gas hog for those occasional journeys, or Zipcar.
From the surprisingly favorable Top Gear review, "BMW reckons nearly all i3 buyers will use it as a second car so won't be doing long journeys, and it's optimised to make them efficient and fun."
The Tesla Roadster was the first and for a while the cheapest car to use all CFRP body panels, but Tesla's site talks of its "monocoque chassis, constructed of resin-bonded and riveted extruded aluminum."
From TFA the i3 is "the first mass-produced auto with a carbon fiber-reinforced plastic passenger cell mounted onto an aluminum chassis"
So you're both correct.
You don't dispose of lithium-ion, you recycle it. CFRP (Carbon fiber reinforced plastic) isn't recycled much, though there are initial plants that can recycle the fibers into a lesser grade.
But you're focusing on the wrong thing. A 1.5 ton 35mpg car is going to burn through 10 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles, and that gasoline is very polluting to produce, spill, refine, and deliver before it all goes up in smoke. All reputable studies find that 75-90% of the pollution from a car comes from operating it, not manufacturing it.
As to whether you should ditch your 39 mpg car for an i3, so long as you sell it to someone who junks their gas guzzler then it's a win for the environment. The average fuel efficiency of the automotive fleet goes up.
Sure, everyone thinks they know what that better language is. There is no consensus, there never will be, and other browser makers will resist attempts like Dart and NaCl and pNaCl by one vendor to impose a new language or runtime. So realistically, how will it occur? Every web site has been free to send <script type="text/python" src="foo.py"> or <script type="bin/mybytecode_x64" src="foo.llvm"> pages for close to 15 years now, but no one does because it's a complete non-starter to require end-users to install a special browser or hack in support for a new language module.
Meanwhile in the real world JavaScript (+ HTML + CSS + Canvas + SVG + WebGL + audio processing + sensor support + notifications + real-time communications + ...) keeps improving, despite calls to "stop hijacking" it and to "stay off my lawn".
No, let's keep advancing JavaScript.
Let's compare
* find web site promoting some application
* go to download link
* find it's not available for Mac/Linux/your phone/Windows XP
* or it is, but you need to download a different Qt/GTK/SDL/DotNet/JDK runtime
* but that's not available for your machine, or it's 32-bit not 64-bit
* now download, save, run installer, wait for virus checker
* now finally run the bloody thing
* (Windows-only) wonder why there's another task running, it's the %^$#! Check for updates service
* A week later. Yay, there's an update. Repeat all these steps.
vs.
* find web site promoting some application
* click link
* you're running today's build. It just works.
You have to be a clueless, blind, future-fearing Luddite, yet simultaneously have the skills to master the download-find-install-run-maintain loop to find the former preferable. The 0.1% of the world population who fit that niche all hang out on Slashdot and vote up "bloated browser" comments.
So, the green heads are as much at fault for the climate change problems as anyone.
Comic facepalm.
Meanwhile a Mercedes E-Class (is everyone driving that a "limousine whatever" too?) is a lot slower and at around 25 mpg will consume 15 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles.
That argument might resonate with Mercedes buyers who tend to be wealthier and therefore would care more about the environment because they're in a position to afford luxury goods. However, the Mercedes E class is also offered in a hybrid configuration for those buyers who are concerned about their carbon footprint...
Before arguing fatuous points, go visit fueleconomy.gov. 2013 Mercedes-Benz E400 Hybrid gets 26 mpg. Still 15 tons of gasoline.
... or being seen as "green" in a chic sort of way.
More snide comments about other drivers. What happened to you?
Bringing up financing just introduces more flaws in BP's model.
Leasing an EV is a good idea, if you have a regular 40 mile commute get a Volt or Leaf right now and you may save money. But Better Place didn't lease you "your" battery, because it regularly gets swapped for something else. They sold you electric miles (Shai Agassi made it sound like he was freeing you from that expensive battery pack, you'd just pay to drive around cheaply on electricity). But that means buying a car becomes a messy three-way between you, the car manufacturer, and the "provider of a charged battery". And since most people can (and want to) recharge at home for most of their driving, BP had to stop you from plugging into a wall outlet for cheap kWh in order to make their finances work. Others here allege they used a unique connector, my understanding is they would meter your home EV charging station separately, and you could only recharge at Better Place's public stations. It was a complete mess. The genuine benefit of a quick swap during a long trip costs big money to deliver, and BP's model could only do it by making all your regular recharge and driving much more expensive, eliminating the "cheap running costs" benefit of EVs. A few hundred people in Israel found the tradeoff worthwhile, but it was always going to be a tough sell.
Capable? Yes, it could probably be done. Will it be done? No. Elon is a smart man and he knows how to say the right things to the right audience to get what he wants.
More importantly, he's selling his second-generation made-in-USA car to thousands of buyers, and winning awards.
However, as a practical matter the Model S already has difficulty competing with fossil fuel powered vehicles on range and even then only by making the batteries fully integrated components molded into every bit of spare room in the vehicle frame.
The Model S chassis is a thing of beauty. A compact high-power motor and reduction gearing, and a flat battery pack fills the frame because there's nothing else down there. No muffler, catalytic converter, oil pan, etc. Why not use the lot for batteries instead of taking away trunk space?
In fact it's more like an alternative to the S class Mercedes for limousine liberals...
Don't oversell your straw man. The $95,000 S Class is more expensive and quite a bit more luxurious.
... who want to appear green using our green (aka money). Tell me again why my tax dollars should be subsidizing Musk and Tesla?
Tesla just repaid its $465M loan under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program set up under the G.W. Bush administration; Ford and Nissan received billions under the same program. If you're referring to the $7500 tax credit, it lets buyers keep more of their money for the worthwhile goal of "ending America's addiction to foreign oil", as every Republican president since Nixon has intoned. Tell me again why my tax dollars should be subsidizing your home mortgage, or any other tax rebate?
Your sneering tone about "appearing green" ignores the genuine increase in efficiency from an electric drive. No doubt you'll bleat about coal powered cars, ignoring the increasing role of cleaner natural gas in USA's electricity generating mix, and that many buyers will install solar PV to reduce their carbon footprint further. Meanwhile a Mercedes E-Class (is everyone driving that a "limousine whatever" too?) is a lot slower and at around 25 mpg will consume 15 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles. Plug in cars are definitely better for the environment.
EV batteries are big, but adding swap capability only adds minor additional space.. The Model S pack is swappable. The problem is standardization. Better Place burned through all that money for only one battery design that only one car adopted, and even then the Renault Fluence had to have its trunk extended to make the Z.E. version fit BP's QuickDrop pack. BP hoped that customers would demand swap capability so other car companies would adopt it, but it didn't happen, and car manufactures have instead adopted many different chemistries, layouts, placement within the car, air vs. water cooling...
EV batteries are built up from multiple slabs or sheets. Already if your battery breaks, you only replace the defective module. You could imagine swapping the individual modules for charged ones, but each still weighs around 40 pounds and has be reattached to high-voltage high-current wiring and the cooling system. It's an order of magnitude harder than prying out 8 D cells from your boombox, and again there's no "D cell" standard for EVs.
Maybe there could be a standard for a battery extender, a cage in the trunk where you can add several of these modules to your city EV for a long trip. That avoids the problem of swapping your $12,000 pristine battery for a clapped-out beater. But all the cost-time-weight-safety-standardization tradeoffs work against it. Skip the hassle and rent a long-range car for those trips, or use the other car that's already in the garage of most American households.
Since Elon has said that the Model S ( and presumably the Model X) is capable of conversion to battery swap
It's not automated, but yes, jack the car up at a dealer, detach the battery pack, attach a charged one. Tesla Motors has been vague on the details. Since owners own the car and its expensive warrantied battery pack, most likely a dealer will give you a loaner battery as a courtesy for a long trip, and you'll later return to pick up your original. Obsessive fans at Tesla Motors Club debate more elaborate swapping networks but as yet there's no evidence that Tesla will go for it. Musk has shown he'll do whatever it takes for his EVs to compete, but it seems Tesla is busy building out the Supercharger Network (relatively fast DC quick charge stations spread along major routes, unless you're a dumbass New York Times reporter).
perhaps Tesla will try to get the Better Place switch station tech - despite the company's failure, they did have solid working tech as Tesla could benefit tremendously by not having to reinvent, er, the wheel.
BP's intellectual property includes their outdated battery pack design (Tesla's flat sheet is better), the QuickDrop technology for attaching the battery (Tesla's is better), and automating the battery swap with robots. The last seems only worth a few million, unless evil patents are involved.
Batteries are the way you get a decent boost to the efficiency of burning anything in an inefficient combusion engine, viz hybrid powertrains. Keep dreaming that ethanol from anything will become so cheap that you don't care about efficiency. Meanwhile plugging in is the cheapest, most efficient, and least-polluting way to make a car go the first XX miles right now.
I'm not against ethanol from biomass, though it's a far less efficient way to get energy from an area than covering it with solar panels, and the processes all require substantial energy inputs. If and when ethanol from anything is cost-effective it'll serve as a fine fuel for the range-extender engines of plug-in cars that mostly run off their batteries.
Nobody is making a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine. BMW only made 100 7-series hydrogen models in 2006, and the Mazda hydrogen Wankel (2008) was never produced in quantity. It's tough to store a lot of it hydrogen a car, so you need a more efficient powerplant than blowing up a fuel to make heat and a little forward motion. That powerplant is a fuel cell, essentially reversing electrolysis to drive an electric motor. Fuel cell vehicles are out there, Honda has leased a few dozen FCX Claritys in Southern California, the only place in the USA with a handful of public H2 refueling stations.
The latest optimistic date for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to be finally really genuinely truly here is 2015, and Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz and maybe Toyota are most serious about offering models. But the relative success of the Volt and the Ford and Toyota plug-in vehicles shows far more people are happy to plug in at home for their regular commute and use a conventional gas engine as an occasional range extender. "Early adopters ready to spend big money" will mostly buy Teslas with huge battery packs that can recharge (slowly) anywhere. The market of rich environmentalists who don't have access to a plug and live near the handful of H2 refueling stations and who regularly drive long distances is TINY, and will remain so until fossil fuel becomes vastly more expensive.
Mod AC parent up! Here it is again
Why? Because you're in a browser right now and it's the most popular software platform ever.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/GamepadAPI
No it isn't.
WebGL sends shader programs to the GPU which executes them. There isn't a layer underneath it.
People had no interest in such world browsers, several companies including Microsoft offered them in the 90s and they all died. Microsoft's 1997 technology was called Chrome (yes, really), and they promised "Chromeffects would turn a web browser into a rippling, 3D space with audio and video playback".
Meanwhile people do like 3D games, they do love running things in their browser, and the fullscreen API lets the game canvas go fullscreen. Enjoy your lawn.
That standard platform is the Android kernel.
porting Ubuntu touch: To rapidly support a wide range of devices, our architecture reuses some of the drivers and hardware enablement available for Android. porting Firefox OS: Boot to Gecko (Firefox OS) uses a kernel derived from Android, with a Gecko-based user interface on top of it.Meanwhile Plasma Active, Salifish, and Tizen are based on a traditional Linux platform, and the Mer project hopes to be the common core distribution for them.
For the tiny fraction of users who "select their own OS", device popularity and an unlocked bootloader matter far more than standardization. If you buy an unsuccessful phone, it won't have a community providing images for it and jailbreaking its bootloader if necessary.
The standardized platform is vital for all these also-ran OSes to get lots of apps. Aaron Seigo's post about standardizing the QML compontents across KDE Plasma, Jolla Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 and Ubuntu is a good sign, but they still suffer from inconsistent device APIs and different packaging requirements. That's where Firefox OS has a theoretical edge: apps for it are just web pages with a manifest. The number of web developers (incuding "app" developers who just put a wrapper around an HTML app) is orders of magnitude more than QML developers.
The Mozilla Open Web Apps project proposes some small additions to existing sites to turn them into apps that run in a rich, fun, and powerful computing environment. These apps run on desktop browsers and mobile devices, and are easier for a user to discover and launch than Web sites. They have access to a growing set of novel features, such as synchronizing across all of a user's devices.They don't push for anything. They ship Android.
There's a big difference between going to a web site and being able to run it offline, vs. downloading then running a setup.exe (and re-installing the Java or .NET runtime you got rid of in 2011). HTML5 delivers a universal zero-install runtime that eliminates any "installation" step, and when the user is connected there is no "upgrade" step either. It ought to be the future. I may never get a Firefox OS phone, but I'm looking forward to its app stores and Mozilla's advocacy to make any web page an app.