It's not just cities, it's any multi-vehicle household with a garage where someone's regular commute is less than ~70 miles. That describes millions and millions of suburban drivers.
Everyone but Tesla already uses such rectangular cells, take a look at e.g. SBLiMotive's. It's got over 100 of them. But every design put the cells in a special enclosure for thermal management, and some like the Volt are water-cooled. So now the robot has to lower the pack or move the groceries out of the way, lift the lid off, disconnect the thermal system, open a particular "sheet", unscrew 60+ batteries and insert new ones. Nice clever robot!
Maybe in 20 years your car will have an expansion cage that can hold 0-20 standardized 15-pound battery sheets that each store 1 kWh and yet don't require sophisticated thermal management, and we've somehow been able to solve the safety and mechanical and electrical issues so that it's realistic for a volt-monkey to hump a fresh set over to your car and drop them in. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Meanwhile Better Place is about to roll out entire battery-pack swap in Denmark and Israel for exactly one car model that's adopted their standardized QuickDrop design. Their biggest problem isn't technical but financial: the money for spare batteries and their swap stations has to come from somewhere, and you pay them a lot for the added convenience.
Of course not. A USB device must start at low power (1 unit load, 0.2W) and wait for a signal that it can transition to its maximum power draw (5 units - 2.5W with USB 2.0, 6 units - 4.5W in a special USB 3.0 mode). If a lower-power hub can't supply the power (such as a small netbook running off its battery), then attached devices should never transition to high power consumption, which may mean they won't work. I assume this new spec will go further and let the USB hub indicate how much power it can supply in case it can e.g. supply 10W but not 100W.
This is all complicated by unpowered USB port extenders, the dumb battery charging extension, the USB 3.0 higher power mode, and all the USB gizmos and dumb USB chargers out there that don't implement USB correctly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Power It's amazing USB works at all.
Thanks for making Mr. Proffitt's point, as he writes in the original article "The old arguments about desktops and application superiority aren't going to matter if all the other platforms have moved on."
Native apps suck, on every platform. You can't select text everywhere, you can't Ctrl-+ to zoom, you can't bookmark/back/forward, you can't View > Source or View > Selection Source, you can't run bookmarklet hacks on them, you can't drag images out. Sure, the native toolkits haltingly advance in areas like HTML rendering and URL support, but every time I right-click in a native app and I don't have a rich context menu available, I curse the bloody thing. Meanwhile every week HTML 5 applications get better and every couple of months the browsers add APIs that eat away at the few remaining things that only native apps can do.
Yes the desktop battle is so last-decade, but you manage to utterly miss the current battle. The future may not and should not be compiled apps from a curated store written for a particular runtime on a platform controlled by a commercial behemoth. The alternative is running a bunch of HTML applications that run in any browser on ANY platform, that you can View > Source to inspect and modify. That's a free software battle worth fighting!
Most of the get-off-my-lawn graybeards on Slashdot miss this point. They refuse to understand the potential of HTML, they conflate it with cloud computing and web services (I run several "web" apps from my hard drive), and they make dismissive snorts that native Gnome/KDE/whatever desktop apps will always be superior while ignoring the relentless advance of exceptional HTML applications. I think that's what Mr. Proffitt is getting at in the original article when he write "I have some doubts that any Linux distribution is going to be able to get its collective act together in time."
At least Mozilla understands this battle, read The App Model and the Web and the rest of Mitchell Baker's recent posts. But the Linux users who should be Mozilla's natural allies in promoting an open Internet don't seem to understand what's going on; maybe that's why Boot to Gecko is based on Android instead of a Linux distro. A few other projects like Joli OS and Webian shell are moving past the Linux desktop to the browser. If these falter, there's still Google's ChromeOS, but it competes with Google's own Android ecosystem.
Although he's using JavaScript typed arrays (U?Int{8,16,32}Array), the JavaScript isn't using other recent language features like let and const. "Just" tons of switch statements and bitwise operations (and the mind of a brilliant hacker). That it runs so fast demonstrates how fantastic V8 and JaegerMonkey are at optimizing JavaScript.
http://bellard.org/jslinux/cpux86.js calls ya.load_binary() that makes XMLHttpRequest()s for "vmlinux26.bin", "root.bin", and "linuxstart.bin". For the latter two his HTTP server responds with root.bin.en.gz and linuxstart.bin.en.gz. After gunzip you can mount root.bin.en as a loopback ext2 filesystem to see the ramdisk FS contents; most binaries are hardlinks to the same 768kB BusyBox ELF 386 binary. I'm not sure what the 14,858 byte linuxstart.bin file is.
What are you on about? "People" aren't remotely in danger of extinction, but 18,351 species are on the IUCN's Red list of threatened species. Most because of habitat loss, i.e. human activity.
People pave paradise, cut down native ecosystems and replace with farming and livestock, carve wilderness regions into isolated populations with roads and development, introduce alien species, and it's "settled facts" (according to the latest report from the National Academies of science and engineering) have caused the recent observed global warming. What the fuck else do you think is causing species to go extinct at a rate that strongly suggests we're living at the brink of the sixth great extinction event?
Didn't Soulskill or 0wait or anyone involved with this on slashdot read to the end of "Disposing of 55 thousand tons of radioactive water"" and see in bold type Los Angeles Times? For no reason I can see apart from laziness, this great piece of investigative reporting is now all over teh webz as a story from the plucky Aussies at the Sydney Morning Herald who seem to have done nothing but some light editing. Searching latimes.com for "Ralph Vartabedian" coughs up the original, two days earlier:
The benefits to storing your music collection online are so great that many people must already be doing it, including the intersection of rich and record collector. Karl Lagerfeld must get tired of lugging his Louis Vuitton trunk-ful of iPods around, I'm sure Elton John is back to acquiring vinyl, I doubt Music Man Murray is going to delete the MP3s of his 300,000 records.
I don't see what's illegal in storing your legally-purchased music in your own online storage. I don't think the record companies can force you to keep the username and password of your online music folder private, any more than your car company can force you to lock your car up. The reason people don't share a read-only password is they'd have to pay their ISP big bandwidth fees when huge crowds come to freeload. But the rich can afford it. When will some celebrity, Russian oligarch or Chinese billionaire, mad at the record companies and eager for infamy, go anarchist value-destroying Robin Hood for us and let slip that the username:password for http://RomanAbramovich.ru/AllMyMusic is boris:Chelsea ?
Big companies can do more but tend to do it at a slower pace. As long as Google keeps their winning percentage high (Apple rather than Microsoft), they'll do fine.
If Slashdot had featured this story yesterday, Gmail vs. Wave would be the textbook Google management case. Wave is genius technology with analogs to inbox, contacts, and message threads, yet Google never integrated it into Gmail so it never got a chance to gain traction. Was that Schmidt making the hard decision not to screw up a beloved Gmail for the sake of dubious innovation, or was Google drowning in turf wars the way Microsoft does? I dunno. Google Voice may be stuck in the same limbo.
But Amazon just released Cloud Drive/Cloud Player. Google has nearly all the pieces to do the same: I can already upload music files to Google Docs, Google has a checkout and an Android app store. I'm sure it's a humiliating wakeup call that Amazon got there first. Google Docs even has the nifty "Share" feature, though enabling it for music would trigger yet another epic legal battle.
Encouraging the development of apps that will draw power and reduce the range or carrying capacity of the vehicle is silly. What's silly is having so little numeracy and common sense to think that even a 100 W touch screen computer (10× the power draw of the iPad power supply) will affect the power and range of an EV with a 42 kWh (or larger) battery pack and probably a 185,000 Watt motor.
Back in 2009, RoundArch blog said "The Tesla Model S – Touch-Screen User Experience is Powered by Roundarch’s Merapi project...
Roundarch’s Merapi is a revolutionary solution for bridging traditional desktop and Web technologies,... [Merapi gives] Access to hardware devices: Browser-based technologies (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX) previously did not have native access to hardware other than microphone and Web cam." "Merapi is a technology that can be used as a messaging bridge between applications that run in the Adobe Flash player or Adobe AIR and applications written in Java."
Nothing much since, maybe Tesla has changed supplier. But it's unlikely Tesla is doing the work themselves, as you say it's not their core competency.
You're wrong on all your points! My $0 LG Optimus S and $200 HTC Evo came running the most recent Android release at the time (2.2, which had been out for 5 months), because I was savvy enough to demand it. With so much competition, new phones running old Android suffer in the marketplace. And Google does NOT do things slowly, Android got four significant updates in 2009, two in 2010, and Gingerbread and Ice Cream are both coming in 2011.
I agree with your tangential comment that vendors like Samsung have terrible track records for Android updates. I hope comparative analysis like http://blogs.computerworld.com/17649/android_upgrades will affect their revenues and thus encourage them to do a better job.
You don't appear to be an educational facility contemplating a deployment of "one laptop per child" or a child in a developing country, so I sincerely hope OLPC doesn't give a damn about what you want.
Maybe WebOS is better but I love how Android means I don't have to think about memory management, save before quitting, confirm quit, etc. As mobets says, press the Home key and choose any of your last 8 apps and you return to its state. Whatever I was recently doing is just there.
Press and hold Home is non-obvious, and Android's user experience directory Matias Duarte (formerly of webOS!) talks in his great interview with Engadget around 14:00 about improving task switching and multitasking. "We've got an on-screen affordance, one of our virtual buttons, you tap it you get a list of your recent applications... with a visible tangible representation of what... it's doing"
That suggests the more savvy consumers with more money to spend are wandering off to iPhone and Android
Uhh, thanks to relentless competition, Android phones with solid specs (WiFi, 800MHz processors, 512MB memory, 2GB microSD card) cost nothing with a 2-year plan from US carriers.
The only reason to buy anything less is the substantial cost of the data plan that I think all the carriers make you get with a smartphone. But most people realize you get so much extra utility over a messaging phone.
MS FUD scared educational ministries into asking for Windows, but I don't think any deployment is actually using Windows on the XO. Every single one shipped running a version of Fedora Linux with the "Sugar" UI, and recent software releases ( http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.2 ) offer a Gnome desktop as an alternative.
You're insane if you think that a developing company can assemble laptops for even 4x what it costs Quanta to crank them out by the hundred thousands. Getting to one laptop per child in a school is expensive enough already.
Transfer of technology is important (though less important than educating kids), and the OLPC open source software facilitates that; anyone can participate in development and I think Uruguay is off developing its own software. But turning a mass-produced rugged device into a locally-made expensive cardboard joke is over-reaching.
You're entitled to your perceptions, but the XO is far from the CrunchPad. Since Negroponte's overpromising, OLPC has shipped two generations of hardware, several software releases for the laptops (and a school server), and developers have created a few hundred activities for the UI. The hardware and software was "real and inventive", now they're actually executing and delivering it while the technorati drool over new shiny.
From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments , "There are over 1.85 million XOs in the field as of August, 2010." 500,000 kids in Peru and 400,000 in Uruguay have the laptops, tens of thousands in other countries.
That seems expensive and largely symbolic. On city routes surrounded by high-rise buildings the average insolation on the panel will be terrible, and there are better ways to spend the $thousands it will cost to generate a negligible amount of power for only an intermittent few hours a day. The reason the Prius and Fisker Karma have solar roof options is so the AC can keep the car cool while parked without draining the battery, but a bus is constantly on the move. You'd still have to size the buses' batteries to handle the range and HVAC on overcast days, and the cost of the electricity to recharge the battery that the solar panel sometimes saves is minimal. Solar panels on a regular bus would make slightly more sense.
If you want to help the environment you put solar panels on a south-facing building roof. Anywhere else you need a good reason to be wasting most of their potential output.
Yeah, it's unclear what will happen. I thought I was being clever by getting a Bluetooth headset with a car charger that I could use for my phones, but it's only rated for 180 mA, while my HTC Evo charger is 1.0 A.
Radio Shack's PointMobl car charger has "over current protection" and a red LED that lights to indicate USB power overload. (It also has short circuit protection, input reversed polarity protection, and a second USB port.)
The best solution is for even dumb chargers to implement the power negotiation spec.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just cities, it's any multi-vehicle household with a garage where someone's regular commute is less than ~70 miles. That describes millions and millions of suburban drivers.
Everyone but Tesla already uses such rectangular cells, take a look at e.g. SBLiMotive's. It's got over 100 of them. But every design put the cells in a special enclosure for thermal management, and some like the Volt are water-cooled. So now the robot has to lower the pack or move the groceries out of the way, lift the lid off, disconnect the thermal system, open a particular "sheet", unscrew 60+ batteries and insert new ones. Nice clever robot!
Maybe in 20 years your car will have an expansion cage that can hold 0-20 standardized 15-pound battery sheets that each store 1 kWh and yet don't require sophisticated thermal management, and we've somehow been able to solve the safety and mechanical and electrical issues so that it's realistic for a volt-monkey to hump a fresh set over to your car and drop them in. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Meanwhile Better Place is about to roll out entire battery-pack swap in Denmark and Israel for exactly one car model that's adopted their standardized QuickDrop design. Their biggest problem isn't technical but financial: the money for spare batteries and their swap stations has to come from somewhere, and you pay them a lot for the added convenience.
There are no issues in covering south-facing roofs with solar PV, except for cost.
Of course not. A USB device must start at low power (1 unit load, 0.2W) and wait for a signal that it can transition to its maximum power draw (5 units - 2.5W with USB 2.0, 6 units - 4.5W in a special USB 3.0 mode). If a lower-power hub can't supply the power (such as a small netbook running off its battery), then attached devices should never transition to high power consumption, which may mean they won't work. I assume this new spec will go further and let the USB hub indicate how much power it can supply in case it can e.g. supply 10W but not 100W.
This is all complicated by unpowered USB port extenders, the dumb battery charging extension, the USB 3.0 higher power mode, and all the USB gizmos and dumb USB chargers out there that don't implement USB correctly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Power It's amazing USB works at all.
Thanks for making Mr. Proffitt's point, as he writes in the original article "The old arguments about desktops and application superiority aren't going to matter if all the other platforms have moved on."
Native apps suck, on every platform. You can't select text everywhere, you can't Ctrl-+ to zoom, you can't bookmark/back/forward, you can't View > Source or View > Selection Source, you can't run bookmarklet hacks on them, you can't drag images out. Sure, the native toolkits haltingly advance in areas like HTML rendering and URL support, but every time I right-click in a native app and I don't have a rich context menu available, I curse the bloody thing. Meanwhile every week HTML 5 applications get better and every couple of months the browsers add APIs that eat away at the few remaining things that only native apps can do.
Yes the desktop battle is so last-decade, but you manage to utterly miss the current battle. The future may not and should not be compiled apps from a curated store written for a particular runtime on a platform controlled by a commercial behemoth. The alternative is running a bunch of HTML applications that run in any browser on ANY platform, that you can View > Source to inspect and modify. That's a free software battle worth fighting!
Most of the get-off-my-lawn graybeards on Slashdot miss this point. They refuse to understand the potential of HTML, they conflate it with cloud computing and web services (I run several "web" apps from my hard drive), and they make dismissive snorts that native Gnome/KDE/whatever desktop apps will always be superior while ignoring the relentless advance of exceptional HTML applications. I think that's what Mr. Proffitt is getting at in the original article when he write "I have some doubts that any Linux distribution is going to be able to get its collective act together in time."
At least Mozilla understands this battle, read The App Model and the Web and the rest of Mitchell Baker's recent posts. But the Linux users who should be Mozilla's natural allies in promoting an open Internet don't seem to understand what's going on; maybe that's why Boot to Gecko is based on Android instead of a Linux distro. A few other projects like Joli OS and Webian shell are moving past the Linux desktop to the browser. If these falter, there's still Google's ChromeOS, but it competes with Google's own Android ecosystem.
Although he's using JavaScript typed arrays (U?Int{8,16,32}Array), the JavaScript isn't using other recent language features like let and const. "Just" tons of switch statements and bitwise operations (and the mind of a brilliant hacker). That it runs so fast demonstrates how fantastic V8 and JaegerMonkey are at optimizing JavaScript.
http://bellard.org/jslinux/cpux86.js calls ya.load_binary() that makes XMLHttpRequest()s for "vmlinux26.bin", "root.bin", and "linuxstart.bin". For the latter two his HTTP server responds with root.bin.en.gz and linuxstart.bin.en.gz. After gunzip you can mount root.bin.en as a loopback ext2 filesystem to see the ramdisk FS contents; most binaries are hardlinks to the same 768kB BusyBox ELF 386 binary. I'm not sure what the 14,858 byte linuxstart.bin file is.
What are you on about? "People" aren't remotely in danger of extinction, but 18,351 species are on the IUCN's Red list of threatened species. Most because of habitat loss, i.e. human activity.
People pave paradise, cut down native ecosystems and replace with farming and livestock, carve wilderness regions into isolated populations with roads and development, introduce alien species, and it's "settled facts" (according to the latest report from the National Academies of science and engineering) have caused the recent observed global warming. What the fuck else do you think is causing species to go extinct at a rate that strongly suggests we're living at the brink of the sixth great extinction event?
Didn't Soulskill or 0wait or anyone involved with this on slashdot read to the end of "Disposing of 55 thousand tons of radioactive water"" and see in bold type Los Angeles Times? For no reason I can see apart from laziness, this great piece of investigative reporting is now all over teh webz as a story from the plucky Aussies at the Sydney Morning Herald who seem to have done nothing but some light editing. Searching latimes.com for "Ralph Vartabedian" coughs up the original, two days earlier:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-water-20110407,0,873990,full.story
Credit where credit is due, show some respect, Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times, etc.
The benefits to storing your music collection online are so great that many people must already be doing it, including the intersection of rich and record collector. Karl Lagerfeld must get tired of lugging his Louis Vuitton trunk-ful of iPods around, I'm sure Elton John is back to acquiring vinyl, I doubt Music Man Murray is going to delete the MP3s of his 300,000 records.
I don't see what's illegal in storing your legally-purchased music in your own online storage. I don't think the record companies can force you to keep the username and password of your online music folder private, any more than your car company can force you to lock your car up. The reason people don't share a read-only password is they'd have to pay their ISP big bandwidth fees when huge crowds come to freeload. But the rich can afford it. When will some celebrity, Russian oligarch or Chinese billionaire, mad at the record companies and eager for infamy, go anarchist value-destroying Robin Hood for us and let slip that the username:password for http ://RomanAbramovich.ru/AllMyMusic is boris:Chelsea ?
Big companies can do more but tend to do it at a slower pace. As long as Google keeps their winning percentage high (Apple rather than Microsoft), they'll do fine.
If Slashdot had featured this story yesterday, Gmail vs. Wave would be the textbook Google management case. Wave is genius technology with analogs to inbox, contacts, and message threads, yet Google never integrated it into Gmail so it never got a chance to gain traction. Was that Schmidt making the hard decision not to screw up a beloved Gmail for the sake of dubious innovation, or was Google drowning in turf wars the way Microsoft does? I dunno. Google Voice may be stuck in the same limbo.
But Amazon just released Cloud Drive/Cloud Player. Google has nearly all the pieces to do the same: I can already upload music files to Google Docs, Google has a checkout and an Android app store. I'm sure it's a humiliating wakeup call that Amazon got there first. Google Docs even has the nifty "Share" feature, though enabling it for music would trigger yet another epic legal battle.
Encouraging the development of apps that will draw power and reduce the range or carrying capacity of the vehicle is silly.
What's silly is having so little numeracy and common sense to think that even a 100 W touch screen computer (10× the power draw of the iPad power supply) will affect the power and range of an EV with a 42 kWh (or larger) battery pack and probably a 185,000 Watt motor.
Back in 2009, RoundArch blog said "The Tesla Model S – Touch-Screen User Experience is Powered by Roundarch’s Merapi project ... ... [Merapi gives] Access to hardware devices: Browser-based technologies (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX) previously did not have native access to hardware other than microphone and Web cam."
Roundarch’s Merapi is a revolutionary solution for bridging traditional desktop and Web technologies,
"Merapi is a technology that can be used as a messaging bridge between applications that run in the Adobe Flash player or Adobe AIR and applications written in Java."
Nothing much since, maybe Tesla has changed supplier. But it's unlikely Tesla is doing the work themselves, as you say it's not their core competency.
Oops, I meant to say "Honeycomb and Ice Cream are both coming in 2011." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History
You're wrong on all your points! My $0 LG Optimus S and $200 HTC Evo came running the most recent Android release at the time (2.2, which had been out for 5 months), because I was savvy enough to demand it. With so much competition, new phones running old Android suffer in the marketplace. And Google does NOT do things slowly, Android got four significant updates in 2009, two in 2010, and Gingerbread and Ice Cream are both coming in 2011.
I agree with your tangential comment that vendors like Samsung have terrible track records for Android updates. I hope comparative analysis like http://blogs.computerworld.com/17649/android_upgrades will affect their revenues and thus encourage them to do a better job.
You don't appear to be an educational facility contemplating a deployment of "one laptop per child" or a child in a developing country, so I sincerely hope OLPC doesn't give a damn about what you want.
People have ported Debian and Ubuntu to the current XO hardware, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Linux_distributions
Maybe WebOS is better but I love how Android means I don't have to think about memory management, save before quitting, confirm quit, etc. As mobets says, press the Home key and choose any of your last 8 apps and you return to its state. Whatever I was recently doing is just there.
Press and hold Home is non-obvious, and Android's user experience directory Matias Duarte (formerly of webOS!) talks in his great interview with Engadget around 14:00 about improving task switching and multitasking. "We've got an on-screen affordance, one of our virtual buttons, you tap it you get a list of your recent applications ... with a visible tangible representation of what... it's doing"
Uhh, thanks to relentless competition, Android phones with solid specs (WiFi, 800MHz processors, 512MB memory, 2GB microSD card) cost nothing with a 2-year plan from US carriers.
The only reason to buy anything less is the substantial cost of the data plan that I think all the carriers make you get with a smartphone. But most people realize you get so much extra utility over a messaging phone.
MS FUD scared educational ministries into asking for Windows, but I don't think any deployment is actually using Windows on the XO. Every single one shipped running a version of Fedora Linux with the "Sugar" UI, and recent software releases ( http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.2 ) offer a Gnome desktop as an alternative.
You're insane if you think that a developing company can assemble laptops for even 4x what it costs Quanta to crank them out by the hundred thousands. Getting to one laptop per child in a school is expensive enough already.
Transfer of technology is important (though less important than educating kids), and the OLPC open source software facilitates that; anyone can participate in development and I think Uruguay is off developing its own software. But turning a mass-produced rugged device into a locally-made expensive cardboard joke is over-reaching.
You're entitled to your perceptions, but the XO is far from the CrunchPad. Since Negroponte's overpromising, OLPC has shipped two generations of hardware, several software releases for the laptops (and a school server), and developers have created a few hundred activities for the UI. The hardware and software was "real and inventive", now they're actually executing and delivering it while the technorati drool over new shiny.
From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments , "There are over 1.85 million XOs in the field as of August, 2010." 500,000 kids in Peru and 400,000 in Uruguay have the laptops, tens of thousands in other countries.
That seems expensive and largely symbolic. On city routes surrounded by high-rise buildings the average insolation on the panel will be terrible, and there are better ways to spend the $thousands it will cost to generate a negligible amount of power for only an intermittent few hours a day. The reason the Prius and Fisker Karma have solar roof options is so the AC can keep the car cool while parked without draining the battery, but a bus is constantly on the move. You'd still have to size the buses' batteries to handle the range and HVAC on overcast days, and the cost of the electricity to recharge the battery that the solar panel sometimes saves is minimal. Solar panels on a regular bus would make slightly more sense.
If you want to help the environment you put solar panels on a south-facing building roof. Anywhere else you need a good reason to be wasting most of their potential output.
Yeah, it's unclear what will happen. I thought I was being clever by getting a Bluetooth headset with a car charger that I could use for my phones, but it's only rated for 180 mA, while my HTC Evo charger is 1.0 A.
Radio Shack's PointMobl car charger has "over current protection" and a red LED that lights to indicate USB power overload. (It also has short circuit protection, input reversed polarity protection, and a second USB port.)
The best solution is for even dumb chargers to implement the power negotiation spec.