Usually the statement is that the Leaf is the first mass market freeway capable electric car.
The first electric cars came out a hundred years ago, predating the gasoline-powered cars that became dominant in the early 1900s.
The GM EV1, the Toyota RAV4-EV, the Honda EV Plus, etc., were built in small numbers to satisfy California's zero emissions mandate from 1987 to 2003.
More recently, Tesla Motors has been selling the high performance all-electric Tesla Roadster, but one could argue that, like Ferraris, those aren't mass market because of the high cost of supercar performance.
I was at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission meeting in Olympia, Washington on the subject of electric vehicle infrastructure last month. None of the utilities represented there expressed any concern about either short term or long term problems caused by electric vehicles. The ramp-up is going to be very slow, permits for charging stations will give them advanced warning on neighborhood clumping, and we'll have decades to build the capacity required as EVs become a significant load on the grid.
The Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt each pull 3.3 kW maximum. Compare that to a hairdryer that pulls about 2 kW or an air conditioner that pulls 2.5 kW.
People who want to worry about this problem like to note that it takes 8 hours to charge a Leaf, but that exaggerates the load. Driving a mile in an EV uses about 320 Wh, wall-to-wheel. Most Americans drive under 40 miles per day, or about 12.8 kWh, so the average charge will be well below half of the maximum charge. It's analogous to a gas car: just because your tank holds 20 gallons doesn't mean you burn 20 gallons every day.
Unlike air conditioners that add to the peak load, EVs can be charged overnight. All of the EVs coming to the market have timers integrated into the charging controls, so it's trivial to plug in when you get home but not charge until later at night.
Building out the required long-term infrastructure will allow us to keep hundreds of billions of dollars per year in our local economies instead of sending those dollars overseas.
The Green Car Reports article linked in the original post mentions a baseline of 300 million cars in the US. The study summary referenced examines several scenarios of plug-in hybrid market penetration of 20% to 80% of new vehicles by 2050. That's 60 to 240 million vehicles with today's numbers, and presumably a lot more with population growth by 2050.
A 2006 DOE study (summary) found that there is enough off-peak excess capacity in our grid today to switch 70% (about 217 million) of all light-duty vehicles to plug-in hybrids with a 33-mile range (which is enough to cover most people's daily driving) without any need to add power plants. The study makes a number of assumptions, like everyone charges off-peak, but the upshot is clear: our grid already has plenty of capacity for overnight charging.
With the most optimistic view of EV and PHEV production rates for the next five years, there aren't going to be enough to cause any problems with the grid. As market share grows, financial incentives (time-of-use metering) and smart grid infrastructure can be put in place to make sure the majority of EV charging is done off-peak.
Basically they are saying "Electric cars wont bring down the grid -- if they aren't widely adopted". What if, instead of half a million, there's 10-30 million?
The study said 200 million cars, but even a half million isn't going to happen this year or next. Nissan is going to make a few tens of thousands of Leafs over the next two years, and then as much as 140,000 per year (worldwide) starting in 2012. GM is going to start with 10,000 Volts per year and bump that up to 30,000 in 2010. Tesla might be producing 20,000 to 50,000 per year by late 2012.
There's just no way we're going to get anywhere near one tenth the number of cars the study considered in the next five years. The utilities are already planning for EVs today with just a thousand Tesla Roadsters, 900 RAV4-EVs, and a few thousand one-off conversions. The utilities have lots of time to make any adjustments needed to power EVs and provide incentives to encourage off-peak charging.
Generally speaking, when you contribute to a charity, they send you a letter documenting your gift, including a statement as to the fair market value of any goods or services received. Generally, things are pretty loose when you're getting something that can't be purchased. For example, if your donation gets you a special behind-the-scenes tour that's not for sale to the public, there's no value associated with that.
One possible approach to this would be these things are junk with no value, so the cost is pure donation. Another approach is that the FMV of the items is the winning bid, the buyer gets no charitable deduction, and Slashdot gets a deduction for donating the full sales price.
So, what's the plan on this? Can the Slashdot folks comment on whether they'll send out appropriate acknowledgment letters with pre-determined FMV statements?
> Yes, the Tesla is also 98k+. Toyota is not interested in making > a car that only Jay Leno can afford.
The Tesla Roadster is the starting point, not the final goal. They are making their first car a high-end sports car because they can compete in that market with a low-volume pure electric vehicle.
Their next vehicle will be a sports sedan produced in higher volumes, and built in the US, for introduction in 2009. Their next vehicle will be even lower price and higher volume.
It's difficult to create a car company from scratch. It's a complex business and has to be both high volume and incredibly efficient to compete with the big car makers. That sort of business doesn't get built overnight, or even in just a couple of years.
Tesla in on the right track. While the big car makers are wasting time fooling around with hybrid cars that have no range because they carry around a heavy gas engine, Tesla is showing that a pure electric can built with a great driving range, way more than you need for anything less than an interstate road trip.
I can't wait to get a pure electric vehicle for many reasons.
- Much better power plant to road efficiency, with far less pollution than a gas engine. - No more wasted time making trips to the gas station. Just like a cell phone, you plug it in at night and it's charged in the morning. - By charging overnight, you leverage otherwise unused power plant capacity. - No more oil changes. No muffler replacements. No timing belt. The only regular maintenance will be tires and brakes, and the brakes last longer because of regenerative braking. - No waiting for the engine to warm up so the heater will work.
> With the iPod they arrived "fashionably late", well before the > party was going, but not until they knew it was going to be a good party.
Really? Is that what people said? "Oh, gee, the iPod is here to make money on this market that's going through the roof."
I remember it being more like, "Apple has no idea what they're doing. No one wants an expensive, heavy harddrive-based iPod when they can buy a cheaper, lighter flash-based device with a horrible interface."
The iPod *created* the mainstream MP3 player market. Before the iPod it was just nerds who owned the darn things. Now the nerds and their grandparents own iPods.
So don't tell me Apple's late to the party. We won't know how the party's going until the guest of honor shows up.
I'm not sure I'll buy an iPhone, but I also didn't rush out a buy the first iPod either. Now I'm on my third iPod and I use it for things I hadn't even thought of when the first one came out. The same thing may very well happen with the iPhone, but no one will know until lots of people have had some time actually using it.
I hate to disappoint you, but Simonyi isn't the guy that has earned your ire. You want the idiot (or collection of idiots) that took Simonyi's good idea, mangled it into something useless, then made the whole mess visible to the entire world of Windows programmers.
Actual Hungarian doesn't tag variables with their implementation type (16-bit signed int, 32-bit signed int, etc.), but rather their semantic meaning. Hungarian is to programming what labeling quantities is to physics. It doesn't make sense to add a meter-per-second measurement to a temperature reading; correct Hungarian labels variables by their meaning and makes analogous programming errors equally apparent.
For example, if FOO is a struct, then a pointer to a single instance of a FOO, a pointer to an array of FOOs and the identifier of the local storage of an array of FOOs are all of type "FOO *", but Hungarian makes it obvious which is which.
FOO *pfoo;// a pointer to a single FOO
FOO *pafoo;// a pointer to an array of FOOs
FOO afoo[12];// storage for an array of FOOs
These lines of code are all syntactically correct but nonsense semantically.
pfoo[3].field = value;// NO! you just trashed memory
size_of_array = sizeof(pafoo);// Nope, that's the size of a pointer
afoo->field = value;// this might be correct, but probably not
If you want to know what real Hungarian is, as opposed to the abomination exposed through the Windows header files, try reading about the Hungarian naming convention as conceived and used by Charles, somewhat evolved from his original PhD thesis.
In the 90's, a bit after Apple released the Newton, I saw a demo by the handwriting recognition team at Microsoft. They were very proud of their work, which they promised would be much better than Apple's. As part of the demo, the presenter wrote "Windows Rules" on the tablet, which the software recognized as "Windows Pales". That got a pretty embarrassing round of laughter considering it was an internal demo.
To be fair, I'll throw in a more recent Apple story. I ordered a Mac Book Pro the day they were announced, and when it arrived it had the now famous squeal. I called Apple's 800 number and endured the automated voice menu:
Apple Robot: "Say the name of the product you are calling about." Me: "Mac Book Pro" Apple Robot: "Did you say Apple Cinema Display?" Me: "No" Apple Robot: "I'm sorry. Please say the name of the product you are calling about" Me: "Mac Book Pro" Apple Robot: "Did you say Unix?"
I got one of the very first shipping units, so they obviously hadn't added "Mac Book Pro" to the known list of products yet, but it was hysterical how far away the nearest matches were.
Any rate that decays continuously with a half-life can be described by a function of the form C*e^(-kt) where t is time, C is the initial rate (at t = 0), and the constant k = ln(2)/(half life), with half-life measured in the same units as time.
A power law relationship is something of the form y = A*t^k, which cannot be used to model a rate with a half life, since the time to reduce the rate by half depends on where you start, and increases as time increases.
Also any exponential function (with negative k) eventually decays faster than any power law function. The power law can start decaying faster, but since the half life will increase with time, the exponential function with a constant half-life will always eventually get under it. (L'Hospital's rule is your friend.)
So to say that something that can be described with a half life follows a power law rather than a exponential function, and decays faster than an exponential function, indicates a complete ignorance of the methematical terms. This also calls into question the validity of everything else the article says.
Sending music over data lines to self-powered speakers isn't new. Meridian has been doing it for at least 10 years. They don't use TCP/IP, but it's the same idea.
This year is going to be incredible. For every thing they've made easier, there are a dozen other things that are still hard, both in hardware and software.
No one used the IR sensors last year because they were useless; too many sources of IR noise and reflections that are literally invisible and there were better ways to find the posts in autonomous mode. The CMUCam is much more interesting and useful. If you don't like, don't use it, but don't complain because they gave us something better this year.
FIRST has made it easier for every team to field a functional robot with an autonomous mode, which means the competition is going to be tough and teams will have to really innovate to be competitive.
With three teams on each side and pretty limited scoring possibilities, design, reliability, scouting, collaboration and strategy will all be critical. New teams will have fun competing with a functional robot and veteran teams will have to get off their laurels and find an edge. I think it's going to be a great year.
Let's say you cash in $1,000,000 in options, which get taxed like income, so you give up a bit over 38%. So now you've got $620,000. Let's pretend you have no debt and invest the money well, making 3% after taxes and inflation (which is pretty hard to do reliably over the long term). That's $18,600 per year to live comfortably. Somehow I doubt that would do the job.
So, what would it take? $3 million, $5 million? Even that won't be enough if you don't figure out how to manage you new wealth very quickly.
Since you do have debt beyond a mortgage, that indicates you're not great at living within your means. Getting a whole pile of cash all at once is not a good way to learn money management. You're much better off to learn with live within your means before getting the big windfall, but if you can do that then you probably don't need it. Ironic, huh?
> MS Word jumped from like 2.0 to 5.1 to "catch up" with Wordperfect.
I'm sure this was intended as a joke, but it's actually correct with one slight correction.
After shipping Win Word 2.0 and Mac Word 5.1, the two teams and code bases were merged to build one product that worked on both platforms. While the Windows version of Word was only at version 2.0, it had been in development for eons, dating back before Mac Word 3.0. The Windows version had suffered significant changes in the Windows platform (it was started before Windows 3.0, if you have any idea what that means), as well as an overly ambitious feature set. Along the way, they integrated all of the great stuff from the Mac version, like tables and page view, both innovative in their time. When Win Word 1.0 came out, it had everything that Mac Word 4.0 had, plus lots of other stuff, most significantly a macro language and fields (which do automated numbering, math equations, forms, etc).
Mac Word 5.0 and Win Word 2.0 were upgrades to those code bases: smaller releases to add a few features, respond to customer requests, and put some polish on the preceding versions. After that, the two teams and code bases were merged into one colossal effort to build a version of Word that ran on both platforms, supported the same core set of features (plus platform-specific features like DDE on Windows and Publish and Subscribe on Mac), and used the same file format. (Actually, there were two such efforts, the first got cancelled, but that's another story.) While most of the team worked on the big merge effort, smaller teams produced incremental updates for the Win and Mac versions, thus Mac Word 5.1.
As this huge project got closer to shipping, the marketing folks had to decide what to call it. Should it be Word 3.0 because there were more Windows customers than Mac customers? Or should it be Word 6.0 because that was the larger number and there had already been a Mac Word 3.0? Adding to the issue, Mac Word wasn't very well received since it shipped about a month too early and had significant bugs. Version 3.1 was a much better product, but the press continued to gripe about it for years.
The decision was finally made by the product manager after talking to someone from the press who asked, "why would I want to by Word 3 when I can buy WordPerfect 5?" This clown was serious, and since idiots from the press play a huge role in forming customers' impression of products, the decision was made to pander to the dorks who think the merits of a product can be summed up in a single-digit version number. This amp goes to eleven.
So the first release of the cross-platform version of Word was called version 6.0 because Microsoft had good reason to fear that reviewers would look at the version numbers for WordPerfect and Word and conclude that since 5 is greater than 3, WordPerfect must be better so that should be the conclusion of the review.
A little over two years ago I ended my caffeine addiction of over 20 years pretty much by accident. I had a nasty cold/flu and drinking Coke just wasn't appealing. After a week of being miserable with the cold, I realized that I had gone a the entire time without any caffeine with no (additional) symptoms. So, I decided that was my golden opportunity to kick the habit without dealing with annoying withdrawal symptoms.
I haven't had a Coke or other significant caffeine since. I feel better, sleep better, and can power through late nights just as well as I did when I thought caffeine was helping me stay awake.
Before that I had tried several times to quit, unsuccessfully. Finally, I had solemnly resolved to give up trying to give up caffeine. I'm glad to have broken that vow.
This has never been done before. Any time we wander into the unknown, we are likely to be surprised and learn something unexpected. Historically, this has proven to be very productive.
In this case specifically, it's interesting because we're collecting information and material from a new type of solar system object, one of very few that are within easy reach. There are theories based on indirect observations which suggest what will be found. Comparing what is found to what was predicted will help to test and refine (or invalidate) those theories.
There are good reasons to believe that comets are leftover raw material from the formation of our solar system, objects which did not get gobbled up by larger objects and have spent most of their time since those early days orbiting out beyond Pluto's orbit. Then some chance encounter in the frigid boondocks of the outer solar system bent their orbit in toward the inner solar system.
So, the Stardust probe is hopefully collecting a sample of pre-solar system material that's been in deep freeze storage for 4 or 5 billion years. That material is believed to be composed at least partly of fragments blown off from stellar explosions even farther back in time. It is literally star dust. This is an opportunity to get our hands on material that may be the same stuff that the Hubble and other telescopes look at from across light-years of space, all without leaving the neighborhood.
No one knows what we'll find, but it's bound to be interesting, adding another piece to our understanding of the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually the statement is that the Leaf is the first mass market freeway capable electric car.
The first electric cars came out a hundred years ago, predating the gasoline-powered cars that became dominant in the early 1900s.
The GM EV1, the Toyota RAV4-EV, the Honda EV Plus, etc., were built in small numbers to satisfy California's zero emissions mandate from 1987 to 2003.
More recently, Tesla Motors has been selling the high performance all-electric Tesla Roadster, but one could argue that, like Ferraris, those aren't mass market because of the high cost of supercar performance.
I was at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission meeting in Olympia, Washington on the subject of electric vehicle infrastructure last month. None of the utilities represented there expressed any concern about either short term or long term problems caused by electric vehicles. The ramp-up is going to be very slow, permits for charging stations will give them advanced warning on neighborhood clumping, and we'll have decades to build the capacity required as EVs become a significant load on the grid.
The Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt each pull 3.3 kW maximum. Compare that to a hairdryer that pulls about 2 kW or an air conditioner that pulls 2.5 kW.
People who want to worry about this problem like to note that it takes 8 hours to charge a Leaf, but that exaggerates the load. Driving a mile in an EV uses about 320 Wh, wall-to-wheel. Most Americans drive under 40 miles per day, or about 12.8 kWh, so the average charge will be well below half of the maximum charge. It's analogous to a gas car: just because your tank holds 20 gallons doesn't mean you burn 20 gallons every day.
Unlike air conditioners that add to the peak load, EVs can be charged overnight. All of the EVs coming to the market have timers integrated into the charging controls, so it's trivial to plug in when you get home but not charge until later at night.
Building out the required long-term infrastructure will allow us to keep hundreds of billions of dollars per year in our local economies instead of sending those dollars overseas.
The Green Car Reports article linked in the original post mentions a baseline of 300 million cars in the US. The study summary referenced examines several scenarios of plug-in hybrid market penetration of 20% to 80% of new vehicles by 2050. That's 60 to 240 million vehicles with today's numbers, and presumably a lot more with population growth by 2050.
A 2006 DOE study (summary) found that there is enough off-peak excess capacity in our grid today to switch 70% (about 217 million) of all light-duty vehicles to plug-in hybrids with a 33-mile range (which is enough to cover most people's daily driving) without any need to add power plants. The study makes a number of assumptions, like everyone charges off-peak, but the upshot is clear: our grid already has plenty of capacity for overnight charging.
With the most optimistic view of EV and PHEV production rates for the next five years, there aren't going to be enough to cause any problems with the grid. As market share grows, financial incentives (time-of-use metering) and smart grid infrastructure can be put in place to make sure the majority of EV charging is done off-peak.
Basically they are saying "Electric cars wont bring down the grid -- if they aren't widely adopted". What if, instead of half a million, there's 10-30 million?
The study said 200 million cars, but even a half million isn't going to happen this year or next. Nissan is going to make a few tens of thousands of Leafs over the next two years, and then as much as 140,000 per year (worldwide) starting in 2012. GM is going to start with 10,000 Volts per year and bump that up to 30,000 in 2010. Tesla might be producing 20,000 to 50,000 per year by late 2012.
There's just no way we're going to get anywhere near one tenth the number of cars the study considered in the next five years. The utilities are already planning for EVs today with just a thousand Tesla Roadsters, 900 RAV4-EVs, and a few thousand one-off conversions. The utilities have lots of time to make any adjustments needed to power EVs and provide incentives to encourage off-peak charging.
To all the dorks who misread the post and expected something different: get over it. It says played on a heat sink not played with the fan.
I think it's pretty creative and well done for a 37-second YouTube video.
Generally speaking, when you contribute to a charity, they send you a letter documenting your gift, including a statement as to the fair market value of any goods or services received. Generally, things are pretty loose when you're getting something that can't be purchased. For example, if your donation gets you a special behind-the-scenes tour that's not for sale to the public, there's no value associated with that.
One possible approach to this would be these things are junk with no value, so the cost is pure donation. Another approach is that the FMV of the items is the winning bid, the buyer gets no charitable deduction, and Slashdot gets a deduction for donating the full sales price.
So, what's the plan on this? Can the Slashdot folks comment on whether they'll send out appropriate acknowledgment letters with pre-determined FMV statements?
"A unique story on the CBC website details an even more unusual conflict."
How can something happen and be more unusual than unique? There aren't that many integers between 0 and 1.
> Yes, the Tesla is also 98k+. Toyota is not interested in making
> a car that only Jay Leno can afford.
The Tesla Roadster is the starting point, not the final goal. They are making their first car a high-end sports car because they can compete in that market with a low-volume pure electric vehicle.
Their next vehicle will be a sports sedan produced in higher volumes, and built in the US, for introduction in 2009. Their next vehicle will be even lower price and higher volume.
It's difficult to create a car company from scratch. It's a complex business and has to be both high volume and incredibly efficient to compete with the big car makers. That sort of business doesn't get built overnight, or even in just a couple of years.
Tesla in on the right track. While the big car makers are wasting time fooling around with hybrid cars that have no range because they carry around a heavy gas engine, Tesla is showing that a pure electric can built with a great driving range, way more than you need for anything less than an interstate road trip.
I can't wait to get a pure electric vehicle for many reasons.
- Much better power plant to road efficiency, with far less pollution than a gas engine.
- No more wasted time making trips to the gas station. Just like a cell phone, you plug it in at night and it's charged in the morning.
- By charging overnight, you leverage otherwise unused power plant capacity.
- No more oil changes. No muffler replacements. No timing belt. The only regular maintenance will be tires and brakes, and the brakes last longer because of regenerative braking.
- No waiting for the engine to warm up so the heater will work.
Just because there's no SDK today doesn't mean there won't be one later this year.
> With the iPod they arrived "fashionably late", well before the
> party was going, but not until they knew it was going to be a good party.
Really? Is that what people said? "Oh, gee, the iPod is here to make money on this market that's going through the roof."
I remember it being more like, "Apple has no idea what they're doing. No one wants an expensive, heavy harddrive-based iPod when they can buy a cheaper, lighter flash-based device with a horrible interface."
The iPod *created* the mainstream MP3 player market. Before the iPod it was just nerds who owned the darn things. Now the nerds and their grandparents own iPods.
So don't tell me Apple's late to the party. We won't know how the party's going until the guest of honor shows up.
I'm not sure I'll buy an iPhone, but I also didn't rush out a buy the first iPod either. Now I'm on my third iPod and I use it for things I hadn't even thought of when the first one came out. The same thing may very well happen with the iPhone, but no one will know until lots of people have had some time actually using it.
I tried the first vulnerability on my 10.4.9 machine, current with the latest security updates, and the only app listed is Safari.
Maybe that one is fixed?
I hate to disappoint you, but Simonyi isn't the guy that has earned your ire. You want the idiot (or collection of idiots) that took Simonyi's good idea, mangled it into something useless, then made the whole mess visible to the entire world of Windows programmers.
Actual Hungarian doesn't tag variables with their implementation type (16-bit signed int, 32-bit signed int, etc.), but rather their semantic meaning. Hungarian is to programming what labeling quantities is to physics. It doesn't make sense to add a meter-per-second measurement to a temperature reading; correct Hungarian labels variables by their meaning and makes analogous programming errors equally apparent.
For example, if FOO is a struct, then a pointer to a single instance of a FOO, a pointer to an array of FOOs and the identifier of the local storage of an array of FOOs are all of type "FOO *", but Hungarian makes it obvious which is which.
FOO *pfoo; // a pointer to a single FOO // a pointer to an array of FOOs // storage for an array of FOOs
FOO *pafoo;
FOO afoo[12];
These lines of code are all syntactically correct but nonsense semantically.
pfoo[3].field = value; // NO! you just trashed memory // Nope, that's the size of a pointer // this might be correct, but probably not
size_of_array = sizeof(pafoo);
afoo->field = value;
If you want to know what real Hungarian is, as opposed to the abomination exposed through the Windows header files, try reading about the Hungarian naming convention as conceived and used by Charles, somewhat evolved from his original PhD thesis.
In the 90's, a bit after Apple released the Newton, I saw a demo by the handwriting recognition team at Microsoft. They were very proud of their work, which they promised would be much better than Apple's. As part of the demo, the presenter wrote "Windows Rules" on the tablet, which the software recognized as "Windows Pales". That got a pretty embarrassing round of laughter considering it was an internal demo.
To be fair, I'll throw in a more recent Apple story. I ordered a Mac Book Pro the day they were announced, and when it arrived it had the now famous squeal. I called Apple's 800 number and endured the automated voice menu:
Apple Robot: "Say the name of the product you are calling about."
Me: "Mac Book Pro"
Apple Robot: "Did you say Apple Cinema Display?"
Me: "No"
Apple Robot: "I'm sorry. Please say the name of the product you are calling about"
Me: "Mac Book Pro"
Apple Robot: "Did you say Unix?"
I got one of the very first shipping units, so they obviously hadn't added "Mac Book Pro" to the known list of products yet, but it was hysterical how far away the nearest matches were.
Any rate that decays continuously with a half-life can be described by a function of the form C*e^(-kt) where t is time, C is the initial rate (at t = 0), and the constant k = ln(2)/(half life), with half-life measured in the same units as time.
A power law relationship is something of the form y = A*t^k, which cannot be used to model a rate with a half life, since the time to reduce the rate by half depends on where you start, and increases as time increases.
Also any exponential function (with negative k) eventually decays faster than any power law function. The power law can start decaying faster, but since the half life will increase with time, the exponential function with a constant half-life will always eventually get under it. (L'Hospital's rule is your friend.)
So to say that something that can be described with a half life follows a power law rather than a exponential function, and decays faster than an exponential function, indicates a complete ignorance of the methematical terms. This also calls into question the validity of everything else the article says.
Sending music over data lines to self-powered speakers isn't new. Meridian has been doing it for at least 10 years. They don't use TCP/IP, but it's the same idea.
This year is going to be incredible. For every thing they've made easier, there are a dozen other things that are still hard, both in hardware and software.
No one used the IR sensors last year because they were useless; too many sources of IR noise and reflections that are literally invisible and there were better ways to find the posts in autonomous mode. The CMUCam is much more interesting and useful. If you don't like, don't use it, but don't complain because they gave us something better this year.
FIRST has made it easier for every team to field a functional robot with an autonomous mode, which means the competition is going to be tough and teams will have to really innovate to be competitive.
With three teams on each side and pretty limited scoring possibilities, design, reliability, scouting, collaboration and strategy will all be critical. New teams will have fun competing with a functional robot and veteran teams will have to get off their laurels and find an edge. I think it's going to be a great year.
Go team 1318!
There are a couple of easy improvements that can be made to Mr. Litt's program that I haven't seen mentioned.
When removing multiples of a new prime p, you don't need to test the even multiples of p, 2 already did that for you. This cuts your work in half.
Although less asymptotically beneficial, you can start with p^2 since the lower multiples of p have already been done in previous passes.
Let's say you cash in $1,000,000 in options, which get taxed like income, so you give up a bit over 38%. So now you've got $620,000. Let's pretend you have no debt and invest the money well, making 3% after taxes and inflation (which is pretty hard to do reliably over the long term). That's $18,600 per year to live comfortably. Somehow I doubt that would do the job.
So, what would it take? $3 million, $5 million? Even that won't be enough if you don't figure out how to manage you new wealth very quickly.
Since you do have debt beyond a mortgage, that indicates you're not great at living within your means. Getting a whole pile of cash all at once is not a good way to learn money management. You're much better off to learn with live within your means before getting the big windfall, but if you can do that then you probably don't need it. Ironic, huh?
> MS Word jumped from like 2.0 to 5.1 to "catch up" with Wordperfect.
I'm sure this was intended as a joke, but it's actually correct with one slight correction.
After shipping Win Word 2.0 and Mac Word 5.1, the two teams and code bases were merged to build one product that worked on both platforms. While the Windows version of Word was only at version 2.0, it had been in development for eons, dating back before Mac Word 3.0. The Windows version had suffered significant changes in the Windows platform (it was started before Windows 3.0, if you have any idea what that means), as well as an overly ambitious feature set. Along the way, they integrated all of the great stuff from the Mac version, like tables and page view, both innovative in their time. When Win Word 1.0 came out, it had everything that Mac Word 4.0 had, plus lots of other stuff, most significantly a macro language and fields (which do automated numbering, math equations, forms, etc).
Mac Word 5.0 and Win Word 2.0 were upgrades to those code bases: smaller releases to add a few features, respond to customer requests, and put some polish on the preceding versions. After that, the two teams and code bases were merged into one colossal effort to build a version of Word that ran on both platforms, supported the same core set of features (plus platform-specific features like DDE on Windows and Publish and Subscribe on Mac), and used the same file format. (Actually, there were two such efforts, the first got cancelled, but that's another story.) While most of the team worked on the big merge effort, smaller teams produced incremental updates for the Win and Mac versions, thus Mac Word 5.1.
As this huge project got closer to shipping, the marketing folks had to decide what to call it. Should it be Word 3.0 because there were more Windows customers than Mac customers? Or should it be Word 6.0 because that was the larger number and there had already been a Mac Word 3.0? Adding to the issue, Mac Word wasn't very well received since it shipped about a month too early and had significant bugs. Version 3.1 was a much better product, but the press continued to gripe about it for years.
The decision was finally made by the product manager after talking to someone from the press who asked, "why would I want to by Word 3 when I can buy WordPerfect 5?" This clown was serious, and since idiots from the press play a huge role in forming customers' impression of products, the decision was made to pander to the dorks who think the merits of a product can be summed up in a single-digit version number. This amp goes to eleven.
So the first release of the cross-platform version of Word was called version 6.0 because Microsoft had good reason to fear that reviewers would look at the version numbers for WordPerfect and Word and conclude that since 5 is greater than 3, WordPerfect must be better so that should be the conclusion of the review.
A little over two years ago I ended my caffeine addiction of over 20 years pretty much by accident. I had a nasty cold/flu and drinking Coke just wasn't appealing. After a week of being miserable with the cold, I realized that I had gone a the entire time without any caffeine with no (additional) symptoms. So, I decided that was my golden opportunity to kick the habit without dealing with annoying withdrawal symptoms.
I haven't had a Coke or other significant caffeine since. I feel better, sleep better, and can power through late nights just as well as I did when I thought caffeine was helping me stay awake.
Before that I had tried several times to quit, unsuccessfully. Finally, I had solemnly resolved to give up trying to give up caffeine. I'm glad to have broken that vow.
This has never been done before. Any time we wander into the unknown, we are likely to be surprised and learn something unexpected. Historically, this has proven to be very productive.
In this case specifically, it's interesting because we're collecting information and material from a new type of solar system object, one of very few that are within easy reach. There are theories based on indirect observations which suggest what will be found. Comparing what is found to what was predicted will help to test and refine (or invalidate) those theories.
There are good reasons to believe that comets are leftover raw material from the formation of our solar system, objects which did not get gobbled up by larger objects and have spent most of their time since those early days orbiting out beyond Pluto's orbit. Then some chance encounter in the frigid boondocks of the outer solar system bent their orbit in toward the inner solar system.
So, the Stardust probe is hopefully collecting a sample of pre-solar system material that's been in deep freeze storage for 4 or 5 billion years. That material is believed to be composed at least partly of fragments blown off from stellar explosions even farther back in time. It is literally star dust. This is an opportunity to get our hands on material that may be the same stuff that the Hubble and other telescopes look at from across light-years of space, all without leaving the neighborhood.
No one knows what we'll find, but it's bound to be interesting, adding another piece to our understanding of the universe.