I should mention I neglected to include the energy loss from the acceleration and from any inclines, so really not all of the energy losses are from frictional forces...
I don't actually know as much about the ICE side of things, but it's quite likely that electric motors have a much different efficiency curve. Most motors don't really vary that much in efficiency at sufficiently high RPM levels. So your energy losses are going to be from all of the external frictional forces (drag and rolling resistance, which depend on the cube and square of velocity, respectively). So in general, going faster causes more external energy loss per distance traveled. To get the total loss from your storage, though, you'd have to divide by the efficiency of the engine or motor. If the engine's efficiency increased significantly by traveling at a higher speed, it's plausible that you actually consume less fuel when you're driving faster.
I feel like it makes me want to mod the console more, though, because the added features are usually half-baked. On the video end, you never get all the codecs you want supported, for example.
I think price was probably the largest setback for the PS3 on the consumer end. It just doesn't make sense to plan for a 10 year cycle on a console. What Sony did was make price sacrifices to appear to have a small advantage in power. This is a bad idea for two reasons.
First, computer components become more powerful and cheaper to build way too fast. You know what happened in 10 years on the CPU side? In 1997, Intel released the Pentium II; you wouldn't still use that to play modern games, would you?
Secondly, while some of the population has the privilege of choosing the most powerful console and will do so without regard to price, most are price conscious. The leap in Sony's pricing narrowed the scope of their market. Not as many people can afford it.
In short, Sony made a foolish move and forgot the basics of console market strategy. They're paying for it now.
The Wii, on the other hand, appears revolutionary and is priced affordably. It's unfortunate that its new control scheme is a little half-baked, but I guess you can't expect the first attempt to be perfect. Hopefully the Wii+1 will properly use trilateration (needs three noncollinear infrared sources, not two) to find the position of the Wiimote and not have this indirect pointing nonsense.
Hmph. If Kotaku's article is to be believed, Nintendo had plenty of room to include DVD functionality in their current price point. I understand the Wii was a bit of a riskier investment, but still... I think the idea that DVD functionality needed to significantly impact price is ridiculous.
Please read the GUIDELINES. It is not just about making a 100 MPG car. That is not difficult at all (I've done so with a team at MIT myself). VW 1 liter car fails it! Gah...
That's just the spec on the headline -- there's far more to it than that. The car must be at a cost that the market will support (a demand of at least 10,000 vehicles annually). The cost of batteries is probably the largest problem to a marketable pure EV (that, the general stigma over battery reliability, and charging times -- some of the newer batteries do bring the latter down, though).
It doesn't meet the requirements. The 1 litre car (at 6.3 kW) doesn't have nearly the output necessary to achieve 100 kph in 12 seconds. The idea is to make a vehicle that performs to bare minimum American standards and have it be marketable. It's not quite as simple as it sounds.
They're still working on the details, but a draft of the requirements is up. The conveniences you have listed aren't exactly required, but they have a sort of catch-all where its cost and features have to permit sales of 10,000 per year. I have no idea how exactly they'll evaluate that, though.
So I was feeling really happy that Nintendo was doing well, given their maxim (all about gameplay and fun, not graphics). But has anyone else been a little disappointed with the lineup of games? I'm excluding a few Nintendo titles here, but it feels like the vast majority of the games have been less-than-stellar ports or mini-game compilations. While mini-games can be really fun, I also want a rich experience from more complex games.
In Perrin Kaplan's recent GameDaily interview, she was asked about Nintendo's anemic Q1 lineup, a question which she simply responded that the 27 products they have going from January to June are awesome. She insists that Nintendo is competing for a different market, and I'm starting to believe her.
Something else that bugs me... the Wiimote isn't quite what is was hyped up to be. There is a little lag (at least in Wii Sports and Wii Play) between my movements and the response on screen; it's very small, but it felt a little annoying when the tennis racket only began swinging a little after I began. Also, it would be nice if the Wiimote actually pointed on screen where you pointed -- this would require some level of calibration, I suppose, since television sizes vary. I imagine this is even more difficult to deal with since the Wiimote only has two reference points for its calculations -- not the three that are necessary to yield the three coordinates in space. But this is why they market they Wiimote as detecting motion in 3D space, rather than position. It then probably gets the relative position by integration. I wonder if the lag would be reduced further by having a third point and eliminating the integration calculation (though I guess games would still be interested in your projected position anyway, so perhaps it wouldn't actually eliminate it).
Anyway, kudos to Nintendo for the sales, but I hope there is more in store for the core gamer soon.
Or they could make it the default option and charge more for any of the other office suites. Then you'll have no idea how much they're charging (unless there's an option for no office suite).
Well, a price cut could help the system sell faster, which may bring in more revenue from software sales. Besides, if the analysts are to be believed, Microsoft is making money on at least their premium version. The transition to the 65 nm manufacturing process ought to bring costs down further, making it more tempting to cut the price if they think they could achieve more profit in the long run. Personally, I'm hoping a price cut comes soon because I won't buy one until the first cut. If a large number of others feel that way, it could be in Microsoft's interests to cut the price with the new process.
I guess I figured that an integrated solution of CPU/GPU might be more asymmetric than the Cell and then have more problems with yield, but after thinking about how a G80 looks and works, I'm probably quite wrong there. If you started adding more flavors of specialized units, though, cost might become an issue again.
Electronic News: What's the defining factor that makes some chips better than others?
Reeves: Defects. It becomes a bigger problem the bigger the chip is. With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you're lucky to get 10 or 20 percent.
The difference between that company and A123 is that A123 actually has a product. The teams at the MIT Vehicle Design Summit used ones with cosmetic defects in an electric-assisted human-powered vehicle, a fuel cell car, and a battery-powered electric car (single-seater, unfortunately... but I wasn't in charge of how high the goals were set). They don't have the same levels of specific energy nor energy density as standard Li-Ion batteries, but they don't have the same level of dangers (esp. with fires and explosions) and have that nice, fast standard charge current.
The range you want can be achieved at the cost of a lot of weight, but really, 30-40 miles is very low. The Tesla Roadster isn't really the very best design, but it has a 250 mile range (note: it uses standard Li-Ion batteries, not A123's -- the weight would be significantly higher for the same capacity from A123). I'd hold off on converting, though. It's an extremely expensive endeavor, as the batteries have enthusiast-level prices, and the lowered capacity is a little too significant. Hopefully, the next round of battery technology will solve this issue, as I don't see fuel cells becoming viable anytime soon (extreme price issues for those, not related to economies of scale, plus the system --generation of hydrogen to exhaust-- isn't nearly as efficient).
And since I'm on the subject of replacing gasoline, anyone that thinks biofuels can do more than substitute out a little portion of oil dependence is a fool. I'm sure the farmers would love to have increased demand for their corn (or maybe they'd like to grow switchgrass, which is much better for biofuel production), but there's just not enough land to grow the crops to satisfy the energy demand. Unless you're living in Brazil or a similar type of country, it isn't going to work. It's just a stopgap solution.
Everyone who wanted one and was already looking for an email account has one. However, that doesn't include all the people (particularly teenagers) that decide they need an email account of their own now. They'll probably turn to the place they've grown up using for search, Google. And now it's easy to get an account on a whim.
I disagree. Well-made RPGs do evoke emotion (provided you're paying attention to the plot and characters and not stupid leveling) for the same reasons that a book or movie may.
Oh, here, I'll pinch you. The web services corporations combined probably have more money to throw in. So you see... the other corporate mongers won this time.;-)
Re:Parent is wrong, not insightful
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
While the parent is clearly misinformed, I think the point was that Apple's level of "system integration" gives consumers much less flexibility. With regard to graphics cards, the Apple consumer has much fewer choices and paths for upgrade (as far as I know--I'm not sure how drivers and support go for Macs).
On the cost topic, it's debatable whether Dells or Apples cost more because people don't seem to agree on what components are actually similar or how to compensate for differences in offerings. However, Apple makes their computers very expensive by not providing much choice for the CPU. They tend to offer only the much more expensive chips, which offer only modest gains in performance. Another way to think about prices is how much something costs to get what you need, and in that regard, Apple tends to be much more expensive for the typical consumer.
Yeah... so of course if we change where we get our energy, we're going to need to update the infrastructure. It's not something that can happen instantly. Thankfully, consumers are pretty conservative about this type of thing, so who cares?
You could conceivably store a large amount of energy (take a good portion of the excess from off peak hours) in a SMES or batteries. Then, it could dump charge and recharge as demand came and went.
Slashdot Mirror
I should mention I neglected to include the energy loss from the acceleration and from any inclines, so really not all of the energy losses are from frictional forces...
I don't actually know as much about the ICE side of things, but it's quite likely that electric motors have a much different efficiency curve. Most motors don't really vary that much in efficiency at sufficiently high RPM levels. So your energy losses are going to be from all of the external frictional forces (drag and rolling resistance, which depend on the cube and square of velocity, respectively). So in general, going faster causes more external energy loss per distance traveled. To get the total loss from your storage, though, you'd have to divide by the efficiency of the engine or motor. If the engine's efficiency increased significantly by traveling at a higher speed, it's plausible that you actually consume less fuel when you're driving faster.
I feel like it makes me want to mod the console more, though, because the added features are usually half-baked. On the video end, you never get all the codecs you want supported, for example.
First, computer components become more powerful and cheaper to build way too fast. You know what happened in 10 years on the CPU side? In 1997, Intel released the Pentium II; you wouldn't still use that to play modern games, would you?
Secondly, while some of the population has the privilege of choosing the most powerful console and will do so without regard to price, most are price conscious. The leap in Sony's pricing narrowed the scope of their market. Not as many people can afford it.
In short, Sony made a foolish move and forgot the basics of console market strategy. They're paying for it now.
The Wii, on the other hand, appears revolutionary and is priced affordably. It's unfortunate that its new control scheme is a little half-baked, but I guess you can't expect the first attempt to be perfect. Hopefully the Wii+1 will properly use trilateration (needs three noncollinear infrared sources, not two) to find the position of the Wiimote and not have this indirect pointing nonsense.
Hmph. If Kotaku's article is to be believed, Nintendo had plenty of room to include DVD functionality in their current price point. I understand the Wii was a bit of a riskier investment, but still... I think the idea that DVD functionality needed to significantly impact price is ridiculous.
Please read the GUIDELINES. It is not just about making a 100 MPG car. That is not difficult at all (I've done so with a team at MIT myself). VW 1 liter car fails it! Gah...
That's just the spec on the headline -- there's far more to it than that. The car must be at a cost that the market will support (a demand of at least 10,000 vehicles annually). The cost of batteries is probably the largest problem to a marketable pure EV (that, the general stigma over battery reliability, and charging times -- some of the newer batteries do bring the latter down, though).
It doesn't meet the requirements. The 1 litre car (at 6.3 kW) doesn't have nearly the output necessary to achieve 100 kph in 12 seconds. The idea is to make a vehicle that performs to bare minimum American standards and have it be marketable. It's not quite as simple as it sounds.
They're still working on the details, but a draft of the requirements is up. The conveniences you have listed aren't exactly required, but they have a sort of catch-all where its cost and features have to permit sales of 10,000 per year. I have no idea how exactly they'll evaluate that, though.
So I was feeling really happy that Nintendo was doing well, given their maxim (all about gameplay and fun, not graphics). But has anyone else been a little disappointed with the lineup of games? I'm excluding a few Nintendo titles here, but it feels like the vast majority of the games have been less-than-stellar ports or mini-game compilations. While mini-games can be really fun, I also want a rich experience from more complex games.
In Perrin Kaplan's recent GameDaily interview, she was asked about Nintendo's anemic Q1 lineup, a question which she simply responded that the 27 products they have going from January to June are awesome. She insists that Nintendo is competing for a different market, and I'm starting to believe her.
Something else that bugs me... the Wiimote isn't quite what is was hyped up to be. There is a little lag (at least in Wii Sports and Wii Play) between my movements and the response on screen; it's very small, but it felt a little annoying when the tennis racket only began swinging a little after I began. Also, it would be nice if the Wiimote actually pointed on screen where you pointed -- this would require some level of calibration, I suppose, since television sizes vary. I imagine this is even more difficult to deal with since the Wiimote only has two reference points for its calculations -- not the three that are necessary to yield the three coordinates in space. But this is why they market they Wiimote as detecting motion in 3D space, rather than position. It then probably gets the relative position by integration. I wonder if the lag would be reduced further by having a third point and eliminating the integration calculation (though I guess games would still be interested in your projected position anyway, so perhaps it wouldn't actually eliminate it).
Anyway, kudos to Nintendo for the sales, but I hope there is more in store for the core gamer soon.
It's not the best of interfaces, but Ubuntu has some level of specification of hardware support on their wiki.
Or they could make it the default option and charge more for any of the other office suites. Then you'll have no idea how much they're charging (unless there's an option for no office suite).
Well, a price cut could help the system sell faster, which may bring in more revenue from software sales. Besides, if the analysts are to be believed, Microsoft is making money on at least their premium version. The transition to the 65 nm manufacturing process ought to bring costs down further, making it more tempting to cut the price if they think they could achieve more profit in the long run. Personally, I'm hoping a price cut comes soon because I won't buy one until the first cut. If a large number of others feel that way, it could be in Microsoft's interests to cut the price with the new process.
It doesn't have to be Dell, but having the support of perhaps the largest consumer PC vendor is a plus.
I guess I figured that an integrated solution of CPU/GPU might be more asymmetric than the Cell and then have more problems with yield, but after thinking about how a G80 looks and works, I'm probably quite wrong there. If you started adding more flavors of specialized units, though, cost might become an issue again.
Electronic News: What's the defining factor that makes some chips better than others?
Reeves: Defects. It becomes a bigger problem the bigger the chip is. With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you're lucky to get 10 or 20 percent.
Source
Sounds like a good idea for the mass market to me...
Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage? (SMES, for short!)
The difference between that company and A123 is that A123 actually has a product. The teams at the MIT Vehicle Design Summit used ones with cosmetic defects in an electric-assisted human-powered vehicle, a fuel cell car, and a battery-powered electric car (single-seater, unfortunately... but I wasn't in charge of how high the goals were set). They don't have the same levels of specific energy nor energy density as standard Li-Ion batteries, but they don't have the same level of dangers (esp. with fires and explosions) and have that nice, fast standard charge current.
The range you want can be achieved at the cost of a lot of weight, but really, 30-40 miles is very low. The Tesla Roadster isn't really the very best design, but it has a 250 mile range (note: it uses standard Li-Ion batteries, not A123's -- the weight would be significantly higher for the same capacity from A123). I'd hold off on converting, though. It's an extremely expensive endeavor, as the batteries have enthusiast-level prices, and the lowered capacity is a little too significant. Hopefully, the next round of battery technology will solve this issue, as I don't see fuel cells becoming viable anytime soon (extreme price issues for those, not related to economies of scale, plus the system --generation of hydrogen to exhaust-- isn't nearly as efficient).
And since I'm on the subject of replacing gasoline, anyone that thinks biofuels can do more than substitute out a little portion of oil dependence is a fool. I'm sure the farmers would love to have increased demand for their corn (or maybe they'd like to grow switchgrass, which is much better for biofuel production), but there's just not enough land to grow the crops to satisfy the energy demand. Unless you're living in Brazil or a similar type of country, it isn't going to work. It's just a stopgap solution.
Everyone who wanted one and was already looking for an email account has one. However, that doesn't include all the people (particularly teenagers) that decide they need an email account of their own now. They'll probably turn to the place they've grown up using for search, Google. And now it's easy to get an account on a whim.
Isn't Windows Home Server supposed to be their product to accomodate this change? It sounds like they might be getting that.
However, I'd keep with Linux anyway. If a free OS does the job well for you, why change?
I disagree. Well-made RPGs do evoke emotion (provided you're paying attention to the plot and characters and not stupid leveling) for the same reasons that a book or movie may.
Oh, here, I'll pinch you. The web services corporations combined probably have more money to throw in. So you see... the other corporate mongers won this time. ;-)
On the cost topic, it's debatable whether Dells or Apples cost more because people don't seem to agree on what components are actually similar or how to compensate for differences in offerings. However, Apple makes their computers very expensive by not providing much choice for the CPU. They tend to offer only the much more expensive chips, which offer only modest gains in performance. Another way to think about prices is how much something costs to get what you need, and in that regard, Apple tends to be much more expensive for the typical consumer.
Yeah... so of course if we change where we get our energy, we're going to need to update the infrastructure. It's not something that can happen instantly. Thankfully, consumers are pretty conservative about this type of thing, so who cares?
You could conceivably store a large amount of energy (take a good portion of the excess from off peak hours) in a SMES or batteries. Then, it could dump charge and recharge as demand came and went.