You're not the only one. If I was spending $70 million on a home, it'd look nothing like that. It'd probably be a good deal smaller, or if it was the same number of overall square feet, it'd probably be more subdivided. To me, a room for a given purpose has an optimal size. If the room is too small for that purpose, it's not going to work great, but also if the room is too big for that purpose, it will also not work great.

I'd probably focus less on strange decorations (some ornamental motorcycle? A wall of candy?) and more on practical stuff, like going whole hog on expensive home automation. To me, luxury involves making something easier to use or more functional (like electronically tinting windows or a Washlet toilet), or more comfortable (like a nice mattress or a good carpet), or making it look nicer (like a nice wood finish)... not stuff whose sole purpose is to look expensive. I want something to look luxurious and pleasing, not expensive.

Gas stations currently have no involvement in Tesla's charging infrastructure. I believe the prototype battery swap station is inside a converted gas station carwash, but that's probably more because it's a prototype that isn't fully automated than any indication of what a final fully automated station would look like. Further, I highly doubt that the gas station next to the prototype swap station has any involvement in it beyond providing the land and/or structure.

The space required for battery storage would be non-negligible, but they don't take up very much space, considering they're thin and can be stacked (you'd expect them to go on racks) The original goal was also for the system to be fully automated, minimizing labour costs, and the total number of batteries at a station would never change since any swap would result in a new battery being deposited. While occasional trips by Tesla to replace batteries might be required, they'd be rare, only happening when a given station accumulated a sufficiently large number of defunct batteries. Normally it would take years for a battery to reach that state.

The problem currently is that the prototype system isn't fully automated, and isn't as space-efficient as an automated system would be, hence why they put it in a carwash.

No, they're not. Sony's annual revenue is $64.7 billion USD. North Korea's GDP is $12.4 billion USD. Sony's market capitalization is also larger than North Korea's entire economy. The drop in Sony's stock value after the hack was roughly a quarter of North Korea's GDP, although the stock has since recovered somewhat.

Sony is far larger than North Korea, economically.

And if Tesla said something about battery swaps to their customers that was credible, the news would spread, starting most likely with their own discussion forums. Besides that, I'd dispute that Tesla owners are really getting any sort of inside info, particularly since all the Tesla owners that you know appear to be wrong on this subject.

I work for a large annual convention, and at our most recent event we took our first baby steps into using pallets. We got a bunch of plastic pallets and a pallet jack to move them.

For us, it's about doing our load-in and load-out at the venue quickly. Before, we'd have one or two trucks doing the rounds between our storage space and the venue. The trucks would arrive, and then we'd load everything into the trucks one piece at a time (using boxes, at least), and then the trucks would go off and we'd sit on the loading dock waiting for them to return. With pallets, the trucks arrive, we stick the pallets in with the pallet jack, the trucks (very quickly leave), and then while waiting for the truck to return we're loading stuff onto pallets and wrapping it for the next truck. By the time the truck has returned, the pallets are ready to load.

We're not fully converted to using pallets, but the first steps have already shown us how much extra speed we can get out of them, mostly just by letting our people work on loading the trucks before the trucks even get to the dock.

There are dozens of languages that compile to the .NET CLI, including BASIC, C++, Ruby, PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python, Lisp, Pascal, Perl, Scheme, etc. C# is the most popular language to compile to the CLI, yes, but almost any other common language out there can be used too.

I'm not sure. The additional armour that they added consisted of three components, some of which aren't located under the battery.

Sort of: they're in a flat pack (kind of like a big skateboard) that is bolted to the bottom of the car. The battery pack does give the car a good deal of structural support and rigidity, but it can be removed relatively quickly and swapped out with another.

The batteries are permanently embedded in a giant battery pack that takes up most of the bottom of the car. The battery swap station is replacing that, not the individual cells inside it.

The battery stations and superchargers are meant to charge in between cities when driving between them. The assumption is that your normal charging happens at home or at your destination.

Why would Tesla owners know anything more about Tesla's future plans than anyone else?

It seems like they're going to be doing part or all of the battery swap manually, so the improvement from 3 minutes down back to the target of 90 seconds is more about getting everything automated again rather than simply improving the process. It's not practical to roll out large numbers of battery swap stations all over the world if they need a pit crew at each one.

From their press release, it sounds like the culprit is the additional armour that was added to the car to avoid damage to the battery packs from road debris. The original swap demonstration was fully automated, but then they went and stuck a bunch of other stuff on the underbody, invalidating their existing automation work for it.

You can buy hardware with lower-power Intel chips from NewEgg, you just can't buy the CPU by itself. It's not in your price range, but here's a Zotac mini computer for $380 (which includes the RAM and SSD): http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

They also sell numerous tablets/laptops/etc with that processor.

For an Intel motherbaord/CPU/RAM combo, you're looking at around $40 for the motherboard (all these prices from NewEgg US), $30 for 4GB of RAM, leaving you up to $130 for the processor. That puts it at an Intel i3-4360, a high-clocked dual-core Haswell part.

For AMD's part, assuming the same CPU budget, you're looking at an A10-6800K.

Right off the bat we can notice a disparity in TDP, being 54W on the Intel chip and 100W on the AMD chip.

In terms of performance, AnandTech Bench conveniently has both of those chips in their system. The benchmarks show that the Intel chip is faster (sometimes substantially) in almost every benchmark, be it single or multithreaded... And all that while using much less power.

After looking up those results, though, I realized that that AMD chip was a Richland, while there is the newer Kaveri cores available. There is also a Kaveri CPU at the same $130 pricepoint (but with a lower clockspeed/model number), the A10-7700K, with a TDP of 95W. That one is unfortunately not in Bench, but looking at other sides indicates that it manages to narrow the gap substantially, while still generally being slower than the i3 chip. But in order to do this, it uses 10W more power at idle and 26W more power at load.

Intel's got Haswell chips at decent clockspeeds down to roughly the $40 pricepoint, where I expect they'd still compete favourably with AMD. Below that is nothing, and I suspect there might be a point somewhere between $40 and $130 where AMD makes more sense.

All this said, I'm disappointed in AMD. I don't want Intel to beat them, I want AMD to put out parts that are competitive in price, performance, AND power consumption. Most of my early CPUs were AMD chips. I've owned a K6-2, a Duron, and an Athlon XP, and all were fantastic. The Athlon 64 was also great. But ever since then, AMD has been behind, and the lack of competition has certainly not helped the market. I keep hoping that AMD will put out something new that wows me, a completely new architecture that shakes things up like Conroe did for Intel or ClawHammer did for AMD. But thus far they seem to keep iterating on the same non-competitive designs.

Unfortunately, it seems like ARM is more likely than AMD to bring competition to the market as they keep slowly creeping up the TDP ladder, and we're just now starting to see them going head-to-head with Intel in the PC space with lower-end Chromebooks. nVidia's Denver core is supposed to be competitive with Haswell in terms of performance/power, but I can't find any benchmarks that directly compare them.

It's not entirely clear to me that ARM chips offer better power efficiency than Intel chips when comparing modern parts at similar performance targets. There's not traditionally been much in the way of comparison points between them, because only very recently have ARM chips and Intel chips begun overlapping in terms of power envelopes.

I'd be interested in seeing a comparison between nVidia's Denver cores (or the A15) and Intel's new Core M parts. I believe they have similar TDPs.

So, if NewEgg doesn't sell it, then Intel doesn't make it? Intel's lower power parts are packaged to be soldered directly onto the motherboards of tablets and notebooks, places where people don't replace CPUs. NewEgg doesn't sell those parts. It's also worth noting that TDP is going to be the maximum power draw, but isn't going to tell you how much power it takes to accomplish a given task. Two CPUs with the same TDP can exhibit dramatic differences in battery life in mobile products.

Your implication was that AMD offers better power efficiency than Intel chips. This is false. Intel's parts offer either substantially more performance at similar power consumption, or substantially less power consumption at similar performance. This is true from tablets through servers. But AMD is still competitive on price. This has led to them holding onto some market share, but it means that they have minimal presence in the mobile space, since power efficiency is a big deal in tablets and ultrabooks.