Of course I do, IPC has also improved significantly since then. I'm merely disputing the claim that Intel has never "overhyped technology" or "not delivered a product".

They overhyped the P4, and did not deliver on their promise of a 10GHz P4.

Intel has a lot of great products, but the assertion that thegarbz made was absurd.

I called you daft for not understanding the concept that someone who runs a swapping service station covers all costs related to their business activities and rolls them into what they charge for service, just like every other business does. I fail to see what is hard about this for you to understand. The answer to "who pays for X cost" is *always* "the service provider, with the costs indirectly passed on to their customers via the rate charged".

Really, you think that bad fuel can't damage an engine? It can and does. And it's the supplier who ultimately bears the cost. No, "bad electricity" is not a proper analogy (although your sarcasm in this regard is funny given how many devices are damaged by surges every year); a gas station fuels vehicles by insertung fuel into them, while a swapping station fuels vehicles by inserting pre-charged batteries into them. Batteries correspond to fuel in this context.

In what world do you live where car parts are regularly inspected by the manufacturer after being installed into the vehicle? Cars have hundreds if not thousands of parts more safety critical than a battery pack, and yes, manufacturers *are* liable if their failure modes due to damage pose an unreasonable risk of injury. Think of a famous failure case - say, for example, the Ford Pinto fires. Were the gas tanks defective? Nope. But the cars had an unacceptably bad failure mode in certain types of crashes, and it fell on the manufacturer to fix it - as it always does. A part must meet its use case, and if its use case is "deliver electricity from a swappable system and not burn the vehicle down if damaged", it has to contain the necessary safety systems to do that.

Lastly, you're still stuck in bizarro world where ICE vehicles full of combustible fuel are incombustible, whereas EVs with no combustable fuel and more often than not with batteries less flammable than a block of cheese (once again: *not all li-ions are the same*!) burst into flames left and right. Meanwhile, in the reality that the rest of us live in, the opposite is true. Heck, last summer I saw a flaming hulk of a passenger car with fire crews trying to put it out to extract the burned bodies of the two tourists who had been driving it. Meanwhile, Teslas and Leafs have been in many wrecks - go to Google Images and search for "crash tesla" or "crash leaf". Where are the fires from these oh-so-flammable vehicles? Yes, they have happened, but at a much lower per-vehicle rate than gasoline cars according to NTSB stats. Sorry, but your fire conceptions are just not based in reality.

On the Moon or Mars they wouldn't reach very far. But a RTG-powered version on Titan would have unlimited range (although may need to land periodically to recharge its flight batteries). And even a rocket or gas jet version would have quite significant range on an asteroid.

Such a design is obviously going to be very mission sensitive, hence the need for different propulsion systems. Some missions would benefit significantly as well from wings to allow for long distance flight on bodies with atmospheres (Venus, Titan, maybe Mars, etc). A couple worlds, such as Titan, might benefit from landing floats. And so forth. But that's where rapid prototyping tech (such as 3d printing) becomes useful - they engineer the base model and then can play around with variants with ease. Hopefully in the end they'll have a sample collector module with a workable version for almost any body in the solar system. And for the interests of science, we really need something like that, a universal adaptable drone module - to be paired with a universal adaptable ion tug module, one of a couple variants of a universal adaptable reentry / landing modules, and the same for adaptable ascent modules.

It's impressive what science can be pulled off on the surface of another world. But it's nothing compared to what we can do here on Earth with a sample return.

Everything has its trade-offs. iOS tends to have less issues with malware and reliability than other platforms, but you trade a bunch of flexibility for that. I'm willing to accept that trade-off.

In one truck, yes. The frequency of dead batteries, however, will be the same as passenger vehicles; who will dispose of those?

Seriously, you can't be this daft. The operator, of course, with the price rolled into the service cost.

All of which are relatively involved.

No, they're not. Even your laptop battery estimates its capacity, and that's about as simple as li-ion battery packs get. Coulomb counting, voltage measurements at start and end compared to the charge temperature, charge voltage curve shapes, direct measurement of pack heating over the course of charge to measure internal resistance, and about half a dozen other methods are all usable and widely used to estimate capacity remaining in a pack. Pretty much every modern EV and hybrid in existence checks its battery pack's performance at least at the pack level, if not the individual cell level (Tesla does it at the "brick" level), to see how it's aging and when components or the pack as the whole need to be replaced.

Measuring remaining battery capacity is a concept older than the light bulb.

testing and inspecting a battery for damage and danger conditions so you don't install it into someone's vehicle and get a lawsuit for "vehicle exploded in a giant flaming blaze" (or drive all your customers away with "we don't test our batteries for anything but charge, and damaged batteries may set your truck on fire") is wholly different.

Just like gas stations check their gas for impurities that can cause damage to an engine? No, it's the manufacturer's issue to ensure that the product meets its stated usage specs - in this case, the specs including safe handling of damage and X number of swap cycles. Meeting damage control specs is why Tesla isolates each cell in a canister to prevent failure propagation. And why packs always come with fuses/breakers that blow when the pack gets wet or there's otherwise a short.

(Just ignoring that many types of li-ions don't burn even when abused. Tesla uses standard cobalt-based 18660s, which is why they have to have a failure isolation system, but vehicles like the Volt and Leaf use more stable spinel chemistries)

That may result in diesel being the cheaper fuel by far

Tesla's battery packs have an 8 year, unlimited-mile warranty. Even if we assume that they're only good for 1000 full charge cycles (which should be well on the low end), at 30 tonne-miles per kWh of charge, times 1000 cycles, and $150/kWh for the pack, that's 200 tonne-miles per dollar of pack capital cost. A diesel truck will get about 120 tonne-miles per gallon of diesel, and diesel costs somewhere in the ballpark of 6x more than electricity per unit range (depends on your location), meaning that the electric version saves about 3-4$ per dollars of energy cost per dollar of pack capital cost.

There are a lot more batteries on a truck.

Wait, so you're picturing them being done individually, one after the next? Seriously? *smacks forehead*

Fortunately, if you mount batteries under there without a bunch of armored doors and other shit to hold it all together, the cargo container catches fire when the batteries become damaged.

In the parallel world where EVs are always catching on fire, and petroleum-fueled vehicles aren't - quite unlike our actual world.

It's the javascript engine that's the problem, not the rest of it. Opera on iOS, for example does not use WebKit, or at least it doesn't in turbo mode. They do the javascript execution on the server side and feed you the results. The downside is lower compatibility, the upside is it can be MUCH faster when you're on a really slow or shoddy connection.

It depends on what you're using it for, and how you manage it. Your SSD is doing wear levelling at a block level, but people are talking about using this new stuff to replace RAM. That means per-byte writes (not per-block) with no wear levelling.

Has anybody actually ever demonstrated recovery of overwritten data in the real world (as opposed to the lab) on either HDDs or SSDs?

Still waiting on that 10GHz Pentium 4 that Intel promised me. Or rather, that they bragged the NetBurst architecture would be able to hit.

I've got a whole whackload of Cree LED bulbs. I had a 100W completely die, my other 100W flashes on occasion (apparently their 100W bulbs have a notoriously high failure rate), I had to get rid of a 60W from a lamp fixture because it periodically switched back and forth between full brightness and lower brightness. So far, they have not been substantially more reliable than CFL or incandescent. They may not burn out as often, but they "soft-fail" more often than CFL or incandescent did, those tended to either work fine or not at all.

Their warranty is basically worthless. They are only sold by one store (Home Depot), and warranty replacements can't be done where you bought it. You need to ship them the broken lightbulb (at your own cost) to get a replacement, and shipping something that size/weight costs more than buying a new LED bulb in the first place, making the warranty completely useless.

Practically unlimited? 1000x the endurance of NAND gets you 3 million writes. It's per-byte addressable, and it's supposed to have performance 1000x that of NAND. If you assume NAND has typical access times of 2ms, and then this stuff could write a single byte up to 500,000 times per second.

In short: without wear levelling, you can burn out this stuff in 6 seconds if you overwrite the same byte as fast as possible.

If you implement wear levelling on a block level, and use it for storage (and not to replace RAM), then it should be effectively unlimited write cycles.

One example was this, which just flat out says discontinued:

http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dprod...

Another is this, which mentions wireless but none of the models seem to support wireless:

http://www.bb-elec.com/Product...

For that last set, the manufacturer's page has no wireless ones either, except in the discontinued section:

http://www.icron.com/products/...

You know, that would be the best prank ever. Convincing Clarkson that he's getting a new TV show but having the actual point being to secretly film him when he's not acting for the fake "show", as they subject him to situations that would be increasingly uncomfortable for a speed-obsessed labour-hating hot-headed racist diva. Sort of "Top Gear" crossed with "An Idiot Abroad". ;)

I'm using an MK809 Android TV stick that cost me about $35 on Amazon. Plays my Samba shared media over wifi flawlessly, as well as Hulu/Netflix/NBC/CBS, all while using the USB port on my TV as its power supply. It really doesn't get much more efficient than that.

Instead of a TV remote, I use a "flying mouse" that you can find for around $15 on Amazon. Held like a remote, it's a mouse; hold it sideways if you need to type. I leave the TV's volume always on max, and control the audio thru the TV stick.

It's slick, it's easy, it's cheap, and very efficient, and doesn't require *any* expensive hardware nor any cable running.

Being an astrophysicist doesn't make you at all qualified to use a VCR. (Wait, who uses VCRs anymore?! I haven't touched one in almost two decades!) But it *does* mean that we're not talking about an idiot. And if you're trying to target your product to be usable for the average joe, and an astrophysicist can't figure it out, you can assume that you missed your target.