How old are the batteries? Do you own your battery? What is a battery worth? Do you load your truck with aging, unreliable batteries to swap-off with other aging, unreliable batteries?

When it comes to a truck which will have a sizeable number of large batteries, you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to never have more than a dud or two so long as the battery management process is sound.

As a service station manager, how do you test each of these batteries to ensure its safety and reliability (its level of aging)

By, for example, any of the dozen or so methods already used for this purpose?

As a service station manager, how do you offset the cost of rotating out old batteries traded in by truckers?

By rolling that into the swapping cost?

Could you please ask questions a little harder than "What does 1+1 equal?" I'm seriously not getting why you don't already know the answer to these questions you're asking.

Changing batteries in something like a truck is a labor-intensive process.

Wait a minute, you think that when people talk about battery swap they're talking about someone going up and swapping batteries by hand?

mounting may preclude a fast removal operation.

Many companies have already demonstrated battery swap for cars, which is a far harder target than trucks. With trucks, my preferred mounting is on the trailers themselves (with the cab having its own, non-swappable batteries). You already have, today, stuff mounted to the underside of trailers. It's right where the structural strength is already located and you have tons of open space underneath for easy access and standard form factors. It's an order of magnitude easier challenge than for cars, which you practically have to have disassemble their frames to get their batteries out.

The operation may take 40 minutes overall

Battery swap in the much harder case of cars can be done in less than a tenth that time.

Mounting the batteries affects balance, thus handling, thus safety

And you're envisioning that one would load all of the batteries only on one side or something...?

Think about it as if you were going to swap an entire, pre-filled gas tank

And think about having the tank you plan to switch out be a standardized external tank mounted in a standard form factor on a standard trailer.

Assuming an overall pack energy density of 200 Wh/kg, 1kWh would weigh 5kg. A typical truck may move around 1 tonne 120 miles per gallon of diesel. A gallon of diesel contains about 10kWh of energy. An electric motor will use it about 2,5 times more efficiently than a diesel ICE, so 120 miles per gallon of diesel equates to 300 miles per 10kWh of electricty, or 30 miles per kWh electric, or 30 miles per 5kg of battery pack. So every 30 miles of range you want takes up 0,5% of your cargo mass. If you want say 300 miles range then it would consume 5% of your payload.

On the other hand, the price difference in the cost of fuelling the truck (diesel vs. electricity) would be massive. For each tonne of cargo (assuming 300 miles vehicle range and an average haul distance per hour of say 60 miles), giving up 50kg of cargo to enable to you spend $0,30 on electricity ($0,10/kWh) instead of about $1,80 on diesel ($2,70/gal), or a savings of $1,5 for giving up 50kg of cargo. If we scale to say 50 tonnes of cargo then this equates to giving up 2,5 tonnes (5%) of your cargo to save $75 per hour.

There have been electric delivery trucks for a long time - for example, Smith Electric Vehicles has been making li-ion trucks almost as long as Tesla has been around. And they follow up on a long history of electric delivery vehicles on a continuous line dating back to the early lead-acid days. But "existing" doesn't mean "having blown the market wide open". The big question is when that could happen.

You know, though, as ridiculous as it sounds, I almost wonder Tesla's efforts could evolve into a killer delivery vehicle. The Model S / Model X drivetrain is already starting to get into the power range of a big rig, and big rig budgets can afford their high prices. Combine that this potential solution to charging over long distances and you really could have a winner.

I wouldn't count on really powerful fast chargers ever getting really cheap. Cheaper than they are now, sure, but just ignoring all of the communication and high power conversion hardware you still have to have:

1) A powerful cooling system in your charger (for a really powerful connection, you even need to liquid-cool the charging cable)
2) A huge amount of copper (or aluminum, but that comes with a number of additional challenges) in your charger
3) A high power feed installed to your location
4) A high capacity and high power battery buffer to even out your charges if you want really fast charges / fast charges for big packs (say, 250+ kW)
5) A professional electrician to do the installs (and remember, we're not talking about home wiring here, we're talking about huge-current high-voltage connections). ... and so forth. These things will always add up. So maybe we'd not be talking about $100k to add one.... but I'd be shocked if even in mass production they could be manufactured, delivered and installed for under $10k. Probably several tens of thousands of USD per unit.

Well there's always a menu.

^^^ Typed from my mouse....

This post took 20 minutes..... :-)

I think this has more to do with the Windows Update framework than their ability to check things.
I forgive it this once as this is the first time they've rolled out an OS via a system designed for background patching.

That said I fully expect it to be fixed. The error is completely fatal. The update will just continue to attempt to install without re-downloading. From my history it looked like it attempted to install 4 times before I finally manually went through it yesterday.

If MS has any common sense at all they'll realise people won't fix this by themselves and release an update to Windows Update to correct this, it's a pretty epic fail on their part, but at least they didn't attempt to actually install corrupted files.

Knowing the industry the way it is it is just as likely that Samsung were the only ones who implemented the spec faithfully without some dodgy firmware workaround.

Sometimes the "broken" device is the only one actually working properly.

How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None it's an electrical problem.
How many electrical engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None we'll just work around it in software.

Has this ever been tested? I know there's somethings you can't give up your rights to, and in Australia I believe this is one of them. Anyone know about the USA?

Needs to be downloaded from the windows store as a Metro App. It's annoying as shit. The new minesweeper is more annoying than the metro menu.

It's already fixed. They sent out a corrupted install. It's not as big of a deal as you make it out to be. Open up your update history and if it says "Windows 10 Update Failed" with error code 80240020 then simply follow the instructions further up to delete the install files and run the update again.

It's not an end of the world scenario, and the downloaded ISO is actually the same as the Windows Update release. In fact there's instructions on Reddit for how to make an ISO from the files downloaded by Windows Update.

I like how you say "feature" as if you don't get something in exchange.

All of the data sent to MS is related to a certain function. Location relates to Cortana search results, sound is again Cortana's Siri wannabe interface, contact list so that the handwriting recognition can autocorrect your funny spelt friend's names. etc. etc.

But hey if you're really worried adjust each setting you don't like individually by clicking PC Settings > Privacy. Yep they went out of their way to hide that one. If only the old control panel were that easy to find (still haven't found it).

Personally I turned Cortana off and all related crap sent to MS, but only because I don't intend to use it.

As someone who was hit with this bug this step was wrong for me. The folder didn't contain anything. The correct folder to delete was:

"C:\$Windows.BT"

One of the subfolders in there "SafeOS" is protected and needs to have it's contents manually deleted. Also the folder is hidden. I think I read somewhere if the folder is 5.7GB or less then you have a corrupted install or incomplete download and the correct size is over 6GB.

Anyway the rest of the steps worked for me. Anyone needing more info should google "80240020"

They are and do, which is why the update fails during the silent "preparing your copy" step.

Harvesting data and not misusing the data are two different concepts.

Google have harvested more data on users than any other company in history, but I have far more faith that my data is in good hands with them than a company that is actively hostile towards users. One company is at the forefront of encryption and protecting the chanel between you and them, the other has released the single buggiest and most heavily exploited software in history.