In my experience, companies that do not have very good products spend an awful lot of time trying to sell "solutions". Looks a lot like whats happening here.

Bzzzt, wrong.

The best smartphone OS for the enterprise is whatever the user shows up with because the corporation doesn't have to shell out several hundreds of dollars, and in most cases, $50+ per month for every user. If your company has 300k employees, phone plans alone will run you $180M / year. Off loading that expense to your employees is not trivial. Now add the cost of a new BB for each one of them every two years (or however long they last on average), and you're looking at another $100M a year. That is not small change to any organization, and not having to pay it is worth a lot of wrangling on the back end.

They did in fact create a system that puts out more instantaneous energy per unit weight, but that is not the improvement that super capacitors need. They have improved gravimetric power density. The two measures that need improvement to make super capacitors more useful are gravimetric energy density (how much energy can it store in a given weight), and volumetric energy density. How much energy can it store in a given volume. Without significant improvements in those two areas, super capacitors cannot make significant inroads against batteries.

It should also be noted that super capacitors already have better power density than chemical batteries by a wide margin, and are more than sufficient to replace I.C. engines and gasoline in that respect.

a few hundred thousand units per year is not very many in the tech world. Apple Sells 100 million iPhones per year. You also need to remember, these kinds of gadgets aren't going into the high volume vehicles like the corollas and civics, they're going into the relatively low volume luxury car and SUV markets. The Entire luxury SUV market for all manufacturers combined sold less vehicles than the Toyota corolla alone last year. Over an entire model run, you're only talking 50,000 units. That's a lot of R+D cost to be spreading on such a small production run. Standardization would allow production runs across multiple makes and models the way car stereo manufacturers do. That is why an Alpine DVD in dash system can run about $500 while the equivalent system from Mercedes costs $5k. The alpine can be installed in just about any car, while the Mercedes version is inextricably tied to the Mercedes SUV.

I hate to pick nits, but that's X window, no S.

That is somewhat true. My employer buys many thousands of machines every year. All of them in the last year have come with "windows 8" licenses, even though we exercise our corporate option to "downgrade" to win 7 at no charge. All of those count towards M$ win 8 sales accounting, even though they were in reality win 7 licenses. If you were to find out how many of those win 8 licenses are in fact really running win 8 instead of win 7, you will find that the real number is only a few percent of the total M$ is reporting. If M$ makes win 7 unavailable, then companies like mine will seriously investigate a change to a linux variant. If were going to have to retrain our workforce to deal with a radically new OS anyway, you can damn well bet its going be something cheaper than windows. The VPs have been talking about a shift away from M$ for years now. This could be the final nudge that gets the ball rolling.

Tolerance goes both ways. It is far too easy to claim the high road and seek to prevent those with different viewpoints from being heard. It is another thing entirely to stand and defend a persons right to freedom of speech when you don't like their message. If you can't acknowledge his right to speak his mind, then you are no better than he is.

It does? What part? It just looks like a pile of electronics to me. Bombs have certain very specific characteristics: This has none of those characteristics. You don't happen to work for the TSA or anything do you?

Car based system don't use hard drives. Yes, hard drives fail easily under stressful environments, that's why no one uses them outside of desktop PCs, servers and other relatively immovable objects. Even laptops are using SSDs more and more for reliability reasons. Automotive system (like almost all non PC applications) have been using flash storage for decades. Remember, that the vast majority of storage a PC needs is entirely unnecessary for an embedded system. It is very rare to find an embedded system that requires more than a few hundred megs of storage.

to put it in perspective for you, the space shuttle had over 200,000 moving parts all under constant computer monitoring and control, and the main systems all fit onto a few dozens of 64KB flash roms. Even with a DVD/bluray decoder, a car based computer platform just doesn't require that much storage. Software doesn't require huge amounts of storage, content does.

That is why automotive systems don't have hard drives... They pretty much all use flash storage, and have for a while now. Keep in mind, a typical car system doesn't need more than about a couple hundred meg of total storage, and even that is probably far more than most use.

Its a lot less grueling that it used to be. The vast majority of the problems a laptop would have with temperature extremes comes from mechanical stress on moving parts, and chemical stress on the battery. A car mounted computer has no battery problems, and modern systems can use Flash storage instead of mechanical hard drives to store data, thus eliminating the other trouble spot.

The other argument you will hear people make is about overheating. This is a complete non-issue, as car hardware doesn't need to be super powerful. A low power ARM based system will have enough horsepower for pretty much everything a car owner will want/need, and these come in such low power packages that cooling is a non-issue, even without active cooling (I have a board on my desk right now that is capable of playing blue rays at 1080P and doesn't even have a fan. It uses less than 5 watts all told.) Even if you have system that needs so much compute-power that it has to have active cooling, 5 years down the road, that level of computing will likely no longer require active cooling...

Probably the same great reason they have today: Campaign contributions...

The reason the units cost so much is because of non standardization Because each manufacturer is different, and none of them are cross compatible, no one can build in volume to gain economies of scale, so the prices remain astronomical for even the simplest devices. You couldn't ask for a better example of how standardization is good for the consumer, and the lack thereof is bad.

sooner or later, there will no longer be any "unpleasant work" left to be done by people. At that point, Capitalism will become unnecessary. The question of what it gets replaced with scares the crap out of me...

When they cant support their own kids, they have no business having them. Progeny is a privilege, not a right. This is not my doing, nor is it anything that we could change, even if we wanted to, it is a natural law. If they cant feed their children (or themselves), then they die. Its simpler and far less cruel if they don't have the kids in the first place, but the choice is theirs.