has officially journeyed into the drones product category.
A new line of business is not a bloody trip to the mines of Moria. Anonymous, the word you seek is "entered," Always use the simplest wordng to avoid looking stupid.
These clowns manage to opine about the state of the world without mentioning "environment", " climate ", or " species ". It's nice that war and violence are down, but ignoring the fact that overpopulation, habitat destruction, and climate change have brought our home planet to the sixth great extinction event is unforgivable. The world IS falling apart, you deliberately clueless assholes.
Why not develop a great technology and license it to the real auto manufacturers like Honda and Toyota and GM and Ford? All of them want to get into the EV business but their tech isn't as good,
What great technology is there to license? All those automakers already work with suppliers selling batteries, motors, inverters, etc. and have all sold compliance EVs in small numbers with those parts. A new licensor or part supplier would have to be dramatically better to get in the door. "Better" here means way cheaper, and cheap requires volume and the manufacturers apart from GM are refusing to commit to high-volume EV sales. So you'd have to convince a number of manufacturers that your widget is the future and hope their combined orders of 10,000 gets you to volume discount production. GM did invest in Sakti and a failed battery startup, it seems nobody has been that much better at the other parts then existing suppliers. And Magna International developed the whole drivetrain for the Food Focus EV, and the result is Ford is even less interested in selling a Not-Invented-Here design.
I would love the existing big manufacturers to realize they're missing out on a revolution in transportation and be desperately investing in any idea that keeps them relevant in the electric auto business. They aren't.
[Nissan] helped develop the CHAdeMO standard for charging EVs, and the rival CCS standard is just an inferior rip-off and the Tesla one clearly borrows a lot of ideas from both.
CHAdeMO: 62.5 kW, CCS 90 kW, Supercharger 120 kW, (Porsche's Turbocharger 800 V proposal is ?? 240 kW if it's SAE DC Level 3). The politics of standard-setting are terrible, but each is an advance. CHAdeMO is a separate connector to the SAE J1772 they all support.
Most importantly, Nissan makes an affordable EV that demonstrates that for most people the limited range is not a problem.
The Leaf is a fine car and is deservedly the best-selling EV of all time. But waiting 30 minutes to recharge the car after every 75 minutes of highway driving is no fun. You don't get stranded, but you don't take long trips.
Who would want to buy a car for 100% more than the competition's car?
Cars are not like electronics. New cars range in price from the $12,815 Nissan Versa to million dollar exotics. It's not clear to many of us what you get in an expensive German car that is 100% more expensive than a comparable American/Japanese/Korean car, especially after you add expensive options that are included in the cheaper car's premium model.
One of the great achievements of Tesla is to build an expensive electric car that is not just the best production EV, but also compares well with premium sports sedans, luxury hybrids, and supercars. I welcome other purpose-built EVs, but unless Faraday/Apple is building a pickup truck, there isn't much uncontested space to compete in.
I do kind of hate how KDE has to break everything and start over for each new QT version.
tl;dr: Then don't upgrade. Or trust your distro to do the right thing. There's no one KDEN any more.
KDE tends to group a rethink of their project to a new Qt version, why not? Software evolves. KDE4 introduced plasma, phonon, solid. There is no single "KDE 5". The KDE Frameworks 5 reorganizes the KDE libraries, and the new Plasma 5 desktop changes the theme and graphics stack. http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/... tries to explain what's going on.
I started with Kubuntu 9.04 which ran KDE 4.2, and by 4.4 it was trouble-free. The recent Kubuntu 14.10 -> 15.04 upgrade switched me from KDE4 to Plasma 5.2, I think Kubuntu is the first major distro to jump to Plasma 5. It was a seamless upgrade, everything just worked despite the seismic changes underneath (systemd, Plasma 5, etc.). Plasma 5.2 in Kubuntu is using various libkf5 packages and libqt5core5a according to http://packages.ubuntu.com/viv... , but I believe not all the KDE apps have switched over from KDE4. It's interesting that in the blog post above Jos Poortvliet writes "I'd recommend moving over your work desktop or laptop for [Plasma] 5.4." In my experience Plasma 5.2 and the KDE apps are in good shape, better than the audio and display problems I had with KDE 4.2. I reported a couple of medium-priority KDE bugs that were fixed already so I added the Kubuntu backports PPA to get Plasma 5.3, and it's better still.
YMMV.
Why not use the web service you want to, and simply use Mozilla Sync to provide the bookmark to it.
Because web services spy on you and share or sell what you give them and everything else they discern about you. Firefox with cookie and tracker blockers reduces some of your exposure, but why have any? My calendar, to-do list, and movements are nobody's business but my own.
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement.
Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around.
True. The sync payload isn't that big for the apps I mentioned. Music is a lot to transfer but with de-duping of everyone's identical Taylor Swift tracks it isn't so much to store, though i can't see how you maintain encryption with de-duping. I deliberately left a photo-video app off the list because it's a huge amount of unique data that you do want backed up and your favorites sync'd. So maybe you pay for cloud media storage and only Firefox-sync metadata. Or web apps sync big data with OwnCloud or FreedomBox running on your router, another open alternative that's struggling for investment and mindshare.
I really want an alternative to Android, but it's an even bigger challenge than I thought.
Much of the value of Google's contacts, calendar, music player, etc. on Android is I can access the data from any browser. It's so useful I grit my teeth and share my personal info with evil Google. Firefox OS has its own HTML5 versions of those apps running locally, yet they don't run in desktop or Android Firefox. If the apps did run in every Firefox (and eventually any standards-compliant browser) and Firefox Sync securely kept the apps' data in sync (FF Sync is encrypted, so no one can spy on my personal data) then i would find it pretty compelling.
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement. I like Firefox, and I enjoy the sync. Having open productivity apps running in a browser fits with Mozilla's mission. I want more stuff running in a browser without spying, because it levels the playing field for Linux and could lead to a lightweight boot-to-browser environment for my phone, laptop, desktop, and tablet. Part of Google has that vision with ChromeOS, but they can't let go of the lock-in and dominance Android gave them. It's depressing seeing everyone piss all over Mozilla instead of supporting an alternative to picking a closed proprietary environment provided by a spying corporation.
A 150-year old observation about markets and business production does not apply to individuals spending money to reduce consumption. Sure, a few people who overspend to get a more fuel-efficient car will maintain their gasoline budget and take extra trips in it, but far more will take the money saved on fuel and spend it on other things. Sure, those things have their own energy costs, but a fancy Apple gizmo has far less embodied energy than the gasoline the owner saved. Besides, those wacky environmentalists spending $$$ to consume less energy are likely to spend some of the money saved on additional energy-saving measures.
Read the Wikipedia article more carefully, there are so many caveats and non-linearities that it really is a weak argument even before you consider individual consumers' motivations.
See my post elsewhere. Nissan probably invested 20x more in Leaf production than Fiat did in the 500e, so Nissan enjoys economy of scale. They claimed the Leaf is profitable in November 2013.
A Maserati Ghibli costs $66,900. The Fiat 500e is $24,800 if you quality for the full federal income tax credit of $7500, and even less with other incentives. Instructing strangers how to spend their money is not a good strategy, comrade.
Good summary except for this part
Toyota had a similar mindset as GM, but couldn't compete on ZEVs
No one tried to compete on EVs. GM spent money on the amazing EV1 but was never serious about promoting it and simultaneously lobbied to kill the ZEV mandate. Meanwhile the original Toyota RAV4 EV was a fine car and some happy pioneer owners are still running theirs because Toyota sold 300 of them instead of leasing, almost by accident.
Given the state of the art in electric vehicles I really don't see an electric vehicle being significantly profitable at less than $50,000 right now. There simply aren't enough of them out there to drive the unit costs down. I expect that number to fall over time but it will require investment by companies
Facts congruent with your last sentence disprove your first sentence. The Nissan Leaf sells around $29,000 (thus $22K if you get the EV tax credit) and in November 2013 Nissan claimed it is profitable. The difference between the Leaf and compliance cars like the Fiat 500e (and the Ford Focus EV, GM Spark EV, Honda Fit EV, Smart ED, Toyota RAV4 EV, etc., etc., etc.) is that Nissan has invested hundreds of millions in the Leaf, building its own battery plants near the production sites in USA, Europe, and Japan. Result: there were "34,000 Leafs on US roads today and 75,000 worldwide", and thousands more since then.
Maybe Fiat and all the other compliance car makers thought their component suppliers would magically sell them cheap battery packs, motors, inverters, on-board chargers, etc. That may come with standardization and aggregate volume, but Tesla and Nissan (and maybe BMW with its big investment in the i3 brand) have shown that to drive costs down, you make it yourself in volume and/or order tens of thousands of parts. Car companies grudgingly building 2,000 compliance cars over 3 years can STFU about costs.
and maybe some government subsidies here and there.
The tax credit for buying an EV is enough.
Power grids must always have excess capacity available or risk going down and most industrial sized power plants take hours to throttle up while usually providing very little storage capacity.
There's a fix for that: all the electrical energy stored in electric vehicle batteries. Hence the dozens of studies and pilot programs of Vehicle 2 Grid systems where the utility can work with its customers to meet peak demand. And just like rooftop solar, the customer is spending the $1000s per kWh capital costs, not the utility!
But just like rooftop solar, when it comes to a utility actually paying its customers instead of billing them... Does. Not. Compute. <Utility looks around wildly for government people to influence so it can raise rates>
Are you having fun yet?
