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Comment Re:Still not solid-state. (Score 1) 23

Semi-solid-state batteries significantly reduce the amount of liquid-that-immediately-bursts-into-flames-when-exposed-to-air-and-doesn't-stop-burning-when-you-douse-it-with-water

Have you ever punctured a lipo cell? I have. Nothing happened. Then I put it in water. There were a few little bubbles. Over the next two years the pack gradually grew until it was about three times its prior size, and hard. At no time did it emit flames. (I kept it in a coffee can.)

I think NCM batteries in particular are fucking terrible and I don't want to downplay that there is a risk of thermal runaway for all lithium cells with liquid (etc) electrolyte, but overstating the case is not a help.

Comment Re: Good luck finding a local gas station in 6-8 y (Score 1) 98

I agree we should generally be going EV (I can't, though) but it's convenient to have a gas station in your neighborhood because you might be headed away from wherever else it might be located.

For EVs filling up is more annoying (as it takes longer) so that raises the desire to do it closer to home. And indeed, people do tend to do it there. I don't have anywhere else convenient to do it, and it's not convenient at home, which is why I can't reasonably have one.

Comment Re:Erm no (Score 2) 23

NeXTSTEP was Jobs attempt to sell $10k workstations to education.

He wanted to sell them to business as well. But then Motorola started to choke while Intel and AMD were executing, and they had to port to PC. Then there was no justification for a big price tag.

BeBOX was waaay ahead of NeXTCUBE (in fact it was up there with alphas of the same era)

The BeBox was really a marketing stunt more than anything else. It was built around a Motorola PPC dev board. (sidebad: The "Geekport" a breakout box connector on the original hardware, and was included only because there were other needed ports on the same board that port is on.) With its dual PowerPC 603e processors at either 66 or 133 MHz, it wasn't exactly slow, but it wasn't as fast as any but the slowest Alphastations. What roped people in was the case design. Otherwise it was obvious that you'd be better off running the OS on a PC soon, because they kept getting faster and cheaper and a good one was already faster than a BeBox.

I had a 66MHz BeBox and also ran BeOS on a Pentium Pro 180. The experience was comparable on both machines, with no real leader. All of the same demos that were so impressive on the BeBox were just as smooth on the PC. But no, the BeBox was not way ahead of the NeXT Cube; it was way after it, as in, five years after. That's a long time in computing now, but it was an even longer time (so to speak) back then. The PowerPC didn't exist when they built the cube; the best processor ever in a NeXT machine was a 68040 @ 25 MHz. (another sidebar: That was an extremely respectable processor for its time, but it also represented the last time Motorola would come up with a competitive chip without help from IBM. 68060 had competitive performance, but not competitive cost.)

It seems like a few NeXT machines were in fact sold into higher education. I knew one guy who had a turbo slab as a CS grad student. He really loved Objective C.

Comment Re:BeOS was actually pretty decent (Score 2) 23

Yes. Essentially, Jobs was more of a problem than an asset.

Absent his RDF, yes, he would have been. But he was an effective marketing tool. He was also intelligent enough to see that the Newton was overwrought as a portable device and demand something simpler. The market was moving in that direction anyway, and he charged out in front of it successfully.

Comment Re:You know people get lung cancer (Score 1) 14

First off it's not unsolvable, "particulates" aren't necessarily dangerous.

Yes in fact they are, or at least, any persistent particulates are dangerous. That's what makes automobiles so bad, and why DPFs actually make diesels worse. We've discussed here on Slashdot before that gassers actually make just as much soot as diesels, it's just far finer so it's much harder to detect, which is why this fact went unknown for decades. The reason it's hard to detect is that the particulate sizes are very small. When they get very small (PM2.5 and below in particular) cilia have a hard time removing them from the lungs and they tend to persist. The soot particles are very stable since they are made out of carbon. All persistent irritants are potential carcinogens.

What's certain is that tire particles aren't a guarantor of cancer .. it could at best bias the probability.. but not by much.

Some of the additives in tires are very carcinogenic.

it's likely not infeasible to make non-toxic tires.

It's both infeasible and impractical. Even the carbon black and silicates in tires can cause cancer for the reasons explained in the first paragraph. At best you can mitigate risk, you'll never make them non-carcinogenic. It would be better to also reduce the number of vehicles and also make tire compounds harder to reduce wear. This does reduce safe effective speed around corners and such, but most vehicles have a lot of excess in that department these days, and the ones that don't usually aren't going very fast. I like hard cornering, it's where the fun is in my opinion, but I do consider it to be more important to improve health.

Comment Re:Oh look the grifters are back (Score 1) 101

Switching facilities are expensive, but you can design grids such that they are able to break into smaller grids, and that does get continually cheaper. Restarting and synchronizing grids can be difficult, but the more battery storage you've got, the easier that gets. So what we'll more likely wind up with is a grid with more compartmentalization, with a lot of people left in weird and unreliable sectors of the network with unreliable power because nobody will force the providers to actually provide them with power reliably.

Comment Re:Out of control demand for power (Score 2) 101

Solar uses space

There's a lot of space available because it doesn't need it all to itself. There's a lot of desert nobody is using, a lot of canals and reservoirs we could cover, a lot of nice safe flat commercial roofs, a lot of commercial glass, a lot of car parks. So since that's not a real problem, can we just legislate it and move on?

Wind is going to be seen as a loser in so many ways

Because so many lies are being told about it, yes.

Comment Re:Remotely downloaded code (Score 1) 19

Are the benefits of using tools like composer worth these risks? Why is that still the norm, rather than the exception?

Because 1) handling exceptions is hard and 2) keeping everything updated from the myriad of sources is hard too.

Whether the benefits are worth the risks is surely complicated, but if it means updates get done that otherwise wouldn't (and it does) then there's at least a reasonable chance that it's a net positive overall.

Comment Re:Life Expectancy Study. (Score 1) 110

I'm down with practically anything, or at least just about anything practical, over NCM. It just has issues on every level from political to technical.

I've got my fingers crossed for sodium, but sure, nickel-iron would seem to make sense for stationary applications. I'm hoping though that they can come up with a sodium battery that wouldn't be toxic even if you blew it up.

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