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Comment Re: I'm wetting my pants now (Score 1) 63

This just seems so short-sighted. You spend a bunch of money familiarising with the code knowing that youâ(TM)ll be forced to do it again after youâ(TM)ve forgotten it. This is an opportunity to eliminate an unnecessary upgrade step. Each step of course will risk new and different regressions. Never mind that people donâ(TM)t find working on old code and tooling very motivational.

Iâ(TM)m not so au fait with the Java world anymore, but in C++ land, there are some serious benefits from using new compilers in terms of code speed and better language features and compiler errors/warning they help you write better code. Every time we upgrade, the compiler finds something in our 25 year old code base that shouldnâ(TM)t have worked!

Comment Re:If I ruled .. (Score 3, Interesting) 223

Our former colonies have all made the metric switch just fine. Canada's a bit confused because the building industry tends to be Imperial (or the US equivalents), but otherwise they're switched fine. As a Briton who emigrated to Canada as an adult and married an Aussie, before returning to the UK, I can attest to the fact that you can adjust. I don't do anything in miles anymore, even though I've been back in the UK almost 20 years. For a while I did low temperatures in celsius (I'd lived in Canada) and high temperatures in Farenheit (I'd live on a RAF base in Cyprus in the early 80s and later in the US in my 20s), but then I lived in Melbourne and experienced high temperatures and metric at the same time. It comes down to experiences.

Pints are defined in mls! Please don't go metric in the Aussie way: their beers are tiny ;)

Comment Re:If I ruled .. (Score 1) 223

But Ireland, Malta and Cyprus can continue driving on the on the left? Would the province of Northern Ireland be given a special exemption? Seems fair given that it's already got half a foot in the EU already due to Boris's Brexit deal that sold them out and undermined British sovereignty with a line down through the Irish Sea. Or would you force a switch of sides when crossing the border? That would all seem to undermine the Good Friday Agreement though.

Two decades seems a bit arbritary, maybe even spiteful. Maybe an absolute majority of the electorate rather than just of those who bothered to vote or perhaps a clear margin of 20% or more would be a better measure of suitability to rejoin the EU. Anything less risks reversal a few years later.

I don't think many people supporting rejoining actually realise or support the idea that rejoining won't be on the same terms as before. You're alluding to that in a spiteful and unrealistic way, but your comment is based in reality.

Comment Re:I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but .. (Score 1) 135

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Comment cobalt chemistry, not so nice. (Score 1) 115

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

Comment I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but ... (Score 1) 135

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

Comment Re:that is a lot of land if my calcs are correct (Score 1) 103

An acre is 1/640th of a square mile, so 2,400 acres/640 = 3.75 sq miles.

An acre is defined as the area of one chain by one furlong (66 by 660 feet), which is equal to 10 sq chains. There are 80 chains in a mile, or 6,400 sq chains, hence dividing by 640.

God, I love these old units. They make me feel so feudal!

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