Hybrids: Don't buy the hype

NPR : Do Hybrid Cars Save Money?: "Morning Edition, September 30, 2005 Hybrid cars certainly save gas, but it's debatable whether they save money for consumers. Steve Inskeep talks with Joseph White, Detroit bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, who argues that -- at least for now -- they don't."

Hybrids: Don't buy the hype - Sep. 26, 2005: "Some simple calculations by our partners at Edmunds.com revealed the following:
A hybrid Honda Accord costs about $3,800 more than the comparable non-hybrid version, including purchase, maintenance and insurance costs. Over five years, assuming 15,000 miles of driving per year, you'll make up that cost in gasoline money if the price of gas goes up immediately to $9.20 a gallon and averages that for the whole period. "

When Hybrids Do (And Don't) Make Sense

Stolen Comment from hybrid discussion on slashdot.org about the value and sanity of purchasing hybrid cars.
<quote>
Hybrid Price Premium == Guilt Tax

The price people pay for hybrids represents something of a guilt tax paid by the affluent. While they'll probably never recoup the price of the hybrid in gasoline savings, they will, in fact, be reducing their usage of the stuff, which is not a bad thing.

Prices will need to be no higher, preferably lower, than current car prices if hybrids or any other similar alternative technologies are to have a lasting environmental impact. Only the economically privileged can afford to spend more to use less energy.
</quote>

My additional thoughts: They are nothing but a political statement by the "haves". They are making a dumb political statement. With current hybrid technology, the fact is that they are being tied to gasoline burning engines. They are in essence are throwing an economic extension cord to the oil companies, it will just lengthen the time until we see real alternative fuel vehicles.

In Virginia hybrid cars are eligible to a couple of things. The first is the "Special Clean Fuel" license plate --- which obviously is a lie --- the fuel is Gasoline - it just uses less than the same car that isn't hybrid. Is any car that meets the 'hybrid gas mileage' to be considered to have "special clean fuel'?

The second, which does tick me off is habits have (had?) an HOV exception that allowed them to be driven on carpool lanes, without the required number of passengers. Shouldn't any car that has 'hybrid gas mileage' be allowed the same exception?

I drive a 1992 Geo Metro, I average 44 real miles per gallon. Using the http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ fuel comparison site my car matches or beats the Civic Hybrid. Note that the Geo Metro was pretty much the cheapest car on the market in 1992. Why does it take such an expensive car to beat the technology of 1992?




I also wonder why we haven't seen Diesel Hybrids.... Diesel engines already are more efficient than the gas engines - why aren't they coupling them with electric drives?

Directv HDTV and Mitsubishi

The story so far. I stupidly bought an HD "ready" TV 6 years too early. Now that I actually want to use the HD 1080 resolution of my TV - I have to adapt to the standard that was adopted after my TV was created. This may be unique to the 1999 1/2 year versions of the Mitsubishi HD TV's.

Mitsubishi guessed (wrong) that the inputs for what they called DTV (Digital TV) would have an RGBHV signal. The standards group arrived at YPrPb (or HDMI).

In order to connect my VS-60803 TV with my new Directv HD Tivo box, I bought a Key Digital KD-CTCA3. ($300) and a VGA to 5 BNC cable ($19). Following the instructions provided and a tech note from Mitsubishi about a hidden menu to enable the RGBHV connections for HD almost had it working. I called Key Digital for advise and once the technician made sure I was driving the Directv box at 1080i, he had me swap the H and V BNC connectors on the back of the TV - which I probably would have never tried.

One cool thing about the new Directv HD Tivo box over my old Sony DirecTivo box is that it will record over the air HD signals - so even though the local broadcasters aren't on Directv's feeds, I can still Tivo CSI, and my other favorite shows.

A lot of my previous rant still stands - I feel that the non-HD pictures that are sent by Directv are sub standard - and over compressed. They lack detail, lacking more detail than the original source.

Am I really alone in my general disappointment with Directv non-HD quality? The number of MPEG artifacts are starting to drive me nuts.

The Old New Thing : Thursday, September 11, 2003

From Raymond Chen

"There are two forms of the WM_NCCALCSIZE message"
Wrapping the old hmenu!

The Old New Thing : Understanding hash codes

The Old New Thing : Understanding hash codes: "# Re:Understanding hash codes
Wednesday, August 31, 2005 1:22 PM by Andrew Fedoniouk
Back to original task of creating
sting-to-numeric-id functions/maps.

Ternary search trees are generally better approach for that (compact and fast) and do no require non-deterministic hash functions.

Tested by myself on real tasks (HTML/DOM parsing/rendering). Indeed, it shows significant gains in some cases. Especially in places where hash function were not designed properly.
In general it is hard to create good hash functions - it's design is a serious research as a rule.

Canonical TST paper:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rs/strings/

And about perfect hashes. There is a well known utility named gperf.exe (google:gperf.exe) - it allows to generate automaticly perfect and minimal string-to-id functions for C/C++. "