This is slightly off topic but simply stated I just love IBM these days. There aren't many corporations that dedicate as much focus on research and yet, for a large corp. they also keep their nose surprisingly clean (these days). While we watch the swirling tech scandals ebb and flow they just quietly sit off to the side and keep changing the world.
Wow. I haven't opened ie on my think pad in years. And it's been longer since I ran ie6
IE 6 as a requirement is really rare now. (as an FYI for everyone else - IBM has one of the largest Mac fleets in the world, and fully supports a Linux desktop client as well. ( and yes Lotus Notes runs on win/mac/Linux/iOS/Android)
Sorry to take a tangent here:
Curious what you'd say about someone who is moving to NYC and thinking about what kind of work to find. Formerly worked for one of the big SV tech companies in a project management role. Would love to work for a smaller company now but there aren't as many tech startups in NYC so perhpas IBM is the best bet.
How do you like working there all in all? I understand hierarchy and bureaucracy are the name of the game back east, especially at big blue, but I suspect this will be nothing new... and that SV just claims to be more flat. But would love to hear your perspective and whether it's fulfilling in your org.
There is a horrible amount of waste because of the many levels of management. The higher ups often push software changes on us because of some agenda (it was developed in-house) when the software is very inferior and will hurt our productivity greatly.
IBM tries very hard to encourage us to participate and let our voices be heard, but in my experience anything that takes time, effort or money is ignored, making the whole thing a silly puppet show.
I'm leaving the job soon because of things like this. I absolutely hate it when people say "such overhead is inevitable within such a big organization" because it's become an excuse for EVERYTHING. You wouldn't believe the sort of things we spend weeks on doing that should take minutes. We are talking manually renaming files and proccessing log files, because the "budget for such changes is already used up" or some other bullshit.
There is no ridiculous mind-numbingly slow process that isn't justified by the fact that the organizational aspect is in the way. I think it's become a warm blanket that managers can wrap around themselves to avoid taking responsibility.
Sorry to hear, sounds like some of the major negatives I experienced in Silicon Valley. Nevertheless all companies have their healthy and unhealthy divisions and practices. Presumably someone is doing something right to pay for everyone else. We'll see if they continue to stay in the game.
Thanks for the info!
I guess the NYC job market's a tough one especially for tech.
If ISSI (internal software updating tool) hasn't hit you yet, it's very possible to still be running IE6. ISSI can't hit everyone all the time. And there are still apps that can't run on Firefox, so needed IE (6 if not a newer version of IE).
Sorry to take a tangent here but interesting to be able to ask two individuals for their experience:
Curious what you'd say about someone who is moving to NYC and thinking about what kind of work to find. Formerly worked for one of the big SV tech companies in a project management role. Would love to work for a smaller company now but there aren't as many tech startups in NYC so perhpas IBM is the best bet.
How do you like working there all in all? I understand hierarchy and bureaucracy are the name of the game back east, especially at big blue, but I suspect this will be nothing new... and that SV just claims to be more flat. But would love to hear your perspective and whether it's fulfilling in your org.
It really depends on your department. Some people get to work on the really cool and fun stuff. The stuff that gets IBM so much respect on HN these days, most people inside IBM never even touch. Then you have other areas, where there are internal applications that still rely on IE6 and have horrible interfaces (edit: and yes, Lotus Notes is really truly the application that should not be named :D).
You're right, hierarchy and bureaucracy are name of the game, but that's true in any big org. You're probably best off asking someone who's actually working in the department where you'd be applying. There are so many departments and each one has their own culture, processes, etc. Someone who complains or is happy about stuff in one department is most likely not reflective of another department.
For the record, my department isn't exactly great, but they're giving me the opportunity that I actually care about (an opportunity to live in China so I can learn Mandarin).
Thanks for the reply! China sounds like an awesome gig. I did some time in India with my last gig but China would have been the preferable option... at least for me.
Anyway to be honest I sort of like the idea of honesty about being hierarchical. Sometimes SV's claims of flatness feel like propaganda and rub me the wrong way when they're not realistic.
I can imagine what you mean about most people not being on the really cool stuff: I can see that IBM is keen to develop really awesome stuff that doesn't necessarily make money but which ensures IBM's brand is synonymous with innovation. Better than splattering coke and pepsi signs across the world's cities after all :)
This is more because of secrecy (and ignorance). Any company of such scale is engaged in hundreds patent disputes every year at least, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands, it really hard even to estimate. And this continues for decades.
Those ten-twenty disputes that made to journals and blogs are in such small amount that they can be counted as statistical deviation and more of PR or anti-PR moves.
Real patent wars are never off, especially for multinationals.
The way I've always heard the story told, IBM actually kept the patent peace in the industry for decades. They have thousands of patents going back to the foundational era of computing, and warehouses full of prior art. They also operated for a decade or so under harsh anti-trust scrutiny, which limited the viability of "offensive" patent use. Instead, if some upstart threatened to corner off key new technology, IBM was always ready to fire back with some "method for utilizing a spinning disk to store structured records" patent. Cross-licensing agreements among the big players were the norm, not patent fights (even the big Microsoft/Apple dustup over the GUI was over copyright, not patents).
I see evidence for this folklore in that the biggest technology patent wars we've seen in recent years have focused around wireless, which one might consider the first major new computing technology that IBM didn't take a big part in developing.
I'm extrapolating on all industry actually, but I have a friend in a small (<100) company in ex-USSR that does exclusively patent reverse engineering for Freescale/Motorola. This one company (there are at least several others working for F/M in Czech and few other countries) does at least hundred patent researches per year for 10+ years at least, meaning buying devices by Apple, Samsung, TI, Microsoft etc. demolishing to bare crystal and then photographing layer by layer microscheme structure, restoring it on PC to reverse integral scheme and find patent infringing (and maybe a little more, some interesting tech things that wasn't known publicly, i.e. TI does very innovative tricks that are interesting for F/M).
So returning to your question,no, I don't have sources, only second hand experience which I find very believable.
I am sorry, but from the press release they have only added two new industry partners to help develop this battery. There is still a long way to go before they have anything near a working product.
I wonder how relevant this really is? Although the IBM of 2012 shares the same name of the IBM of the 1940s, I can't help but wonder if that's the only quality the two companies share. It's not as though employees of that era are still employed there today.
"These days" means everything after 2010 when the sex scandal+insider trading+FBI sting caused the ouster of super executive Robert Moffat, thought to be the next CEO of IBM.
So ... As the battery is used, bonds are formed between oxygen molecules in the air, and the lithium ions on the battery's electrodes. Weight is saved by "borrowing" those O2s from the air, as compared to carrying them around fixed in an oxide. Fine.
Does that mean that as the battery charge is depleted (=it runs out of free lithium ions, I guess), it's mass increases due to all the newly bound oxygen being stored in there? That's counter-intuitive enough to just be awesome!
Also, a large-scale battery whose charge level is directly related to its mass (albeit inversely so, from my intuition) and supports recharging is almost a bit like magic. I hope they pull this off, so I can learn to weigh my car before going on long trips, in the future. :)
Imagine NASCAR with these batteries - Cars covered in solar panels. Drivers carefully timing their recharge pitstops to keep their weight down. Every fan in the stands has a big reflector to reflect sunlight at their favorite car.
As organic_code pointed out, blinding the drivers is a real possibility. Also, races are fairly long and holding a mirror up for two or three hours doesn't sound like a lot of fun. New drivers in the sport have no chance of winning (see last years Daytona 500). Never mind the problem track owners will have selling concessions to a group of people who cannot eat / drink for most of the race.
I want to watch a driver's skill, not the energy output of his / her fans.
It reminds me of planting a tree in a pot, and then realizing in a few years the tree is a lot bigger and weighs a lot more than the pot when you started.
Weight is also saved by using Oxygen instead of heavy metals to donate electrons. Using oxygen (Mr 16) over lead (Mr ~207) will be the main source of weight save.
I'd imagine that more weight is saved because all of the oxidant in the reaction is actively used, and you're not carrying plenty of it around hidden behind surfaces that prevent it from being part of the reaction.
Cool. that would actually be a useful UI feedback property: to check if your phone needs recharging, just pick it up. If it feels heavy it needs to be charged.
If the amount of oxygen exchanged between the battery and atmosphere is enough to make the battery "much lighter" in its charged/non-oxygenated state, wow, that's got to be a lot of oxygen!
I didn't see any numbers in the article, but a commenter (name, moishep) on the site posted the relative atomic masses of the elements and compounds involved:
Li ~7, O ~16, LiO2 ~39
If someone with a better understanding of the chemistry could answer, does this mean that a discharged battery would have over five times the mass of a charged one?
And if that much oxygen is being released in the charging process, that's quite a fire hazard that will need to be designed around.
Or am I missing part of the physics/chemistry involved?
I think there's no question that the Li-Air battery is one of the most important, game changing technologies that we'll see in the next 10 (hopefully) years.
It changes everything. It's not just about better battery life on your MacBook. There are so many things held back right now by poor battery technology.
Sorry to be skeptical, but I can't help but think:
Number of "battery breakthrough" news I heard in the last 15 years: >100, Actual battery breakthroughs: 0
We've been spoiled by Moore's Law in technology. In comparison, all the "battery breakthroughs" of the past decade are pretty feeble. If someone could double or triple the energy density of a battery, that would be a breakthrough.
Unfortunately, there's another discipline where energy density is important: explosives. The critical difference is in how quickly the energy is released, and as Li-Ion batteries show it isn't always as controllable as we'd like.
I'm running a thinkpad with an 8 hour (theoretical) maximum battery life. Actually it's like 5 or 6. But the model from a year or two years before that would have only gotten 1-2 hours battery life.
So improvements are being made and we're seeing them. It's just slow going.
That's what really separates consumer electronics from cars: processing data requires (from a theoretical physics standpoint) a minuscule amount of energy, and there's a lot of room for improvement even with current technology.
Moving heavy things up hills or through air at high speeds requires a respectable amount of energy, and current technology is already within an order of magnitude or so to the theoretical peak efficiency.
They invented NiMh batteries that hold their charge for a while; now I can actually use them in game controllers and flashlights and such without needing freshly charged ones every time I've left 'em in the closet for a few weeks.
Not a density breakthrough, but a UX breakthrough for sure.
To add weight to your skepticism the article states, "Eventually (in another 10 years or so), li-ion batteries could be replaced with li-air batteries." !0 years is a long time-frame.
Exactly. 10 years is way past the Technological Event Horizon, which is about 2 years.
Which means that unlike, for example, memristors, lithium air batteries most likely won't happen, and if they do happen, their happening will be a consequence of other research.
(Which is an argument why most research should be fundamental and open-ended, i.e. not directed towards specific outcomes.)
It's fair to be skeptical of all these announcements but I can't help but think that batteries have gotten better over the last 15 years. Whether these improvements were "breakthroughs" or not is a matter of interpretation.
Batteries have become vastly better over the last 15 years. It's just that this stuff ends up as gradual progress, not sudden jumps, so you don't notice it unless you're looking for it.
There have been quite a few battery breakthroughs at the lab level, especially in the past 3 or 4 years. That is massively different from scaling up manufacture and bringing to market.
Also, I suspect that investors in this sector are hedging their bets and waiting for a clear winner to emerge before spending the big money.
Another cool thing about this (aside from not needing to carry around it's own oxidizer) is that a car-sized pack would be small and light enough to make battery swapping a reality.
Li-Ion and older technologies make battery swapping hard because the pack is large and heavy enough that it really needs to be integrated into the vehicle chassis, which means that each model of vehicle—or at a minimum each class of vehicle—needs a different pack.
Something roughly the size and weight of a gas tank would be much easier to swap out and could probably come in only a few different sizes.
Another thing I'm wondering is if the battery could be simplified by "reprocessing" rather than recharging it. For instance, maybe the anode could be a big spool of lithium "tape" that is slowly unwound as it gets oxidized, with the spent lithium oxide wound around another spool. The whole thing could be mounted in a "cassette" that would be swapped out a reprocessing station, where it could be de-oxidized in a controlled environment and at a controlled rate using off-peak grid power.
So do these batteries still suffer from the same problem of permanent damage if completely discharged? That's the biggest thing that scares me away from buying a Tesla (well, that and the high price of Tesla Motors models).
It may be a theoretical problem, but there are very sophisticated mechanisms in place to prevent this from actually happening in practice with current li-ion batteries. There was a big scare about it with Tesla vehicles a while back that turned out to mostly be one blogger spreading unsubstantiated claims.
It's true that if you keep driving an electric car until the car stops running, and then leave it for weeks or months without recharging as the battery pack continues to slowly trickle out, you could cause damage. Then again, if you keep driving a gasoline car for too long without changing the oil, you can also cause damage.
Not to the engine, but to the (low pressure) fuel pump. And that's because that pump is cooled/lubricated by the fuel. A few seconds won't hurt but longer is definitely not good.
You'll likely also have to bleed the system because the injectors won't open on air pressure alone, but that's not really damage (it just makes it a lot harder to get it started again once it is out of fuel).
If I read this right, much of the weight reduction is because a large component of the electricity-generating reaction is already plentiful in the atmosphere, so it doesn't have to be carried around with the battery.
But as the battery is discharged, the oxygen molecules are altered (according to the video) and presumably stored in the battery - which implies when discharged, the battery gains (significant?) mass. During charging, the oxygen is released again, so the weight goes down.
This would be mind blowing but did they in fact create such a battery as the title suggests? The video talks about year 2030. If they had created working prototypes already I would expect that commercialization would be years away, not decades.
Seems likely. Automotive engineers, and the companies that employ them, are (appropriately) conservative about things, give the $ involved, and the safety issues.
Toyota is only just starting to ship Lithium batteries in some of their hybrids, but they've been common in consumer electronics for years.
It was a joke... visualize tubes coming out of someone's ears. Just because it's a colloquialism doesn't mean you should ignore the imagery it conjures.
I would think carbon nanotubes coming out of my ears would look more like extremely fine hair. Probably good for keeping bugs out, but it'd creep my wife out too.
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If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
First, it's not the comments I'm complaining about, it's the content, so no, my comment is not fulfilling any prophecy.
Second, the title is sensationalistic and misleading. To a casual reader the it implies that the battery is ready for use ("creates") and that it's unique to IBM. Neither are true. A more accurate title would be: IBM research department is trying to develop commercial lithium-air batteries, just like lots of other people.
The article is not in-depth, nor does it describe anything new or interesting in science. It is a brief, shallow overview of a line of research that has existed for decades. That is not news.
Battery research is slow and plodding, yet linkbait link this is often all over reddit and other technology blogs. Hacker News was supposed to be free, or at least low, on this kind of garbage, but the fact that this is the second time I see this very article (or an equivalent one) shows that the Hacker News userbase is no more discriminating than any other news site based on user voting.
