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My fault, wrong wording. If you go backwards you see a 30% price increase per year which is a 23% cost reduction when you go forward (1/1.3 = ca. 0,77) which equates to a factor of about 10000 over 44 years.
Photovoltaics system costs in 1969 where about 3000$/kwp compared to about 1.4$/kwp in 2013. This is a factor of 2150 (19% improvement per year). Together with shorter module liveteam and higher maintainance cost and much higher installation area you get the 23% improvement.
I currently can't find 1969 data, but here is a plot going back to 1972:
http://www.nzdl.org/gsdl/collect/envl/archives/HASH0123.dir/p17.gif

I currently don't find long term data for coal, but there is a slow increase since 1995. The gap between coal and solar has been rapidly closing.

It is not guaranteed that the same cost can be reached, but we are allready down to a factor of 3, coming from a factor of several thousand. Currently no significant slow down in improvement is apparent. There is no data to support that coal will continue to be less expensive than solar twenty years from now. Denying this is similar to those who in the face of moores law claimed that there never could be interactice 3D computer graphics with bump mapping.

Here and here

I saw a demo of this a few years ago when I was studying at Waikato Uni. Very impressive, if you can get over feeling like an idiot singing to a machine.

> The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web...

You can always index your email, for instance using the MG 1.3 g Managing Gigabytes search engine, which as a builtin mechanism for indexing the standard UNIX INBOX-Format. (Re-indexing can be done manually with a command or automatically as a cron job). [Use only this link, because Google will point you at the outdated version 1.2.1 rather than 1.3g]

It would be nice if PINE / Mozilla etc. had plugins for a search engine, though, to avoid calling the mgquery client on the shell.

> The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web...

You can always index your email, for instance using the MG 1.3 g Managing Gigabytes search engine, which as a builtin mechanism for indexing the standard UNIX INBOX-Format. (Re-indexing can be done manually with a command or automatically as a cron job). [Use only this link, because Google will point you at the outdated version 1.2.1 rather than 1.3g]

It would be nice if PINE / Mozilla etc. had plugins for a search engine, though, to avoid calling the mgquery client on the shell.

There are some cool examples of similar things...
Humdrum
or
folkfull

Rob

Greenstone

"Greenstone is a complete digital library creation, management, and distribution package for Unix or Windows. Users create collections by gathering a set of input documents, specifying a configuration file, and running the build script. It provides full-text and fielded searching, browsable indexes, customised formatting, metadata extraction (acronyms, languages, etc), a Z39.50 client, and many other features. It supports many input formats, the interface is configurable and multi-lingual, and collections can be distributed on the web or on CD-ROM."

• musedata.org
• themefinder.org
• ...and there used to be a system called Meldex at the New Zealand Digital Library, but it seems to be gone now.

If you do have any cool ideas, especially about how to get the actual data to search through, or how to provide this service on the web without the RIAA sueing your ass off, I'd be interested to hear.

The New Zealand Digital Library project has been involved in similar projects, for similar reasons.

We have made web-sites, and created CD-ROMs, for collections like the United Nations University documents and the Humanity Development Library (both available at the URL above), and some ongoing work for the FAO. They like our "Greenstone" software because it is GPLed (and excellant, fun-to-hack software, but that's another story).

The GPL means Greenstone is free in both senses: it is available at no cost and can be passed on to people who can't afford to license commercial solutions; and it is free-speech free, which is consistent with the aims of organisations like UNESCO.

Someone mentioned that it is pointless giving software to developing nations, because they have no computers. The real headache is that many people are slightly better off than this - they have computers, but they're lousy 286s running windows 3.0, and your software has to work with *every* version of windows from then on (we develop on Linux, and run on all-sorts). And it's network software - a lot of people lost a lot of sleep over that, let me tell you, before they finally rewrote the early Windows networking... but i digress.

Disclaimer: I work on the NZDL project, but have done little for this software.