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10 Tech Concepts You Should Know for 2007
mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new list of wide-ranging technology terms it claims will be big in 2007. From PRAM to BAN and SmartPills to data clouds, it's a pretty nice summary of upcoming and in-the-works trends across the board (with a podcast embedded). Though these aren't technologies they expect to be in everyone's homes next year, they're sure this tech will be in the headlines. How do their predictions from a year ago stack up now?" From the article: "Printed Solar Panels - Tomorrow's solar panels may not need to be produced in high-vacuum conditions in billion-dollar fabrication facilities. If California-based Nanosolar has its way, plants will use a nanostructured "ink" to form semiconductors, which would be printed on flexible sheets. Nanosolar is currently building a plant that will print 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells annually--more than triple the current solar output of the entire country."
For example:
l ights/performance.htm
"Pedestrian Protection System (PPS)
Radar sensors and computer-controlled braking will keep drivers safer than ever, but what about pedestrians? In case your adaptive cruise control fails to spot someone darting into the road, TRW Automotive is introducing the PPS system: if you smack a pedestrian, the hood is automatically raised to cushion his landing on the engine block. The system is already being tested, part of a drive to meet new European and Japanese regulations on pedestrian safety which are being phased in, starting with 2006 models."
Jaguar's new XK coupe has this: http://www.jaguarusa.com/us/en/xk/highlights/high
Not to mention FTTH (via Verizon), Perpendicular Storage (via Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Mobile WiMAX (Rogers and Bell in Canada have this).
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Data Cloud is a silly name for online file storage, but it is something that will be exceedingly useful. There are files storage services now, but many of them charge ten times what it would cost to back up your files locally. The innovation is that these services will finally become cheap and/or free, even for data in the hundreds of GB.
This gives you countless advantages: You can get away without buying extra drives and implementing RAID. You are protected against fire, theft, and (possibly) accidental deletions. You don't have to open up an FTP channel on your local router. You aren't required to have a static IP for your home machine, and you don't have to always keep it running. You can take apart your local machine, rebuild it, and move things around without worrying about your files. You can backup things which were previously impractical to back up, such as ripping your entire DVD collection and storing it without extra compression. Sounds pretty darn good to me.
? moderation?
So in 20 years the solar panel just stops working?
I think not. actually it's an asymptotic curve which levels out over time. Yes their peak is at teh begining, but they still produce Usable power for a long time.
From Wiki ". (Normally, photovoltaic modules have 25 years' warranty, but they should be fully functional even after 30-40 years.)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics
Also, your economics are slightly skewed
your not paying for 100W of e-. Your paying for a system to manufacture a peak of 100W of e- during daylight hours (avg probably 50W (just guessing?))
If it was $5 for 100W panel, e- would be close to free anyway because everyone would produce their own.
Secondly not many man made conversions happen at 100% efficiency.
I am not a huge alternative energy freek, but economics dictate that solar panels are allready a smart choice for home use. Admittedly, if demand for them suddenly increased, that would not be so. But assuming e- prices continue to go up, (they will, you can bet on it in the long term for at least another 20-40 years) Then you have an even more economicaly strong position. Now, it's probably not going to net you the hugest gains, but it pays for itself, and then more. It's a solid return, that lasts a long time, and is scalable, upgradeable, and virtually maintenance free.
P.S. talking about grid tied, inverted system here. None of that silly battery stuff.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.20/gig transferred, $.15/gig stored... I believe). There is no minimum or fixed start-up costs and you only pay for what you use. This is much cheaper to startup than buying HDs for performance-insensitive large blobs of data, since you don't have to pay for power supply, case, drives, motherboards, cpu, memory or ongoing electrical costs. It's also a 100% quieter than running an extra storage server in your apartment. Sure, you can't stream HD video off of this thing, but it definitely has its uses.
Last month I backed up all my important financial and other data completely encrypted and lot more secure than I could have doen it locally. I conveniently mapped S3 to a drive letter on my local system so most programs can access it without even knowing what's going on. I mapped my Roboform password data to the drive, so I can access the same set of data files from multiple places without having to remember to always carry along a USB key. I even tried storing my Firefox profile there... though it technically worked, the problem is that Firefox accesses like a hundred files every time it starts up, and file access latency was too high to make this workable. What you use it for is really left up to your imagination. Anyway, all told, it cost me $.12 for the month.
You need three things to make this work for you:
1. An amazon S3 account
2. An online storage client that supports S3 (I use the free Jungledisk program, but there are several free clients available for Win/Mac/Linux)
3. Optionally (for Win32 users), a utility that can map webDAV drives to a physical drive letter. I use Webdrive.