Yes, people have come up with some interesting ideas to use the heat.
They have one in Spain for instance. A fluid is heated in a pipe sitting at the focus of parabolic mirrors. It is pumped to to a facility where half is used to boil water directly and half is used melt sodium. The melted sodium is stored and re-used during the night to heat water to produce electricity. Simple as that.
While it is a step in the right direction, it is nowhere as good as they would like you believe.
Like was pointed out before this device has several complex parts that might be hard to manufacture. Also, from what i gather, it's only the light that hits the light collector that is captured with a 42% efficiency. Unless that collector covers the entire surface of the solar panel, I would be surprised if 100% actually made it to the solar cells itself. In this way, the efficiency is probably more around 30%, which is still good. Efficiency is not everything. The amount of light captured is as important.
Life cycle assessments are very important too. Until recently, it would take more energy to make a single solar panel than what it could give you during its entire lifetime. This is changing but, given the complexity of the proposed device, it could still be a problem.
So, while I encourage scientists to keep working on solar cells (it's my field too, btw), I think they should refrain from making such announcements too fast.
I think you bring up the best point example for the point I want to make.
I can understand that some people would be upset to pay to download for a demo on a network they pay to be on, on the internet connection they pay for. BUT! This is all business. If a large enough part of the gaming population is willing to pay for a demo, then companies will try to make money out of it. Simple as that.
The ZoE example is pretty good. I'm convinced this game would've never sold nearly as well without the demo in it. It means people were willing to dish out 40 to 50 dollars for a demo.
If I remember properly, the Final fantasy 8 demo was included in brave fancer musashi. It wasn't a bad game, mind you, but this game too would've probably gone largely unnoticed without this demo. Here too, they managed to make profit on a highly awaited game's demo.
But that doesn't work for little known games or developpers. So, I hope that if that system comes into existence that they will give deloppers the choice of charging or not for the demo.
On a side note, I remember how much of a pain it was to download the 56mb diablo demo. All night long on a 336 kilobaud modem. How much bandwidth it must've cost Blizzard!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, people have come up with some interesting ideas to use the heat.
They have one in Spain for instance. A fluid is heated in a pipe sitting at the focus of parabolic mirrors. It is pumped to to a facility where half is used to boil water directly and half is used melt sodium. The melted sodium is stored and re-used during the night to heat water to produce electricity. Simple as that.
While it is a step in the right direction, it is nowhere as good as they would like you believe.
Like was pointed out before this device has several complex parts that might be hard to manufacture. Also, from what i gather, it's only the light that hits the light collector that is captured with a 42% efficiency. Unless that collector covers the entire surface of the solar panel, I would be surprised if 100% actually made it to the solar cells itself. In this way, the efficiency is probably more around 30%, which is still good. Efficiency is not everything. The amount of light captured is as important.
Life cycle assessments are very important too. Until recently, it would take more energy to make a single solar panel than what it could give you during its entire lifetime. This is changing but, given the complexity of the proposed device, it could still be a problem.
So, while I encourage scientists to keep working on solar cells (it's my field too, btw), I think they should refrain from making such announcements too fast.
I think you bring up the best point example for the point I want to make.
I can understand that some people would be upset to pay to download for a demo on a network they pay to be on, on the internet connection they pay for. BUT! This is all business. If a large enough part of the gaming population is willing to pay for a demo, then companies will try to make money out of it. Simple as that.
The ZoE example is pretty good. I'm convinced this game would've never sold nearly as well without the demo in it. It means people were willing to dish out 40 to 50 dollars for a demo.
If I remember properly, the Final fantasy 8 demo was included in brave fancer musashi. It wasn't a bad game, mind you, but this game too would've probably gone largely unnoticed without this demo. Here too, they managed to make profit on a highly awaited game's demo.
But that doesn't work for little known games or developpers. So, I hope that if that system comes into existence that they will give deloppers the choice of charging or not for the demo.
On a side note, I remember how much of a pain it was to download the 56mb diablo demo. All night long on a 336 kilobaud modem. How much bandwidth it must've cost Blizzard!
Have robotized cameras in a manned flight. It should be funded by fox and be made to be a big brother type reality show. Then, everybody's happy!