When you say that we haven't gone beyond eliminating starvation, you're wrong. I know people who don't work. AT ALL. And not only do they get fed, they get health care as well. And if they *want* to go to school, many avenues are available to them, anywhere from reduced to no cost. I see it in action all of the time.
Now, not everyone takes advantage of that. That's a given. But it's there if they want.
Now, compare that to India: Even if you *want* to go to school, if you're from the wrong parts of society, too bad. You won't be able to. That's it, end of story. Getting into health care... let's say that you need an operation in India. It's up to *you* to pay people to donate blood, and if you don't get enough blood donated, you don't get the surgery. That's it, end of story. You see groups of people on hospital steps BEGGING for people to give blood so that they can be helped.
It's two different worlds: One where help is available if you want it, and one where quite often, help simply isn't available AT ALL.
I'll bet that you haven't ever lived outside of a "Western" nation, and haven't seen the conditions that I'm talking about. Once you do, your views change forever.
You can't talk about the inequality of rich and poor without talking about what it means to be rich or poor. If you consider the poor of the USA (or many other nations) to be "poor" in the same way as the poor of India, you're comparing apples to oranges. No, you're comparing apples to small rocks.
It has to be remembered that the "poor" in the USA are in a completely different class than the poor in India. Being "poor" in the USA is a DREAM for the poor in India (or the poor in most of the world, for that matter.)
Once you've lived in countries with truly poor people, you stop thinking of people here as "poor". I know people living on WIC, medicaid, housing assistance, utility assistance, tuition assistance, and more. And they live as well as the middle to upper-middle class in many other countries.
I've known single-mother families of 6 who lived basically on the charity of others, and they *still* lived a lifestyle that hundreds of millions in India would LOVE to live.
Watch "Born Into Brothels", and see just how much India is trying to do for the poor and unpriveliged. I could be wrong, but I think that India is the country with the starkest difference between the amount of wealth and the amount of adject poverty.
USB flash drives are a different matter.... that's like saying that a Lexus might not perform well because a Fiat doesn't.
=)
As for the limitted write-cycled, yes... but it's worlds different than it was in the old days, when flash got its bad rep - which was, at the time, deserved.
Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks. If your drive has an average seek time of, say, 15 milliseconds, you're limitted to about 60 I/O operations per second no matter how little bandwidth you're using. While the actual transfer speed of flash is roughly similar to a current hard drive, the decrease in latency will be very appreciated in some situations.
... first, they're regulated, I believe - in many (most?) markets, there are minimum charges that can be applied.
Secondly, because they want to make money. If you want a "managed" service, you're their bread and butter. Note that the same T1 line, if you were to use it for long distance instead of data, would only cost you a tiny fraction if you agreed to use at least a certain amount of long distance. One of my friends who used to work for Qwest said that DSL support techs would say "We'll notify a technician", and the tech would only think of handling it if he was devoid of any other work AND completely bored. They don't want to keep DSL (or cable) on the same quality, they want to make what they can from those who *need* reliability.
Third, it's a small package, and you pay more per unit for small packaging. As an example, where I'm at, a point-to-point T1 costs $250 per month, or about $160 per megabit. On the other hand, a point-to-point T3 costs $1200 per month, or about $27 per megabit. That's between two buildings with on-premesis fiber, so no termination fees. If the provider has to pay someone else for termination, that can increase the cost in a hurry.
The real benefit here, which seems to have been overlooked, is access to all of that information in places where bandwidth is either very poor or non-existant - or, where political pressures make it impossible or unwise to view the information online. I could imagine these DVDs being passed around in countries like China...
I've used other motherboards with the JMicron controller, and while they are as buggy as you can imagine, the motherboards allowed installing the OS from an optical drive on that controller.
It's not a controller issue, it's likely a BIOS issue.
If you have access to a hardware calibrator, good things can be done. They might not match exactly, but they can often be made to match enough to surprise most folks. You do have to pick a sort of "lowest common denominator" for brightness, though.
They don't deal well with being discharged deeply, and drivers don't deal well with having to recharge every time their battery is 30% drained. Use the full rated capacity of a lead-acid battery every time, and you're going to replace it VERY soon.
You can make them somewhat more robust for that sort of operation, but it involves compromises that don't really go over well when you put them in a car.
Lithium doesn't really pack *much* more energy density (in terms of volume), but does do it with less weight. That's terrific.
But while lithiums handle deep discharge much better than lead-acid batteries, they're still not as good as NiCad or NiMh. They're also a lot more expensive. And, probably the best argument against them... look at the fires that happen when laptop (or even CELL PHONE) lithium cells are damaged or shorted. Now, imagine a car packing a thousand times more getting in an accident... Sure, you'll say, they can put over-current protection on them. But the batteries in laptops have the same protection, you have to think of *damaged* batteries.
If you finished Street Fighter II without losing a single round, you got to see the credits. If you finished it without ever taking a single point of damage, you got to see pictures of the devs along with the credits. Pretty disappointing for beating an entire game perfectly.
Take a look through the states in that page, and pay attention to "net excess generation".
There are some places which will buy it back at retail rates, but there are more where you either don't get paid for excess, or at best get paid for the "avoided cost", which is where you usually end up getting a cent or two, certainly nowhere near what it would cost you (especially after taxes and fees) to purchase and use the same amount of energy from the company.
Net metering isn't selling back to the company, per se: It's just not paying for what you produced yourself.
If you actually produce more than you use in a month, few (if any) net metering billing styles will actually pay you for the overage. At best, you can usually roll the "excess" over for up to a year. But with net metering, you're not going to put in a huge array and collect checks from the power company for all of the excess.
One person did mention a particularly "juicy" deal in New Mexico. That sort of thing is the exception, not the norm.
I don't know where you live, but I imagine it's somewhere tightly-packed, like DC/NY/LA/etc.. If that's the case, you should see how the rest of the nation lives... most places have a LOT of room on their roof. I've at least driven through almost every state in the nation, and the norm is for houses with a lot of room for something like this.
Let's see, 10% is about 55 mw/square inch, or 8 watts/square foot, am I correct? Most houses where I live can easily spare 500 square feet of roof space, and a not-insignificant portion can spare 1,000. Since the cells they talk about are described as performing exceptionally better than silicon in partial sunlight or shade, you could cover the parts of the roof that aren't inclined optimally, as well. And if you extended to the walls of the structure (like they're talking about doing), that's a lot of real-estate, too.
Some things about your numbers don't seem to add up. You've got 10,000 square feet, but can only generate 8 kilowatt-hours per day? I'll asssume that your area had a decent insolation, or you wouldn't have gone to the expense to use solar. Let's say 4 hours/day equivalent. That's 2,000 watts out of your panels, from 10,000 square feet, 5 watts/square foot. Since a 16% panel covering 15 square feet can produce up to about 200 watts - nearly triple what you saw - something really doesn't sound right. Even factoring for temperature-based derating, it sounds like your conditions were pretty far from prime for solar. But I could be wrong...
Our company outsourced a bunch of work to India. In a private conversation, I asked the V.P. why he did it...he was to-the-point, and said "It costs us $7 per hour out the door." Finding employees in the US with the skills would have cost more in salary alone, then factor in unemployment, health benefits, setting up a workstation for them... it's a huge difference.
Now, our company is the single largest player in our market. We're the 800-pound gorilla. We drove several competitors completely out of business. There's money there, we're not hurting. But when the guys in charge think "We could hire Indians instead, and split an extra $200,000 this year between ourselves...", then you know what the decision is going to be.
The solar can't produce on a continuous basis. The wind can't. But that's what the batteries are for. He's making it sound like a $100,000 system can't even handle a microwave, but a LOT of people do it with far less expensive systems.
In one of the articles, they claim to have the most efficient porphyrin dye in the world. If that's true, even with just 6.5% - or maybe they're a little above that - most people still have plenty of square footage on their roofs, it's just the cost-per-watt that matters. Well, maybe cost-per-kilowatt-hour, because longevity should be factored in.
No, they'll be perfectly happy. Every kilowatt-hour of energy that you pump back in is one that they're charging someone else for receiving... and only paying you a very small portion of what they charged them. If I recall, if they sell it to someone else for 10 cents, you'll get 1 or 2 cents.
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>> You can't talk about the inequality of rich and poor without talking about what it means to be rich or poor.
> Yes, actually, you can, as they are completely orthogonal issues.
Wow.
steve
When you say that we haven't gone beyond eliminating starvation, you're wrong. I know people who don't work. AT ALL. And not only do they get fed, they get health care as well. And if they *want* to go to school, many avenues are available to them, anywhere from reduced to no cost. I see it in action all of the time.
Now, not everyone takes advantage of that. That's a given. But it's there if they want.
Now, compare that to India: Even if you *want* to go to school, if you're from the wrong parts of society, too bad. You won't be able to. That's it, end of story. Getting into health care... let's say that you need an operation in India. It's up to *you* to pay people to donate blood, and if you don't get enough blood donated, you don't get the surgery. That's it, end of story. You see groups of people on hospital steps BEGGING for people to give blood so that they can be helped.
It's two different worlds: One where help is available if you want it, and one where quite often, help simply isn't available AT ALL.
I'll bet that you haven't ever lived outside of a "Western" nation, and haven't seen the conditions that I'm talking about. Once you do, your views change forever.
You can't talk about the inequality of rich and poor without talking about what it means to be rich or poor. If you consider the poor of the USA (or many other nations) to be "poor" in the same way as the poor of India, you're comparing apples to oranges. No, you're comparing apples to small rocks.
It has to be remembered that the "poor" in the USA are in a completely different class than the poor in India. Being "poor" in the USA is a DREAM for the poor in India (or the poor in most of the world, for that matter.)
Once you've lived in countries with truly poor people, you stop thinking of people here as "poor". I know people living on WIC, medicaid, housing assistance, utility assistance, tuition assistance, and more. And they live as well as the middle to upper-middle class in many other countries.
I've known single-mother families of 6 who lived basically on the charity of others, and they *still* lived a lifestyle that hundreds of millions in India would LOVE to live.
They just kill each other with other weapons. Knives, screwdrivers, things like that.
I've lived in a gunless country, people still killed each other. Instead of guns, they used machettes. I'm not joking.
steve
Watch "Born Into Brothels", and see just how much India is trying to do for the poor and unpriveliged. I could be wrong, but I think that India is the country with the starkest difference between the amount of wealth and the amount of adject poverty.
"Where porn comes from."
Everyone will know what you're talking about.
USB flash drives are a different matter.... that's like saying that a Lexus might not perform well because a Fiat doesn't.
=)
As for the limitted write-cycled, yes... but it's worlds different than it was in the old days, when flash got its bad rep - which was, at the time, deserved.
steve
Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks. If your drive has an average seek time of, say, 15 milliseconds, you're limitted to about 60 I/O operations per second no matter how little bandwidth you're using. While the actual transfer speed of flash is roughly similar to a current hard drive, the decrease in latency will be very appreciated in some situations.
Secondly, because they want to make money. If you want a "managed" service, you're their bread and butter. Note that the same T1 line, if you were to use it for long distance instead of data, would only cost you a tiny fraction if you agreed to use at least a certain amount of long distance. One of my friends who used to work for Qwest said that DSL support techs would say "We'll notify a technician", and the tech would only think of handling it if he was devoid of any other work AND completely bored. They don't want to keep DSL (or cable) on the same quality, they want to make what they can from those who *need* reliability.
Third, it's a small package, and you pay more per unit for small packaging. As an example, where I'm at, a point-to-point T1 costs $250 per month, or about $160 per megabit. On the other hand, a point-to-point T3 costs $1200 per month, or about $27 per megabit. That's between two buildings with on-premesis fiber, so no termination fees. If the provider has to pay someone else for termination, that can increase the cost in a hurry.
The real benefit here, which seems to have been overlooked, is access to all of that information in places where bandwidth is either very poor or non-existant - or, where political pressures make it impossible or unwise to view the information online. I could imagine these DVDs being passed around in countries like China...
... for buying MSI.
I've used other motherboards with the JMicron controller, and while they are as buggy as you can imagine, the motherboards allowed installing the OS from an optical drive on that controller.
It's not a controller issue, it's likely a BIOS issue.
If you have access to a hardware calibrator, good things can be done. They might not match exactly, but they can often be made to match enough to surprise most folks. You do have to pick a sort of "lowest common denominator" for brightness, though.
steve
+1 subtle. :-)
They don't deal well with being discharged deeply, and drivers don't deal well with having to recharge every time their battery is 30% drained. Use the full rated capacity of a lead-acid battery every time, and you're going to replace it VERY soon.
You can make them somewhat more robust for that sort of operation, but it involves compromises that don't really go over well when you put them in a car.
Lithium doesn't really pack *much* more energy density (in terms of volume), but does do it with less weight. That's terrific.
But while lithiums handle deep discharge much better than lead-acid batteries, they're still not as good as NiCad or NiMh. They're also a lot more expensive. And, probably the best argument against them... look at the fires that happen when laptop (or even CELL PHONE) lithium cells are damaged or shorted. Now, imagine a car packing a thousand times more getting in an accident... Sure, you'll say, they can put over-current protection on them. But the batteries in laptops have the same protection, you have to think of *damaged* batteries.
If you finished Street Fighter II without losing a single round, you got to see the credits. If you finished it without ever taking a single point of damage, you got to see pictures of the devs along with the credits. Pretty disappointing for beating an entire game perfectly.
Take a look through the states in that page, and pay attention to "net excess generation".
There are some places which will buy it back at retail rates, but there are more where you either don't get paid for excess, or at best get paid for the "avoided cost", which is where you usually end up getting a cent or two, certainly nowhere near what it would cost you (especially after taxes and fees) to purchase and use the same amount of energy from the company.
Net metering isn't selling back to the company, per se: It's just not paying for what you produced yourself.
If you actually produce more than you use in a month, few (if any) net metering billing styles will actually pay you for the overage. At best, you can usually roll the "excess" over for up to a year. But with net metering, you're not going to put in a huge array and collect checks from the power company for all of the excess.
One person did mention a particularly "juicy" deal in New Mexico. That sort of thing is the exception, not the norm.
I don't know where you live, but I imagine it's somewhere tightly-packed, like DC/NY/LA/etc.. If that's the case, you should see how the rest of the nation lives... most places have a LOT of room on their roof. I've at least driven through almost every state in the nation, and the norm is for houses with a lot of room for something like this.
Let's see, 10% is about 55 mw/square inch, or 8 watts/square foot, am I correct? Most houses where I live can easily spare 500 square feet of roof space, and a not-insignificant portion can spare 1,000. Since the cells they talk about are described as performing exceptionally better than silicon in partial sunlight or shade, you could cover the parts of the roof that aren't inclined optimally, as well. And if you extended to the walls of the structure (like they're talking about doing), that's a lot of real-estate, too.
Some things about your numbers don't seem to add up. You've got 10,000 square feet, but can only generate 8 kilowatt-hours per day? I'll asssume that your area had a decent insolation, or you wouldn't have gone to the expense to use solar. Let's say 4 hours/day equivalent. That's 2,000 watts out of your panels, from 10,000 square feet, 5 watts/square foot. Since a 16% panel covering 15 square feet can produce up to about 200 watts - nearly triple what you saw - something really doesn't sound right. Even factoring for temperature-based derating, it sounds like your conditions were pretty far from prime for solar. But I could be wrong...
Our company outsourced a bunch of work to India. In a private conversation, I asked the V.P. why he did it...he was to-the-point, and said "It costs us $7 per hour out the door." Finding employees in the US with the skills would have cost more in salary alone, then factor in unemployment, health benefits, setting up a workstation for them... it's a huge difference.
Now, our company is the single largest player in our market. We're the 800-pound gorilla. We drove several competitors completely out of business. There's money there, we're not hurting. But when the guys in charge think "We could hire Indians instead, and split an extra $200,000 this year between ourselves...", then you know what the decision is going to be.
The solar can't produce on a continuous basis. The wind can't. But that's what the batteries are for. He's making it sound like a $100,000 system can't even handle a microwave, but a LOT of people do it with far less expensive systems.
In one of the articles, they claim to have the most efficient porphyrin dye in the world. If that's true, even with just 6.5% - or maybe they're a little above that - most people still have plenty of square footage on their roofs, it's just the cost-per-watt that matters. Well, maybe cost-per-kilowatt-hour, because longevity should be factored in.
Or, they could deem night-time hours as "peak hours", and charge you more for electricity then instead of during the day. :-)
steve
No, they'll be perfectly happy. Every kilowatt-hour of energy that you pump back in is one that they're charging someone else for receiving... and only paying you a very small portion of what they charged them. If I recall, if they sell it to someone else for 10 cents, you'll get 1 or 2 cents.