I have to agree, even games that allow you to research multiple things at one time don't really give you any benefit to doing so. Space Empires, I'm looking at you.
Doing Tech 1 then 2 then 3 will get you the three techs just as fast as doing 1+2+3, with the added benefit that you'll get 1 and 2 a couple turns faster.
Personally, I'd do something like give a 1-10% advantage per additional tech you're researching to show the benefits of synergy and that a scientist suited for researching lasers is probably not going to do as good in biology.
Hmm... In a 'Research Point' setting, how about the points that go to a research field = RP/(number of research activities + 1).
1000 RP, 1 research topic (crash development) = 500 RP to that topic 1000 RP, 2 research topics (priority) = 333 RP to each topic, totaling 666 1000 RP, 9 topics = 100 RP each, each will take 5 times as long, but you'll get 9 techs in the time it'd take to get 5 serially.
Anyways, back more on the thread topic, growing new eyes would be great, but you still have the problem of restoring the nerve pathways and retraining the brain. It's entirely possible that you'd want a chip between the new eye and the brain to play translator, to make the transition earlier. Reducing therapy/usefulness from 5 years to 6 months (for example) might make it worth it.
There's limits to the more efficient charge control, as for tracking rails - I'm so far north that they matter less as well.
The basic facts of the matter is that any given system will give me around a third less energy for the investment than the same investment down below the mason-dixon line.
Ergo, I'm waiting for solar installs to be more or less standard down in the south before I go installing my own system. I've priced them out several times, just hasn't reached the point of making sense yet, even considering subsidizations.
I've also looked at putting a wind turbine up(I'm in a very small town, so I should be able to do it), but haven't been able to make that math make sense.
Solar power is pretty much limited to a maximum of.5 - IE it produces 50% of it's rated power over the course of a year due to the sun only being up half the time.
Realworld, especially if you're not using tilting panels, is more like 30% even in the desert.
And a lot of them even keep statistics, I think some even have Web interfaces.
You're right - The one I linked to DOES keep statistics, and has a GUI interface panel.
The smaller ones lack that, but are still around $.50/watt.
Can/will costs drop when even more people go installing them? Sure, but my thing right now is that since I'm just south of Canada I'm going to wait until most of the people below the Mason-Dixon line have installed them because I have cheap electricity and less sunlight. I might have to count on a.2 power factor, instead of.3-.4.
Doesn't mean that I can't bring up the point that the ancillery costs need to drop as well. Heck, if panels go below $.50/watt, the inverter becomes the new biggest expense.
Hmm... Assuming a 30% power factor, 1 watt of solar should produce 2.6kwh/year. $.26-.39 worth of electricity
At $3/watt installed cost, a 1KW install will produce $260-$390 worth of grid power a year*, $21.66-$32.50. Going on an average 20 year lifespan** and 5% cost of capital/loan, that would cost $19.80/month to service the capital.
$4/watt, cost rises to $26.40/month, no longer making sense in areas with cheap electricity(I pay $.10/kwh), and/or less sunlight. You can still save a moderate amount of money in higher cost areas like California.
$2/watt - monthly loan service is only $13.20 for our $2k investment, making us $8.46 per month, even assuming cheap electricity. I like, but sub-dollar panels and install costs per watt is still restricted to big commercial installs.
*Excepting fancier schemes like time billing and subsidizations. **I know they're guarenteed for 40, but call it a kinda penalty for the odds of a malfunction, cells failing and the company not making good on warranty, non-warranty damage, etc....
I'm talking just the panel consumer cost. I.e. you walk into a store and that's your price for the panel.
I think you need to reread my post. I asked for a source on the $.50/watt solar panels, then commented that the next that needs to happen is that the associated costs need to drop - which at that point would be double that of the solar panels themselves, thus a bigger target.
What I said: 'If true, the only thing remaining would be to drop the ancillary costs to a similar level. Right now that's running around $1/watt itself.'
When solar panels themselves were running $4-$5/watt, $1/watt ancillary costs weren't as big of a deal. With panels dropping below $1, they're now a big deal.
Well, unless you want to run everything off of DC, but that has issues in and of itself, and you'll likely STILL need a regulator/storage system except for things like sunfrost fridges that can be off 3/4 the day and still keep your stuff cold.
They're not arguing he's not responsable for the crimes he committed. They're arguing that what the US wants him to pay is the equivalent of a burglar robbing a house by walking through the back door that has no lock, then expecting the burglar to PAY for installing a lock.
Of course, at the expense it's probably also like all he stole was a postage stamp, and not a rare one either.
The Present Value of the accumulated savings does not, in many cases, fully justify the purchase of a new TV when a perfectly serviceable, albeit less energy efficient, and fully depreciated (i.e. fully owned) existing model is available and working.
This is so true. So many green people forget to realize the sunk value, resources, and pollution in something, whether it be a car, house, TV, or other appliance.
The whole cash for clunkers thing? I think it's very likely that most of the cars junked under the program would have produced less pollution for their owners than the replacements - just due to the sheer environmental cost of even an efficient car.
And when you reach the impassé of people who do not evaluate everything in terms of financial cost?
That's when their only recourse for extracting retribution from the company, the courts, step in as a more or less neutral third party and IT sets the price. As it does when the two parties are otherwise unable to come to an agreement.
Don't get me wrong, like most people I like clean air, water, food, etc... But I recognize that it's impossible to run a modern society without sacrifice.
Without cars we wouldn't have car accidents and the ensuing fatalities and smog. But on the average, cars increase our quality of life so much that it's worth it. That doesn't mean that we can't afford to optimize to maximize our benefits - Safer cars, cleaner cars, more efficient cars.
Hell, more efficient city planning could do so much if we could convince the NIMBYs to cooperate.
Just to put it in a different perspective, a single gigawatt nuclear power plant with a production factor of.9 will produce 7,884,000,000 kwh/year
Still, I think you're being too tough on yourself. Given that near 100% of households have at least one TV, and from my readings most TVs have around a 10 year lifespan, that would be 10% of households replacing their set each year.
That would be 135,000,000 kwh/yr saved, per year, increasing to 1,350,000,000 when all sets are replaced, assuming that people don't go to even BIGGER* sets that end up consuming the same amount of power despite being more efficient for the screen area.
Anyways, even in the end you're looking at eliminating 17% of the demand that a new nuclear plant could service.
*Just to give an example, my energy star 32" CRT that's nearly a decade old consumes less power per unit of viewable screen area than my 42" energy star LCD TV. This was measured using a meter, not using faceplate values. The LCD consumes close to it's faceplate, the CRT doesn't.
One problem I have with all this efficiency stuff is that we can't just ignore generation like California has attempted to do.
Just look at what they're proposing to replace traditional gasoline vehicles, even hyrids - plug in Hybrids and EVs. Both of them use electricity instead of gasoline. All well and good, especially if the electricity was generated in a green manner.
But, consider the consumer that averages 30 miles a day. This gives you 10k miles a year, but I'm figuring the road warriors who are on the high end still mostly drive liquid fuel vehicles. Using the Tesla Roadster as an example, consumption of electricity is on the order of 3 miles/kwh*, or 28kwh per 100 miles epa est(3.5m/kwh). That means the consumer will use 10 kwh to power his vehicle, or 300kwh extra during a month.
Now, the 'average' family uses ~1000kwh/month, so this will be a 30% increase in their usage, easily wiping out increased efficiencies from replacing light bulbs and appliances with versions that use 10-30% less electricity.
On the plus side, the cost of solar panel is expected to hit 1 dollar a watt by before the end of 2010, and as cheap as 50 cents a watt by the end of 2012.
Do you have a link on that?
If true, the only thing remaining would be to drop the ancillerary costs to a similar level. Right now that's running around $1/watt itself.
For example, a 6kw inverter runs $3.6k. That's $.50/watt right there, without getting into wiring, mounting costs for the panels, paying for the electrician to hook everything up*, etc...
*You can't count on everyone, or even a significant fraction of the population to be able to do this stuff themselves.
Hmm... $16 converting CAD to USD. What I'd really need to do is check the cost of living.
I tend to get pissed when people constantly pick on Walmart. Perhaps sad to say, but Walmart is often a better deal for an entry level worker than the small businesses often touted by others - in my area such smaller businesses often pay less and frequently don't offer health insurance.
Same deal with fast food industries vs a lot of office jobs like filing clerk. The fast food job actually pays more.
Still to me this indicates that skilled managers are at a premium, so we're seeing something of a wage war. A smart employee who wants to stay with Apple might go to the company go 'Microsoft's giving me this tempting offer...' and get a raise to stay there.
It's why my ideas for improving real income center around two things - increasing productivity and increasing competition for workers. If companies are having a hard time hiring people, but the people are worth it, they'll offer higher wages to attract them.
If I was approached I'd keep in mind that this is the same Microsoft who've just laid off 5000 staff to get their balance sheet looking good.
I'd say that that's a fundimental responsability of a business - the ultimate goal of a business is to make money, after all. It should do so in a responsable mannor that will have it still earning money in a decade.
Businesses have to 'right size' every so often, and if they're not in the habit of doing it continuously, you get big layoffs like this. Microsoft has how many divisions, it's fingers in how many pies? They do an OS, business applications to include server side databases, client side applications, games, hardware, internet, advertising, game consoles, games for said consoles, etc...
It's quite possible for one division to be laying people off while another is hiring - and trying to transfer/cross train them isn't always the best option. During the economic crisis, a lot of the layoffs were due to cancelled/broken contracts that Microsoft had employed the people in anticipation of performing. Without said contracts, it makes little sense to keep the people employed if the business slump isn't expected to be relatively brief.
Not necessarily a bad idea. You can even use plastics and concrete instead - sure, they're poor conductors, but water's so good that you just build it bigger.
I watched a special on the live kelp aquarium, they pump LOTS of seawater and it's very maintenance intensive - they need to run special pigs through the pipes to keep them clean and hire divers to scrub the outsides.
In something like this cheap construction cost and corrosion resistance is probably a bigger concern than thermal coupling efficiency.
No - to reconstruct 1 sector you have to read one sector from every other drive, then write 1 sector to the replacement drive. Effectively, to reconstruct you have to read thw whole raid. So the read and write speeds both count.
That's for traditional RAID 5/6 applications. I was responding to the cloud system proposal, where there's no longer necessarily a 1:1 relationship between drives, sectors, and the data contained on them.
don't get it, why not just seal them hermetically with helium inside, and not worry about outside air pressure?
1. Hasn't been necessary 2. Helium is expensive 3. Sealing something Helium-tight is expensive, about as bad as trying to seal in hydrogen* 4. Fairly sensitive to pressure - not a problem in a non-airtight HD, but a problem in a sealed HD that's heating up. 5. Cooling can be an issue
*Mostly because He tends to stay monoatomic, H pairs up into H2. End result is that the H2 molecule is around the same size as a He atom.
This means that drive rebuilds become subject to swarm speeds (since there is an equal chance that it is pulling data from every other drive in the tower).
Well, I'd imagine that the bottleneck would be the replacement drive's write speed, wouldn't it? Even if the controller has enough spare block space on all it's other drives, the new drive is still empty, and that takes quite a bit of time to fill today.
Though I suppose you could restore redundancy very quickly via putting half of all NEW data on the new drive, while the lost redundancy is restored using spare space on all the other drives while waiting for the new drive to come online.
Even partial evacuation would help, but you run into the problem that the read heads are designed to use the air to keep them from contacting the platters, so you'd need to replace that effect somehow.
The Space shuttle and ISS even have special sensors to shut the hard drives down if the air pressure goes too low. Reading about which was how I found out that hard drives are designed to use air.
Not to mention that you're now trying to build an air tight container, but if you're looking at ultra-high performance drives that's less of an issue.
Still, you have to look at how much such a drive would cost, and whether the cost would ever be repaid - if I was looking at investing in such technology I'd be concerned that Flash would outpace my vacuum drives before I got them released. Even if I DO manage to find a niche, would the niche last long enough against flash memory that's getting faster and cheaper so quickly?
For certain data sets and access patterns, flash is already much cheaper than the old raid options - the best example I saw was a dataset of a few hundred gigabytes that was mostly read-only, but accessed so much so randomly they had to mirror it on 10 hard drives to meet the read demands. One professional level SSD performed BETTER, while costing less than half of the setup.
Oil and electricity prices aren't really connected. Oil is an insignificant method of producing electricity in the USA, thus electricity costs should stay around the same, though they might double if EV's become common enough.
Note that I was saying you can't just plop a passivhaus everywhere, that they need to be regionalized.
For the Georgia example, it'd take more than 500 watts of air conditioner just to take the heat generated by humans out of the house. I'd be more tempted to install a solar powered absorbtion chiller personally. You're also going to want some sort of dehumidification system, maybe a cold water system, and the massive construction would help keep temperatures down when the sun sets and the active cooling stops.
You can still build a energy efficient home in Georgia, you just have to take different steps.
forgot to finish: I didn't install the surge supressor to protect my CFLs, but my home's electronics as a whole, and the CFLs lasted quite a while before I installed it.
Let's see, 100 watt bulb, 5 hours a day, 30 days a month would cost me $1.50
If the replacement is 25 watts*, it'll cost me $.375, saving me $1.125/month. For that one bulb. Hardly 15 cents/month total.
I have no idea of your power needs. I've put in actual tube flourescents in my two highest traffic areas - the kitchen and living room, they're even more efficient.
Basically, I think what you're experiencing is pretty unusual, and I'm not going to make a bet without checking for the obvious first. Either you're buying bad lights(solved by ME getting them), or there's a serious problem with your power.
I'm not talking about a complicated check for the outlet, I'm talking about taking a quick look at it while testing voltage with a multimeter for any WTF problems like my socket in series with a light. At the same time, hit your house up with a more complicated tester to see if the power's spiking or something.
A building level surge supressor or power conditioner doesn't have to be that expensive, I installed one for less than $100, just to be paranoid.
I've read up on PassivHaus, and while they're good in many areas, they aren't suitable for all areas of the USA. I'm a big fan of regionalization, personally. You build homes suitable for the area they're going to be put in.
A New England home would be minorly different than one in North Dakota, but would be vastly different than one in Texas, much less Florida.
PassivHaus homes aren't designed for the cooling requirements of a deep south home, they're much more about retaining heat than getting rid of it. Their ground requirements wouldn't work in many areas.
You have to remember that it IS possible to spend so much money on energy efficiency that you'll never see a return on your money(IE it'd be cheaper buying the energy to keep the house at the right temperature than building it to NOT need the energy). I do object to minimum-standard McMansions.
Somebody building a home should take into account local conditions, building material availability, and costs to construct a high quality economical building. This WILL involve a higher up-front cost than current methods, but should pay themselves off in 20 years, even considering interest on the loan.
Yeah well I don't like how you dismissed MY observations as if I'm some kind of retard.
Why do you keep assuming others are demeaning your intelligence?
You have a car, I have a car. My car's been functioning just fine for the last decade, only killed when I ran it off the road to avoid a tractor(my own fault). Meanwhile you've suffered lemon after lemon.
You constantly lampoon cars in response, which I can understand. But I don't share your experience. Why wouldn't I figure that there's something wrong. Maybe your car selection skills are such that you keep hitting on lemons. Maybe you don't perform the necessary maintenance.
If I'd wanted to call you stupid I could have written my posts in a far different fashion.
No the correct solution is to stick with the technology that works (incandescents), because I can't afford to keep throwing-away hundreds of dollars on CFLs after the incandescents are banned in 2012.
For you. CFLs are working quite well for me and my family. In three different states. Again, what's the difference? You mention electrical issues in another post, have you investigated further? Hooked up a multimeter and checked? Do you experience heightened failures for other pieces of electrical equipment?
Oh you don't want to accept the challenge. You're not as confident now.
Well, considering you gave me about as much notice as the town council gave Arthur Dent, sure, crow your superiority.
This ventures into internet tough guy territory(since we're both on a anonymous website), but I'd take your challange with some measures - 1. I provide the CFLs. 2. Outlets are checked for proper voltage/installation/suitability - IE no sockets in series with lights, no putting a 100watt equivalent in a fixture intended for a 40. 3. Somebody installs a home level surge supressor in your house, or at least checks the power with something that can detect spikes/noise. 4. Average life exceeds a year, so early failure of one defective unit isn't a failure.
YOU FIRST. Show me the data that a CFL can handle all of the various roles (including enclosed fixtures, refrigerators, and ovens) that incandescent bulbs have handled every day for the last ~100 years.
I'd never propose that CFLs be a 100% replacement. For me, they've worked in sizes between 60 and 100 watt equivalents quite well.
I'd imagine a small LED system would work quite well in a fridge, don't feel like checking the upper end. Besides, utility bulbs like what goes in fridges and ovens are special anyways - and not particularly efficient. Not a big deal because they're not normally on long enough to matter(the fridge), and in an oven they just contribute a bit more heat. Heck, LED/cold capable CFL would help a fridge - a malfunction that leaves the light on all the time won't destroy the inside lining.
And yet they've already made it mandatory, by law, to adopt them. That's bass-backwards.
They merely require bulbs become more efficient. The new high efficiency incandescents, the LED lights, even some halogen bulbs meet the new standards, so it's not like they're requiring CFLs specifically.
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I have to agree, even games that allow you to research multiple things at one time don't really give you any benefit to doing so. Space Empires, I'm looking at you.
Doing Tech 1 then 2 then 3 will get you the three techs just as fast as doing 1+2+3, with the added benefit that you'll get 1 and 2 a couple turns faster.
Personally, I'd do something like give a 1-10% advantage per additional tech you're researching to show the benefits of synergy and that a scientist suited for researching lasers is probably not going to do as good in biology.
Hmm... In a 'Research Point' setting, how about the points that go to a research field = RP/(number of research activities + 1).
1000 RP, 1 research topic (crash development) = 500 RP to that topic
1000 RP, 2 research topics (priority) = 333 RP to each topic, totaling 666
1000 RP, 9 topics = 100 RP each, each will take 5 times as long, but you'll get 9 techs in the time it'd take to get 5 serially.
Anyways, back more on the thread topic, growing new eyes would be great, but you still have the problem of restoring the nerve pathways and retraining the brain. It's entirely possible that you'd want a chip between the new eye and the brain to play translator, to make the transition earlier. Reducing therapy/usefulness from 5 years to 6 months (for example) might make it worth it.
There's limits to the more efficient charge control, as for tracking rails - I'm so far north that they matter less as well.
The basic facts of the matter is that any given system will give me around a third less energy for the investment than the same investment down below the mason-dixon line.
Ergo, I'm waiting for solar installs to be more or less standard down in the south before I go installing my own system. I've priced them out several times, just hasn't reached the point of making sense yet, even considering subsidizations.
I've also looked at putting a wind turbine up(I'm in a very small town, so I should be able to do it), but haven't been able to make that math make sense.
What exactly do you mean here?
Terminology goof, I meant to say capacity factor.
Solar power is pretty much limited to a maximum of .5 - IE it produces 50% of it's rated power over the course of a year due to the sun only being up half the time.
Realworld, especially if you're not using tilting panels, is more like 30% even in the desert.
Being in North Dakota, I'd be more at 20%.
And a lot of them even keep statistics, I think some even have Web interfaces.
You're right - The one I linked to DOES keep statistics, and has a GUI interface panel.
The smaller ones lack that, but are still around $.50/watt.
Can/will costs drop when even more people go installing them? Sure, but my thing right now is that since I'm just south of Canada I'm going to wait until most of the people below the Mason-Dixon line have installed them because I have cheap electricity and less sunlight. I might have to count on a .2 power factor, instead of .3-.4.
He's talking about panels only.
Doesn't mean that I can't bring up the point that the ancillery costs need to drop as well. Heck, if panels go below $.50/watt, the inverter becomes the new biggest expense.
Hmm... Assuming a 30% power factor, 1 watt of solar should produce 2.6kwh/year. $.26-.39 worth of electricity
At $3/watt installed cost, a 1KW install will produce $260-$390 worth of grid power a year*, $21.66-$32.50. Going on an average 20 year lifespan** and 5% cost of capital/loan, that would cost $19.80/month to service the capital.
$4/watt, cost rises to $26.40/month, no longer making sense in areas with cheap electricity(I pay $.10/kwh), and/or less sunlight. You can still save a moderate amount of money in higher cost areas like California.
$2/watt - monthly loan service is only $13.20 for our $2k investment, making us $8.46 per month, even assuming cheap electricity. I like, but sub-dollar panels and install costs per watt is still restricted to big commercial installs.
*Excepting fancier schemes like time billing and subsidizations.
**I know they're guarenteed for 40, but call it a kinda penalty for the odds of a malfunction, cells failing and the company not making good on warranty, non-warranty damage, etc....
I'm talking just the panel consumer cost. I.e. you walk into a store and that's your price for the panel.
I think you need to reread my post. I asked for a source on the $.50/watt solar panels, then commented that the next that needs to happen is that the associated costs need to drop - which at that point would be double that of the solar panels themselves, thus a bigger target.
What I said: 'If true, the only thing remaining would be to drop the ancillary costs to a similar level. Right now that's running around $1/watt itself.'
When solar panels themselves were running $4-$5/watt, $1/watt ancillary costs weren't as big of a deal. With panels dropping below $1, they're now a big deal.
Well, unless you want to run everything off of DC, but that has issues in and of itself, and you'll likely STILL need a regulator/storage system except for things like sunfrost fridges that can be off 3/4 the day and still keep your stuff cold.
They're not arguing he's not responsable for the crimes he committed. They're arguing that what the US wants him to pay is the equivalent of a burglar robbing a house by walking through the back door that has no lock, then expecting the burglar to PAY for installing a lock.
Of course, at the expense it's probably also like all he stole was a postage stamp, and not a rare one either.
The Present Value of the accumulated savings does not, in many cases, fully justify the purchase of a new TV when a perfectly serviceable, albeit less energy efficient, and fully depreciated (i.e. fully owned) existing model is available and working.
This is so true. So many green people forget to realize the sunk value, resources, and pollution in something, whether it be a car, house, TV, or other appliance.
The whole cash for clunkers thing? I think it's very likely that most of the cars junked under the program would have produced less pollution for their owners than the replacements - just due to the sheer environmental cost of even an efficient car.
And when you reach the impassé of people who do not evaluate everything in terms of financial cost?
That's when their only recourse for extracting retribution from the company, the courts, step in as a more or less neutral third party and IT sets the price. As it does when the two parties are otherwise unable to come to an agreement.
Don't get me wrong, like most people I like clean air, water, food, etc... But I recognize that it's impossible to run a modern society without sacrifice.
Without cars we wouldn't have car accidents and the ensuing fatalities and smog. But on the average, cars increase our quality of life so much that it's worth it. That doesn't mean that we can't afford to optimize to maximize our benefits - Safer cars, cleaner cars, more efficient cars.
Hell, more efficient city planning could do so much if we could convince the NIMBYs to cooperate.
1,350,000,000kwh/yr * 0.005 = 6,750,000kwh/yr
Just to put it in a different perspective, a single gigawatt nuclear power plant with a production factor of .9 will produce 7,884,000,000 kwh/year
Still, I think you're being too tough on yourself. Given that near 100% of households have at least one TV, and from my readings most TVs have around a 10 year lifespan, that would be 10% of households replacing their set each year.
That would be 135,000,000 kwh/yr saved, per year, increasing to 1,350,000,000 when all sets are replaced, assuming that people don't go to even BIGGER* sets that end up consuming the same amount of power despite being more efficient for the screen area.
Anyways, even in the end you're looking at eliminating 17% of the demand that a new nuclear plant could service.
*Just to give an example, my energy star 32" CRT that's nearly a decade old consumes less power per unit of viewable screen area than my 42" energy star LCD TV. This was measured using a meter, not using faceplate values. The LCD consumes close to it's faceplate, the CRT doesn't.
One problem I have with all this efficiency stuff is that we can't just ignore generation like California has attempted to do.
Just look at what they're proposing to replace traditional gasoline vehicles, even hyrids - plug in Hybrids and EVs. Both of them use electricity instead of gasoline. All well and good, especially if the electricity was generated in a green manner.
But, consider the consumer that averages 30 miles a day. This gives you 10k miles a year, but I'm figuring the road warriors who are on the high end still mostly drive liquid fuel vehicles. Using the Tesla Roadster as an example, consumption of electricity is on the order of 3 miles/kwh*, or 28kwh per 100 miles epa est(3.5m/kwh). That means the consumer will use 10 kwh to power his vehicle, or 300kwh extra during a month.
Now, the 'average' family uses ~1000kwh/month, so this will be a 30% increase in their usage, easily wiping out increased efficiencies from replacing light bulbs and appliances with versions that use 10-30% less electricity.
*Buried in the article.
On the plus side, the cost of solar panel is expected to hit 1 dollar a watt by before the end of 2010, and as cheap as 50 cents a watt by the end of 2012.
Do you have a link on that?
If true, the only thing remaining would be to drop the ancillerary costs to a similar level. Right now that's running around $1/watt itself.
For example, a 6kw inverter runs $3.6k. That's $.50/watt right there, without getting into wiring, mounting costs for the panels, paying for the electrician to hook everything up*, etc...
*You can't count on everyone, or even a significant fraction of the population to be able to do this stuff themselves.
Hmm... $16 converting CAD to USD. What I'd really need to do is check the cost of living.
I tend to get pissed when people constantly pick on Walmart. Perhaps sad to say, but Walmart is often a better deal for an entry level worker than the small businesses often touted by others - in my area such smaller businesses often pay less and frequently don't offer health insurance.
Same deal with fast food industries vs a lot of office jobs like filing clerk. The fast food job actually pays more.
Still to me this indicates that skilled managers are at a premium, so we're seeing something of a wage war. A smart employee who wants to stay with Apple might go to the company go 'Microsoft's giving me this tempting offer...' and get a raise to stay there.
It's why my ideas for improving real income center around two things - increasing productivity and increasing competition for workers. If companies are having a hard time hiring people, but the people are worth it, they'll offer higher wages to attract them.
If I was approached I'd keep in mind that this is the same Microsoft who've just laid off 5000 staff to get their balance sheet looking good.
I'd say that that's a fundimental responsability of a business - the ultimate goal of a business is to make money, after all. It should do so in a responsable mannor that will have it still earning money in a decade.
Businesses have to 'right size' every so often, and if they're not in the habit of doing it continuously, you get big layoffs like this. Microsoft has how many divisions, it's fingers in how many pies? They do an OS, business applications to include server side databases, client side applications, games, hardware, internet, advertising, game consoles, games for said consoles, etc...
It's quite possible for one division to be laying people off while another is hiring - and trying to transfer/cross train them isn't always the best option. During the economic crisis, a lot of the layoffs were due to cancelled/broken contracts that Microsoft had employed the people in anticipation of performing. Without said contracts, it makes little sense to keep the people employed if the business slump isn't expected to be relatively brief.
Not necessarily a bad idea. You can even use plastics and concrete instead - sure, they're poor conductors, but water's so good that you just build it bigger.
I watched a special on the live kelp aquarium, they pump LOTS of seawater and it's very maintenance intensive - they need to run special pigs through the pipes to keep them clean and hire divers to scrub the outsides.
In something like this cheap construction cost and corrosion resistance is probably a bigger concern than thermal coupling efficiency.
No - to reconstruct 1 sector you have to read one sector from every other drive, then write 1 sector to the replacement drive. Effectively, to reconstruct you have to read thw whole raid. So the read and write speeds both count.
That's for traditional RAID 5/6 applications. I was responding to the cloud system proposal, where there's no longer necessarily a 1:1 relationship between drives, sectors, and the data contained on them.
don't get it, why not just seal them hermetically with helium inside, and not worry about outside air pressure?
1. Hasn't been necessary
2. Helium is expensive
3. Sealing something Helium-tight is expensive, about as bad as trying to seal in hydrogen*
4. Fairly sensitive to pressure - not a problem in a non-airtight HD, but a problem in a sealed HD that's heating up.
5. Cooling can be an issue
*Mostly because He tends to stay monoatomic, H pairs up into H2. End result is that the H2 molecule is around the same size as a He atom.
This means that drive rebuilds become subject to swarm speeds (since there is an equal chance that it is pulling data from every other drive in the tower).
Well, I'd imagine that the bottleneck would be the replacement drive's write speed, wouldn't it? Even if the controller has enough spare block space on all it's other drives, the new drive is still empty, and that takes quite a bit of time to fill today.
Though I suppose you could restore redundancy very quickly via putting half of all NEW data on the new drive, while the lost redundancy is restored using spare space on all the other drives while waiting for the new drive to come online.
Even partial evacuation would help, but you run into the problem that the read heads are designed to use the air to keep them from contacting the platters, so you'd need to replace that effect somehow.
The Space shuttle and ISS even have special sensors to shut the hard drives down if the air pressure goes too low. Reading about which was how I found out that hard drives are designed to use air.
Not to mention that you're now trying to build an air tight container, but if you're looking at ultra-high performance drives that's less of an issue.
Still, you have to look at how much such a drive would cost, and whether the cost would ever be repaid - if I was looking at investing in such technology I'd be concerned that Flash would outpace my vacuum drives before I got them released. Even if I DO manage to find a niche, would the niche last long enough against flash memory that's getting faster and cheaper so quickly?
For certain data sets and access patterns, flash is already much cheaper than the old raid options - the best example I saw was a dataset of a few hundred gigabytes that was mostly read-only, but accessed so much so randomly they had to mirror it on 10 hard drives to meet the read demands. One professional level SSD performed BETTER, while costing less than half of the setup.
Oil and electricity prices aren't really connected. Oil is an insignificant method of producing electricity in the USA, thus electricity costs should stay around the same, though they might double if EV's become common enough.
Note that I was saying you can't just plop a passivhaus everywhere, that they need to be regionalized.
For the Georgia example, it'd take more than 500 watts of air conditioner just to take the heat generated by humans out of the house. I'd be more tempted to install a solar powered absorbtion chiller personally. You're also going to want some sort of dehumidification system, maybe a cold water system, and the massive construction would help keep temperatures down when the sun sets and the active cooling stops.
You can still build a energy efficient home in Georgia, you just have to take different steps.
forgot to finish:
I didn't install the surge supressor to protect my CFLs, but my home's electronics as a whole, and the CFLs lasted quite a while before I installed it.
Let's see, 100 watt bulb, 5 hours a day, 30 days a month would cost me $1.50
If the replacement is 25 watts*, it'll cost me $.375, saving me $1.125/month. For that one bulb. Hardly 15 cents/month total.
I have no idea of your power needs. I've put in actual tube flourescents in my two highest traffic areas - the kitchen and living room, they're even more efficient.
Basically, I think what you're experiencing is pretty unusual, and I'm not going to make a bet without checking for the obvious first. Either you're buying bad lights(solved by ME getting them), or there's a serious problem with your power.
I'm not talking about a complicated check for the outlet, I'm talking about taking a quick look at it while testing voltage with a multimeter for any WTF problems like my socket in series with a light. At the same time, hit your house up with a more complicated tester to see if the power's spiking or something.
A building level surge supressor or power conditioner doesn't have to be that expensive, I installed one for less than $100, just to be paranoid.
*My 100 watt equivalent is 23, but I'll be nice.
Reactive power still requires burning more coal to rebalance the line.
It takes a capacitor to rebalance the line. It only takes burning more coal to make up the extra resistance losses from the higher VA levels.
10A 50% of the time wastes more power as heat over a wire as 5A 100% of the time, even though they average out to the same number of watts.
I've read up on PassivHaus, and while they're good in many areas, they aren't suitable for all areas of the USA. I'm a big fan of regionalization, personally. You build homes suitable for the area they're going to be put in.
A New England home would be minorly different than one in North Dakota, but would be vastly different than one in Texas, much less Florida.
PassivHaus homes aren't designed for the cooling requirements of a deep south home, they're much more about retaining heat than getting rid of it. Their ground requirements wouldn't work in many areas.
You have to remember that it IS possible to spend so much money on energy efficiency that you'll never see a return on your money(IE it'd be cheaper buying the energy to keep the house at the right temperature than building it to NOT need the energy). I do object to minimum-standard McMansions.
Somebody building a home should take into account local conditions, building material availability, and costs to construct a high quality economical building. This WILL involve a higher up-front cost than current methods, but should pay themselves off in 20 years, even considering interest on the loan.
Yeah well I don't like how you dismissed MY observations as if I'm some kind of retard.
Why do you keep assuming others are demeaning your intelligence?
You have a car, I have a car. My car's been functioning just fine for the last decade, only killed when I ran it off the road to avoid a tractor(my own fault). Meanwhile you've suffered lemon after lemon.
You constantly lampoon cars in response, which I can understand. But I don't share your experience. Why wouldn't I figure that there's something wrong. Maybe your car selection skills are such that you keep hitting on lemons. Maybe you don't perform the necessary maintenance.
If I'd wanted to call you stupid I could have written my posts in a far different fashion.
No the correct solution is to stick with the technology that works (incandescents), because I can't afford to keep throwing-away hundreds of dollars on CFLs after the incandescents are banned in 2012.
For you. CFLs are working quite well for me and my family. In three different states. Again, what's the difference? You mention electrical issues in another post, have you investigated further? Hooked up a multimeter and checked? Do you experience heightened failures for other pieces of electrical equipment?
Oh you don't want to accept the challenge. You're not as confident now.
Well, considering you gave me about as much notice as the town council gave Arthur Dent, sure, crow your superiority.
This ventures into internet tough guy territory(since we're both on a anonymous website), but I'd take your challange with some measures - 1. I provide the CFLs. 2. Outlets are checked for proper voltage/installation/suitability - IE no sockets in series with lights, no putting a 100watt equivalent in a fixture intended for a 40. 3. Somebody installs a home level surge supressor in your house, or at least checks the power with something that can detect spikes/noise. 4. Average life exceeds a year, so early failure of one defective unit isn't a failure.
YOU FIRST. Show me the data that a CFL can handle all of the various roles (including enclosed fixtures, refrigerators, and ovens) that incandescent bulbs have handled every day for the last ~100 years.
I'd never propose that CFLs be a 100% replacement. For me, they've worked in sizes between 60 and 100 watt equivalents quite well.
I'd imagine a small LED system would work quite well in a fridge, don't feel like checking the upper end. Besides, utility bulbs like what goes in fridges and ovens are special anyways - and not particularly efficient. Not a big deal because they're not normally on long enough to matter(the fridge), and in an oven they just contribute a bit more heat. Heck, LED/cold capable CFL would help a fridge - a malfunction that leaves the light on all the time won't destroy the inside lining.
And yet they've already made it mandatory, by law, to adopt them. That's bass-backwards.
They merely require bulbs become more efficient. The new high efficiency incandescents, the LED lights, even some halogen bulbs meet the new standards, so it's not like they're requiring CFLs specifically.