The simple fact that you wrote that post makes you incapable of realizing that there is an actual, non-scientific world of "regular folks" that you never come into contact with. Feel free to ignore my previous observation; you're little circle of friends and acquaintances clearly does not qualify you to comment on the general population.
Oh, and you're not in the target market for this laptop, so it shouldn't really matter to you anyway.
"...and likely plays havoc with global models of climate change"
So, they think it might make a difference in the model, but they don't know - which means they haven't tested it and are going on gut instinct that a single boundary condition to a problem with thousands of boundary conditions (not all equal, of course) will completely reverse the theory and find out that the earth is acting in a way opposite to our expectations.
Call me when they actually update the model and correlate it with global temperature readings. Being wrong in one area is no big deal. Being wrong and having it completely invalidate the overall results is quite different.
Simple observation of people. I happen to be in a field where I interact with both professionals and non-professionals on a daily basis, along a pretty wide socioeconomic spectrum. While entirely non-scientific, it's amazing how true a lot of stereotypes are. Those who fall outside those limits don't think they really exist, but they do, and in a much larger swath of the population than you can imagine.
In the top ten percent of the personal market, women want very similar things to men. In the bottom 90, they want pink frilly stuff. If you want the 90%, you have to figure out how to silence the 10% of people you're going to offend.
Hint: Men are the same way (not the pink part). Give them sports data and stuff with their favorite team logos.
I'm late arriving to this flogging, but just in case you're still reading and nobody else has mentioned it: perform your work. If you are the expert, there are people who will pay to hear you in person. It won't make you rich, but it's not unlikely that you can get a 250-750 dollars a head for a day seminar. Multiply that by 30-50 for a small room / mid-market and you can take your expertise directly to your market. Since you've already published the book, you can include it with the seminar (inflating the cost to cover a tidy profit per book), or offer it for sale. A friend does this for his niche and nets about $2-4k for a day (well, a night and a day - probably 16 hours). This is a small market, where he likely gets only 15-20 tops and the hourly billing rates for professionals hover in the $80-120/hr mark.
Yes, it's frustrating. No, there's not much you can do about it. It sounds like you have a publisher, so asking for an unencumbered release in PDF format for a significant discount (my breakpoint is about $15-20, but I'm a cheapskate) with an ad for your seminar registration website probably isn't an option. While I can empathize with your frustration, when this has happened to me in the past my response has been to modify my distribution to reduce the damage. It's not perfect, but I get paid my fair share.
And it's worse - you've got 30 days in your month, but there are only 20 workdays so you'll need special weekend incentives to make people want to make the trip. So you're closer to needing 3/4 million a day, and that's just to break even on debt service. Operational expenses, maintenance, overhead and profit aren't even counted.
If you get that masters in the evenings, then the question is Candidate A with 10 years and a MS, or Candidate B with an MS and 8 years. If the entry requirements are a BS, you may as well start working. Unless, of course, you're independently wealthy already and are just looking to fulfill your personal goals for challenging work and don't really need to worry about a "career" or paying bills short term. In that case, go get the degree.
I got the impression that the purpose was to actually find out what is being used. I'm actually a bit surprised that this doesn't exist already in the form of licensing records. It probably does, but isn't accessible or searchable in a useful manner. It would be a nice for-fee addition to the Google Earth maps for prospective operators to be able to view the spectrum map in their area.
You must not be in a professional field. We keep our books as references, often for out entire careers. I still use two or three of my texts - from 20 years ago - on a weekly basis (okay, maybe monthly). It's hard to loan your kindle to someone to look something up, but very easy to do so with a single textbook.
Kindle is an entertainment device, not a business one (not yet, at least). And I'm okay saying that a lot of non-technical (and some technical) classes in College are merely entertainment.
If I could afford (or, more accurately, justify) a DSLR, I'd drop my P&S in a second. It didn't matter as much when we were all film - grab a Yashica T4 and you got great pictures because you used the same film. Most digital P&Ss have such little sensors that the noise is significant for anything other than full daylight. The bigger sensor gets you lower noise and more useable shots. I don't want my inside pics looking like I picked up a roll of Konica 3200.
Digital photography really just takes a lot of the ongoing expense out of the hobby/profession, and allows us to take less than perfect shots and "correct" them easier. Recently, it's also allowed better results on the fast end with the best sensors. With Nikon finally putting out a full frame DSLR, they should be affordable in a couple of years, and I'll dig out my bag'o'lenses I have for my old F4s. Then I'll be happy. I still grab the F4 when I know I'm going to be low light and want to take shots quickly. I got some great shots of my kid with a newborn lamb about 3 years ago that I could have never done with a digital. The gap is closing fast though (has already closed, I think), if you have enough money. BTW - I want full frame for max sensor size, and so my 20mm is still a wide angle lens, not some boring 3?mm.
I believe silicone valley is a bit south of where you were intending to refer. And they're not really into tech, but the IP is pretty entertaining nonetheless.
You've hit two keys. Why does it have to have such a large bezel, and why does it have to be non-foldable. Most phones are down to 1/4" or less bezel, so I presume it's not a technical limitation. We have seen prototypes of screens which can be bent if you had a clamshell case. 8.5x11 doesn't have to be the target size, either. Since most paper has a border or at least 1/2", you could reasonably have an 8x6 device when closed that opens up to have the readable size of a letter (or A4) paper. Depending on the resolution and format, ebooks might even be displayed as a two-page landscape format, allowing a more book-like experience.
Don't know 'bout you, but the only rips I tend to see are recodes to that level for 1080, and about 4-5GB for 720. AFAIK, there are no licensed online sources for BR downloads, so it's more of a random metric. Like Libraries of Congress - it's not like anybody actually stores a LoC on a disc, but people still insist on using it as a unit of measure.
Just remember to break them in for a week or two in the direction you plan on using them. It's so easy to forget that last part, or forget to label them and then re-install them backwards. Naturally for data, server-client direction is the directionality you're concerned with. I find a some data cables need as much as two weeks to break in, but the drop in latency is noticeable to discriminating IT professionals.
BTW - I like random for video and pink noise for audio for about 8 days, but others swear by switching between the primary listening/viewing material (or data packets with the frame size you intend to use later), and a generic white noise. It may warm up the overall picture/sound/data, but I like the more pristine results I get from mine, and always re-condition them the same way every six months.;-)
This has, I would suggest, a very, very slim market. Home users won't bother, because it costs more (significantly more at 10c/GB to produce) than an external HD. Hollywood won't bother, because BR still has lots of legs and I don't foresee QHD becoming mainstream any time soon. By then, the video algorithms may have even caught up with the resolution jump and we still won't need more than 50GB for a film. IT won't bother, because if it doesn't go reel to reel it's not a "real" backup solution.
About the only real reason to use this format is distribution of very large data sets to parties locked into a proprietary reader format (medical imaging and digital cinema seemed to be the thrust). That's a pretty low volume marketplace to be pitching to. Oh well, at least it will give justification for high medical costs and high ticket prices at the theater.
FWIW, the search for the holy grail of optical storage was started when CDs held 30x the typical hard drive size. The sheer cavernous storage of 650MB in a 5-20MB hard drive world was so enticing, that it seemed logical that some other removable optical storage would surely keep ahead of hard drives. Backing up 3MB with a box full of $1 floppies was a pain. Backing up a server with a box full of $100 discs just isn't quite as attractive. (For the record, it would take 5 of these to back up my server - though 90% of that is actually a backup of 300 physical DVDs which rest sticky-finger-free in a box in a closet - but the thought of re-ripping all those in a catastrophic failure is not a pleasant one)
I was thinking more of a Lexis-Nexis type database - geared towards research and review, with a nice interface and powerful search engine. Value added stuff. And when I say "pay dearly," I mean as compared to "free".
Now, two things affect this. (1) if all you're storing is other people's stuff, then you're hosed because (2) game theory still holds - if just one other outlet for the material is free, you get nothing.
There's just not much value for good reporting these days. Note that I disagree that good reporting is not valuable, just that society as a whole does not place value distinction between good and poor reporting. Most blogs are useless, but they're free. That sets the bar for all but niche applications.
Very few people, actually. With the advent of streaming HD, every computer needs more speed. If you play with audio or video, you can never have enough speed - transformations for effects and such take a lot of power and a lot of time. Re-encoding at faster than 1x is fine if all you want to do is a single stream, but if you're serving a couple of TVs, you're looking at a lot of load. Even worse, if you're transcoding from a master to take with you, who want's to wait even 30 minutes for a 2 hour video to transcode and transfer to a portable device?
Heck, I keep all my audio as FLAC, and have a program which will transcode on the fly for syncing to my portable. That's great, except that it takes 20X as long to transcode as it does to transfer so I end up keeping a second copy of the library pre-coded. It takes 2-3 days to transcode my very modest library of 6000 tracks on a 2.8GHz machine.
And don't even get me started on high end applications. I can type faster on a 2GHz machine than AutoCAD can write the characters to the screen. Yes, it's that inefficient (AutoCAD, that is).
XP vs Vista doesn't matter much. I run Vista for a Home Theater machine, and it's just as fast as XP. Of course, I have it set to look like XP because transparent shit on my desktop just gives me headaches, so I'm not really using the horsepower-necessary features of Vista.
There's two sides to that. It's actually more valuable to make the old content pay-to-play. You might also get a "breaking news" bonus, but there are so many bloggers, twits, et al., out there that you'd have to be creating the content from scratch, and that's expensive to do with dedicated humans. Too expensive for all but business use and large markets.
No, if you kept all your old articles under lock and key, you'd find people who needed access to that information and would be willing to pay dearly to get it.
Yeah, I didn't RTFA, but a lot of the early posts made it seem like they thought the parts should cost more. Quite the contrary, 50% - even if you include manufacturing costs - seems like a way to take a loss very easily. Most items have a 50% markup at the end stage of the chain, after all the devel, marketing, overhead, shipping, and production is included. Now, granted that the supply chain is short, and there will never (or nearly never) be a discount market for these, so the margin could be smaller and still make it. Still, with s/w development and support, this isn't going to make Bezos any richer from hardware sales.
It is also abused by the unscrupulous for products which decline in retail value over time (electronics, etc). Costco changed their policy on computer items to combat these losers.
There has always been tax free internet shopping. Now there may have been people who did not pay their required use tax, but that has nothing to do with the transaction. Technically.
Well, you're correct that almost everyone lacks a basic understanding of sound computing principles. There was a brief window where computer users had to be competent, and most users were. Now everybody has one and there is practically no need to know anything but where the on switch is.
Linux is great, but operating systems mean so little today. They all "just work" for the end user. Sure, some do things easier than others, but there's no perfect OS. As part of the computer literate we (you and I) expect more from computers than 95% of people. Principally, we expect them to be manageable. Everybody else just wants to be able to use the same 10 programs that everyone else uses so that they can exchange files. The issue is that 8 of those programs don't exist on Linux and 5 don't exist on Mac. You can't apt-get msoffice (you can add a "thank God" at this point, if you like), or get AutoCAD to run in OSX. Sure OOo is availble, but try to open a.doc file with anything but text and you're likely to see something different than the sender created. You can speak of open formats and better solutions, but the fact exists that most of the world uses stuff that's built based on an installed base of windows-centric computing.
Worse, it's unlikely to change anytime soon. Businesses use Windows, so that's what the workforce knows. They're the ones who buy the home computers, and familiar is easy. We play with other OSes to do different things, but it's one of our hobbies - we consciously devote time to it. Most people don't, and don't care. Businesses are about profit, and retraining a workforce - and every new employee - is an expense (investment, if you will) that does not normally pay for itself. In 6 years we've never had a virus related issue, and we have no full time IT person (I spend 2 hours a month - at most - managing a Windows server and 4 workstations). It would take close to 60 hours for each employee to fully train them on a mac or linux NOT including switching our core business software, which would cost more than $50,000 just for new licenses. I would probably end up "investing" close to 2-3 years of profit to switch. And I'd still have to manage the servers. If I cut my IT time by 75%, which is pretty unlikely at 2h/month, I'd save less than $1,000 a year in direct expenses, and less than $2000 in opportunity cost.
The numbers just aren't there. And there are very few businesses which are so generic as to use no software which runs natively under windows. There are some where Mac is the standard, too, of course, and they would have just as hard a time switching to Windows or Linux.
As for the "Vista tax," most of us aren't paying it. Changing paradigms just isn't generally profitable for businesses who are working efficiently already. MS has found that out. We're all still on XP, and plan to be for the foreseeable future. Thanks to the pull Dell has with MS, and their eye towards business, we'll still have XP for at least another year on new machines. And you didn't hear it from me, but after that we'll probably keep the old XP install discs around. With Dell BIOS, they load just fine.
Well, since the fee is per resident, an average household will be paying something like 2.3 times that value, or north of $2500/yr. Also, the cost to generate and distribute electricity is only about 25%-30% fuel costs, the rest is maintenance and transmission. One would hope the maintenance would be less than a traditional plant, but (no I didn't RTFA) if there is a steam cycle involved it may not vary much from fossil fuel. If you bank on transmission and administration being set at 50% of the cost, and the plant and fuel being zero, you'd be at $50 admin + $210 solar = $260.
Is that bad? Not necessarily. It's just more expensive in the current energy climate. Now if they can incorporate lower energy technologies to reduce the demand and sell the surplus, or pair it with a small nuclear facility (constant source plus daytime peaking power from solar) they might be onto something.
Most expanse is in labor and overhead (we call it 33/67, but for most commercial enterprises it's worse). Second, if volunteers fail and the three existing units couldn't be made to work, there's no real fallout. It was a volunteer project. Now, lets say you _have_ to make it work. You're going to plan for the worst, which means some RE and some fabrication costs. Do you know how expensive it is to fabricate a single part? That's just insane.
For the most part, it's the inefficiency of commercial enterprise that costs so fucking much. Of the $6m, probably about 10% would go to overhead ($600k, or about 5 years of total effort cradle-to-grave for writing the RFP, reading the responses, selecting the winner, monitoring the progress, processing payments, etc.) The other $5.4M would have gone to a contractor to do the work. That leaves about 1.8M worth of manpower and parts allowance after overhead. Figuring in risk, that's maybe $900k in real expenses. Figuring in parts and supplies at $100,000 (planned), that leaves $800k in salary money. Figure the average person on the project - a highly technical project - at $80-$100,000/yr and you get 8-10 man-years of labor. Put a 5 person team on the project (one technician, one EE, one ME, one computer guy, and one admin) and you've got 2 years to finish the work. That's a reasonable time frame.
It's so much cheaper when there's no overhead, no need for profit, no need for covering your ass, the people doing the work are experts, and they work the extra time for the love of the game.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple fact that you wrote that post makes you incapable of realizing that there is an actual, non-scientific world of "regular folks" that you never come into contact with. Feel free to ignore my previous observation; you're little circle of friends and acquaintances clearly does not qualify you to comment on the general population.
Oh, and you're not in the target market for this laptop, so it shouldn't really matter to you anyway.
"...and likely plays havoc with global models of climate change"
So, they think it might make a difference in the model, but they don't know - which means they haven't tested it and are going on gut instinct that a single boundary condition to a problem with thousands of boundary conditions (not all equal, of course) will completely reverse the theory and find out that the earth is acting in a way opposite to our expectations.
Call me when they actually update the model and correlate it with global temperature readings. Being wrong in one area is no big deal. Being wrong and having it completely invalidate the overall results is quite different.
Simple observation of people. I happen to be in a field where I interact with both professionals and non-professionals on a daily basis, along a pretty wide socioeconomic spectrum. While entirely non-scientific, it's amazing how true a lot of stereotypes are. Those who fall outside those limits don't think they really exist, but they do, and in a much larger swath of the population than you can imagine.
In the top ten percent of the personal market, women want very similar things to men. In the bottom 90, they want pink frilly stuff. If you want the 90%, you have to figure out how to silence the 10% of people you're going to offend.
Hint: Men are the same way (not the pink part). Give them sports data and stuff with their favorite team logos.
Business is a whole different world...
I'm late arriving to this flogging, but just in case you're still reading and nobody else has mentioned it: perform your work. If you are the expert, there are people who will pay to hear you in person. It won't make you rich, but it's not unlikely that you can get a 250-750 dollars a head for a day seminar. Multiply that by 30-50 for a small room / mid-market and you can take your expertise directly to your market. Since you've already published the book, you can include it with the seminar (inflating the cost to cover a tidy profit per book), or offer it for sale. A friend does this for his niche and nets about $2-4k for a day (well, a night and a day - probably 16 hours). This is a small market, where he likely gets only 15-20 tops and the hourly billing rates for professionals hover in the $80-120/hr mark.
Yes, it's frustrating. No, there's not much you can do about it. It sounds like you have a publisher, so asking for an unencumbered release in PDF format for a significant discount (my breakpoint is about $15-20, but I'm a cheapskate) with an ad for your seminar registration website probably isn't an option. While I can empathize with your frustration, when this has happened to me in the past my response has been to modify my distribution to reduce the damage. It's not perfect, but I get paid my fair share.
And it's worse - you've got 30 days in your month, but there are only 20 workdays so you'll need special weekend incentives to make people want to make the trip. So you're closer to needing 3/4 million a day, and that's just to break even on debt service. Operational expenses, maintenance, overhead and profit aren't even counted.
If you get that masters in the evenings, then the question is Candidate A with 10 years and a MS, or Candidate B with an MS and 8 years. If the entry requirements are a BS, you may as well start working. Unless, of course, you're independently wealthy already and are just looking to fulfill your personal goals for challenging work and don't really need to worry about a "career" or paying bills short term. In that case, go get the degree.
I got the impression that the purpose was to actually find out what is being used. I'm actually a bit surprised that this doesn't exist already in the form of licensing records. It probably does, but isn't accessible or searchable in a useful manner. It would be a nice for-fee addition to the Google Earth maps for prospective operators to be able to view the spectrum map in their area.
You must not be in a professional field. We keep our books as references, often for out entire careers. I still use two or three of my texts - from 20 years ago - on a weekly basis (okay, maybe monthly). It's hard to loan your kindle to someone to look something up, but very easy to do so with a single textbook.
Kindle is an entertainment device, not a business one (not yet, at least). And I'm okay saying that a lot of non-technical (and some technical) classes in College are merely entertainment.
If I could afford (or, more accurately, justify) a DSLR, I'd drop my P&S in a second. It didn't matter as much when we were all film - grab a Yashica T4 and you got great pictures because you used the same film. Most digital P&Ss have such little sensors that the noise is significant for anything other than full daylight. The bigger sensor gets you lower noise and more useable shots. I don't want my inside pics looking like I picked up a roll of Konica 3200.
Digital photography really just takes a lot of the ongoing expense out of the hobby/profession, and allows us to take less than perfect shots and "correct" them easier. Recently, it's also allowed better results on the fast end with the best sensors. With Nikon finally putting out a full frame DSLR, they should be affordable in a couple of years, and I'll dig out my bag'o'lenses I have for my old F4s. Then I'll be happy. I still grab the F4 when I know I'm going to be low light and want to take shots quickly. I got some great shots of my kid with a newborn lamb about 3 years ago that I could have never done with a digital. The gap is closing fast though (has already closed, I think), if you have enough money. BTW - I want full frame for max sensor size, and so my 20mm is still a wide angle lens, not some boring 3?mm.
I believe silicone valley is a bit south of where you were intending to refer. And they're not really into tech, but the IP is pretty entertaining nonetheless.
(Sorry, that one was just too easy)
You've hit two keys. Why does it have to have such a large bezel, and why does it have to be non-foldable. Most phones are down to 1/4" or less bezel, so I presume it's not a technical limitation. We have seen prototypes of screens which can be bent if you had a clamshell case. 8.5x11 doesn't have to be the target size, either. Since most paper has a border or at least 1/2", you could reasonably have an 8x6 device when closed that opens up to have the readable size of a letter (or A4) paper. Depending on the resolution and format, ebooks might even be displayed as a two-page landscape format, allowing a more book-like experience.
Don't know 'bout you, but the only rips I tend to see are recodes to that level for 1080, and about 4-5GB for 720. AFAIK, there are no licensed online sources for BR downloads, so it's more of a random metric. Like Libraries of Congress - it's not like anybody actually stores a LoC on a disc, but people still insist on using it as a unit of measure.
Just remember to break them in for a week or two in the direction you plan on using them. It's so easy to forget that last part, or forget to label them and then re-install them backwards. Naturally for data, server-client direction is the directionality you're concerned with. I find a some data cables need as much as two weeks to break in, but the drop in latency is noticeable to discriminating IT professionals.
BTW - I like random for video and pink noise for audio for about 8 days, but others swear by switching between the primary listening/viewing material (or data packets with the frame size you intend to use later), and a generic white noise. It may warm up the overall picture/sound/data, but I like the more pristine results I get from mine, and always re-condition them the same way every six months. ;-)
This has, I would suggest, a very, very slim market. Home users won't bother, because it costs more (significantly more at 10c/GB to produce) than an external HD. Hollywood won't bother, because BR still has lots of legs and I don't foresee QHD becoming mainstream any time soon. By then, the video algorithms may have even caught up with the resolution jump and we still won't need more than 50GB for a film. IT won't bother, because if it doesn't go reel to reel it's not a "real" backup solution.
About the only real reason to use this format is distribution of very large data sets to parties locked into a proprietary reader format (medical imaging and digital cinema seemed to be the thrust). That's a pretty low volume marketplace to be pitching to. Oh well, at least it will give justification for high medical costs and high ticket prices at the theater.
FWIW, the search for the holy grail of optical storage was started when CDs held 30x the typical hard drive size. The sheer cavernous storage of 650MB in a 5-20MB hard drive world was so enticing, that it seemed logical that some other removable optical storage would surely keep ahead of hard drives. Backing up 3MB with a box full of $1 floppies was a pain. Backing up a server with a box full of $100 discs just isn't quite as attractive. (For the record, it would take 5 of these to back up my server - though 90% of that is actually a backup of 300 physical DVDs which rest sticky-finger-free in a box in a closet - but the thought of re-ripping all those in a catastrophic failure is not a pleasant one)
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Prodigy tried the flashy nasty ad thing before AOL and was pulverized for it. AOL made a whole business plan around it.
I was thinking more of a Lexis-Nexis type database - geared towards research and review, with a nice interface and powerful search engine. Value added stuff. And when I say "pay dearly," I mean as compared to "free".
Now, two things affect this. (1) if all you're storing is other people's stuff, then you're hosed because (2) game theory still holds - if just one other outlet for the material is free, you get nothing.
There's just not much value for good reporting these days. Note that I disagree that good reporting is not valuable, just that society as a whole does not place value distinction between good and poor reporting. Most blogs are useless, but they're free. That sets the bar for all but niche applications.
Very few people, actually. With the advent of streaming HD, every computer needs more speed. If you play with audio or video, you can never have enough speed - transformations for effects and such take a lot of power and a lot of time. Re-encoding at faster than 1x is fine if all you want to do is a single stream, but if you're serving a couple of TVs, you're looking at a lot of load. Even worse, if you're transcoding from a master to take with you, who want's to wait even 30 minutes for a 2 hour video to transcode and transfer to a portable device?
Heck, I keep all my audio as FLAC, and have a program which will transcode on the fly for syncing to my portable. That's great, except that it takes 20X as long to transcode as it does to transfer so I end up keeping a second copy of the library pre-coded. It takes 2-3 days to transcode my very modest library of 6000 tracks on a 2.8GHz machine.
And don't even get me started on high end applications. I can type faster on a 2GHz machine than AutoCAD can write the characters to the screen. Yes, it's that inefficient (AutoCAD, that is).
XP vs Vista doesn't matter much. I run Vista for a Home Theater machine, and it's just as fast as XP. Of course, I have it set to look like XP because transparent shit on my desktop just gives me headaches, so I'm not really using the horsepower-necessary features of Vista.
There's two sides to that. It's actually more valuable to make the old content pay-to-play. You might also get a "breaking news" bonus, but there are so many bloggers, twits, et al., out there that you'd have to be creating the content from scratch, and that's expensive to do with dedicated humans. Too expensive for all but business use and large markets.
No, if you kept all your old articles under lock and key, you'd find people who needed access to that information and would be willing to pay dearly to get it.
Yeah, I didn't RTFA, but a lot of the early posts made it seem like they thought the parts should cost more. Quite the contrary, 50% - even if you include manufacturing costs - seems like a way to take a loss very easily. Most items have a 50% markup at the end stage of the chain, after all the devel, marketing, overhead, shipping, and production is included. Now, granted that the supply chain is short, and there will never (or nearly never) be a discount market for these, so the margin could be smaller and still make it. Still, with s/w development and support, this isn't going to make Bezos any richer from hardware sales.
It is also abused by the unscrupulous for products which decline in retail value over time (electronics, etc). Costco changed their policy on computer items to combat these losers.
There has always been tax free internet shopping. Now there may have been people who did not pay their required use tax, but that has nothing to do with the transaction. Technically.
Well, you're correct that almost everyone lacks a basic understanding of sound computing principles. There was a brief window where computer users had to be competent, and most users were. Now everybody has one and there is practically no need to know anything but where the on switch is.
Linux is great, but operating systems mean so little today. They all "just work" for the end user. Sure, some do things easier than others, but there's no perfect OS. As part of the computer literate we (you and I) expect more from computers than 95% of people. Principally, we expect them to be manageable. Everybody else just wants to be able to use the same 10 programs that everyone else uses so that they can exchange files. The issue is that 8 of those programs don't exist on Linux and 5 don't exist on Mac. You can't apt-get msoffice (you can add a "thank God" at this point, if you like), or get AutoCAD to run in OSX. Sure OOo is availble, but try to open a .doc file with anything but text and you're likely to see something different than the sender created. You can speak of open formats and better solutions, but the fact exists that most of the world uses stuff that's built based on an installed base of windows-centric computing.
Worse, it's unlikely to change anytime soon. Businesses use Windows, so that's what the workforce knows. They're the ones who buy the home computers, and familiar is easy. We play with other OSes to do different things, but it's one of our hobbies - we consciously devote time to it. Most people don't, and don't care. Businesses are about profit, and retraining a workforce - and every new employee - is an expense (investment, if you will) that does not normally pay for itself. In 6 years we've never had a virus related issue, and we have no full time IT person (I spend 2 hours a month - at most - managing a Windows server and 4 workstations). It would take close to 60 hours for each employee to fully train them on a mac or linux NOT including switching our core business software, which would cost more than $50,000 just for new licenses. I would probably end up "investing" close to 2-3 years of profit to switch. And I'd still have to manage the servers. If I cut my IT time by 75%, which is pretty unlikely at 2h/month, I'd save less than $1,000 a year in direct expenses, and less than $2000 in opportunity cost.
The numbers just aren't there. And there are very few businesses which are so generic as to use no software which runs natively under windows. There are some where Mac is the standard, too, of course, and they would have just as hard a time switching to Windows or Linux.
As for the "Vista tax," most of us aren't paying it. Changing paradigms just isn't generally profitable for businesses who are working efficiently already. MS has found that out. We're all still on XP, and plan to be for the foreseeable future. Thanks to the pull Dell has with MS, and their eye towards business, we'll still have XP for at least another year on new machines. And you didn't hear it from me, but after that we'll probably keep the old XP install discs around. With Dell BIOS, they load just fine.
Well, since the fee is per resident, an average household will be paying something like 2.3 times that value, or north of $2500/yr. Also, the cost to generate and distribute electricity is only about 25%-30% fuel costs, the rest is maintenance and transmission. One would hope the maintenance would be less than a traditional plant, but (no I didn't RTFA) if there is a steam cycle involved it may not vary much from fossil fuel. If you bank on transmission and administration being set at 50% of the cost, and the plant and fuel being zero, you'd be at $50 admin + $210 solar = $260.
Is that bad? Not necessarily. It's just more expensive in the current energy climate. Now if they can incorporate lower energy technologies to reduce the demand and sell the surplus, or pair it with a small nuclear facility (constant source plus daytime peaking power from solar) they might be onto something.
Most expanse is in labor and overhead (we call it 33/67, but for most commercial enterprises it's worse). Second, if volunteers fail and the three existing units couldn't be made to work, there's no real fallout. It was a volunteer project. Now, lets say you _have_ to make it work. You're going to plan for the worst, which means some RE and some fabrication costs. Do you know how expensive it is to fabricate a single part? That's just insane.
For the most part, it's the inefficiency of commercial enterprise that costs so fucking much. Of the $6m, probably about 10% would go to overhead ($600k, or about 5 years of total effort cradle-to-grave for writing the RFP, reading the responses, selecting the winner, monitoring the progress, processing payments, etc.) The other $5.4M would have gone to a contractor to do the work. That leaves about 1.8M worth of manpower and parts allowance after overhead. Figuring in risk, that's maybe $900k in real expenses. Figuring in parts and supplies at $100,000 (planned), that leaves $800k in salary money. Figure the average person on the project - a highly technical project - at $80-$100,000/yr and you get 8-10 man-years of labor. Put a 5 person team on the project (one technician, one EE, one ME, one computer guy, and one admin) and you've got 2 years to finish the work. That's a reasonable time frame.
It's so much cheaper when there's no overhead, no need for profit, no need for covering your ass, the people doing the work are experts, and they work the extra time for the love of the game.