Terry Pratchett did - his recent book "Going Postal", one of the main "characters" of the story is the clacks - the Discworld optical telegraph network. It's a fun book.
It is readily apparent from Figures 1-3 that all silicon based solar cells in any type of design and placed anywhere in the U.S. will pay for themselves in terms of energy over their lifetime. This is counter to the resilient myth that solar cells will never be viable because they cannot ever make up for their embodied energy. The myth started with an analysis of very early cells and continues today because of the confusion generated by the economically based "emergy" analysis. The payback time ranges from about 1 year for BIPV installations in Phoenix made from high efficiency a-Si (Fig. 3b) to nearly 5 years for low efficiency c-Si in a centralized power plant located in Detroit.
Older cells in particular were much thicker than today's, and took much larger quantities of refined silicon to make. Solar panels have had positive "energy payback" for many years - not just a couple.
This doesn't mean the panel will pay off in money terms though; what with electricity being so incredibly cheap, while the panel may well pay itself off in terms of energy in 6 years, it may take three or four times that length of time to pay back in money terms. This is of course the significance of this new type of solar panel *IF* they can get the cost down. (Note the weasel word eventually in TFA).
Yes you are - energy payback is how long it takes for a device to generate at least as much energy as it took to make. This is not necessarily the same amount of time as to pay back the purchase cost. A solar panel may generate the energy it took to make it in 6 years, but it may be two or three times that amount of time to generate the amount of electricity to monetarily pay for itself.
I've observed it many times from the vantage point of a light aircraft - in busy traffic times, you can even see the genesis of traffic jams on busy roads - someone jabs their brakes, the car behind hits the brakes harder, and before you know it, you have a standing wave of stopped cars in the traffic maybe 20 or 30 cars deep. It's very interesting to watch from a light plane. It's very frustrating to be in on the ground.
The current generation solar panels have an energy payback time of 6 years in the real world, and typically last for at least 25 years.
Presumably, what makes this technology potentially less expensive is it requires less resources to make than silicon solar cells, so it's fairly likely that they have a faster energy payback than silicon cells.
All the solar panel outputs you typically see quote peak output - i.e. with full sunshine, zero haze, with the sun shining directly onto the panel square on (rays at 90 degrees to the panel). Even a little haze (say, some high cirrus, or 7 miles visibility) typically reduces output to 70% of the peak output. A bright overcast day and you're lucky to make 20% of peak. That's with the current most efficient panel design that's easily available (monocrystalline silicon). There's no information that I've seen saying how this new type of solar cell performs in non-ideal conditions that are found in the real world.
However, *if* they can produce it for the price they think they can (note the weasel word eventually in the article) then given the amount of unused roof space that's available, it may not matter unless they are desperately worse than current technology.
We're talking about a helicopter, not a plane. Helicopters are inherently unstable and require the pilot to actively control them _all the time_. Let go of the controls in a plane, and it'll keep flying at its trimmed speed, and generally will roll out of shallow banks. Light aircraft are generally inherently stable.
Helicopters aren't, especially when moving slowly. Let go of the controls in a hovering helicopter and you'll crash in short order. Let go of the controls of a moving helicopter and you'll just crash a little bit later. Being dazzled in a helicopter is orders of magnitude more hazardous than having the same thing happen in a light aircraft.
Not necessarily; bits of Bob still live on in at least Windows XP such as the dog you get when you try a search. I hear they made Vista less patronizing, so perhaps the cartoon dog is gone from the search page.
Blind? Hardly. Remember, Microsoft has been caught red-handed in dishonesty and corruption: just look at how they intefered with the ISO processes with regard to OOXML, leaving the ISO with a bunch of deadbeat P-members.
If you read TFA, you'll find the mainframe they were decommissioning WAS modern - it was installed in 2005. What the funeral was for was for the line of mainframes, not a 45 year old machine still in service.
Open up an SD card, USB drive, Compact Flash card or whatever and inside... you'll find a chip packaged much in this way. The dimensions they describe are of a common-or-garden BGA (ball grid array) package, which has been used in electronics for _years_.
Actually, it's not that uncommon to use the odd single transistor. Look at any commercial PCB (such as your graphics card, or PCB motherboard), and you'll spot quite a number of SOT-23 packaged transistors.
Almost all of my digital electronics projects include at least one discrete transistor. Quite often, you need an open collector/open drain output from a chip, but it doesn't actually provide one - a single mosfet will do the job (maybe two if you need it to not be inverted). Very often you need to switch some power. A single power mosfet does the job here - very high input impedance, can switch tens of amps. Need to buffer a high impedance output? A single transistor common collector amplifier will often do the job just fine. Need a level shifter for a couple of outputs from 3.3v to 5v? One mosfet and one resistor will usually do the job just fine. Need a single gate inverter, and don't have the space for a 74HC04? One P-channel and one N-channel mosfet, in SOT-23 packages is nice and compact without being too hard to solder. (Although you can get a 74HC1G04 with just one gate, but most people don't have them knocking around in the parts box, but will have a couple of P and N channel mosfets they can use).
The humble discrete transistor is still used all over the place and isn't going away any time soon.
It should be a rite of passage for any computer geek to learn how to create a few CMOS gates with discrete mosfets. Even if they don't intend to do a lot with electronics, it does give an appreciation of what's going on in the real world.
I'd disagree; high density cities ARE the norm. Here in Rightpondia, where we have cities four or five times older than your entire country, all of them are high density. Even our villages are high density - I live in a small town of 2000 people, and most of the houses are terraced (think like the US idea of townhouses). Standalone, detached houses are the exception, not the norm - and indeed, people living in sprawling neighbourhoods of detached houses are very much a late 20th century invention which only came about with cars being ubiquitous.
All cities that grew around natural human transportation systems (i.e. walking and horseback) are extremely high density.
It might be the opposite. About 10 years ago, I read a safety survey which showed that the Mini (a very small but popular car) in this country had one of the lowest accident rates. This was somewhat odd because the Mini was popular generally with inexperienced drivers, and young inexperienced drivers are the ones that tend to do all the crashing (that's why the insurance rates are so high).
It turns out the Mini, being very light compared to most other cars, and also having excellent road holding, just meant when people got themselves into a stupid situation, the car wouldn't let go of the road and the driver avoided the crash altogether. Even an inexpert swerve under braking to avoid some idiot who had pulled out on you - a heavy car would just slide when the front outside wheel gets loaded up - the Mini would still go where the driver pointed it. Indeed, this is why the Mini was a popular rally car of the 1960s and 1970s.
Heavier cars like SUVs... well you know Newton's laws of motion? They don't go round corners so well. A sticky situation in a Mini that leads to stained underwear but not even a scrape in the paintwork, can quite easily be a fatality in an SUV as control is lost and it ends up in a multi-vehicle pileup.
I saw the results of this lack of driver training with most chortlesome results.
I was visiting friends in Utah, and as normal, we were going up to Alta for some skiing. In the 2wd Jetta TDi. In the snow. We were making good (but very careful) progress - the roads had the worst type of slippery compacted snow you usually get, and going up the mountain, you have to be careful to maintain traction.
Then a 4wd SUV roared past us.
Three hundred yards later, the same SUV was stuck in a ditch, back wheels in the air. It was still there when we came back down the mountain later that day.
My friend there had in some ways a downturn in fortune (divorce) and now drives a 16 year old Civic. We still go up the mountain in the Civic. Never got stuck. We still see SUVs stuck in the ditch from time to time. Never cars, always SUVs.
Or the Subaru station wagons - very popular in the mountains. 4 wheel drive, and decent ground clearance - but without being a huge, unaerodynamic brick like an SUV and probably getting twice the fuel economy.
Re:I bet we won't be seeing this story in....
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
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· Score: 1
Especially since the Microsoft system in the London Stock Exchange has had at least one serious outage:-) Wonder why those ads have suddenly disappeared...
No. Systems like this target the weapon in its boost phase. Hopefully, the wreckage of the missile + warheads simply falls back onto the territory of whoever tried to launch them too.
It's a hobby. Some people like to ride, say, horses for a hobby. Not terribly useful now everyone has cars. What's the use? The use is that someone enjoys doing it. Like the horse rider, the time keeping hobbyist enjoys tinkering with highly accurate time pieces.
If you have to question why people have hobbies you don't find interesting, you're amazingly lacking in imagination.
Solar panels have *very* long lifetimes. The one I have has a 25 year warranty that it will produce 80% of new power in 25 years time. A properly constructed panel should last for decades.
Oh, I agree - but had the Speccy not existed, it'd have been no home computer for me: the Spectrum was affordable, the C64 and Beeb were not. Britain in the early-mid 80s was not a rich country. Given the first world and third world, we all wondered who was the second world. I think it was us - high unemployment, low productivity, union strife etc.
We did have BBC Micros at school though, and I agree, the mighty BBC Micro stood so tall over the whole competition (including the C64) they were almost in a different class. The best BASIC interpreter of the time (with a built in assembler!), something that passed for an operating system - other machines tended to use bits of their BASIC intepreter for that, but the BBC's MOS was actually very good and had a lot of features we consider modern today. I have a BBC Micro at home now - it has an IDE hard disc, and ADFS. However most programs written for the old DFS will run off a hard disc with the completely different ADFS because the architects of the BBC Micro gave it an abstraction layer. Not only that, they allowed you to re-vector operating system calls so you could write your own extensions and have them work with existing software. The BBC had a proper formalized way of having more than one ROM with the sideways ROM/RAM system that it had. Not many other 8 bit machines had that.
Slashdot Mirror
Terry Pratchett did - his recent book "Going Postal", one of the main "characters" of the story is the clacks - the Discworld optical telegraph network. It's a fun book.
Quote:
Older cells in particular were much thicker than today's, and took much larger quantities of refined silicon to make. Solar panels have had positive "energy payback" for many years - not just a couple.
This doesn't mean the panel will pay off in money terms though; what with electricity being so incredibly cheap, while the panel may well pay itself off in terms of energy in 6 years, it may take three or four times that length of time to pay back in money terms. This is of course the significance of this new type of solar panel *IF* they can get the cost down. (Note the weasel word eventually in TFA).
Yes you are - energy payback is how long it takes for a device to generate at least as much energy as it took to make. This is not necessarily the same amount of time as to pay back the purchase cost. A solar panel may generate the energy it took to make it in 6 years, but it may be two or three times that amount of time to generate the amount of electricity to monetarily pay for itself.
I think this has been known for _years_.
I've observed it many times from the vantage point of a light aircraft - in busy traffic times, you can even see the genesis of traffic jams on busy roads - someone jabs their brakes, the car behind hits the brakes harder, and before you know it, you have a standing wave of stopped cars in the traffic maybe 20 or 30 cars deep. It's very interesting to watch from a light plane. It's very frustrating to be in on the ground.
The current generation solar panels have an energy payback time of 6 years in the real world, and typically last for at least 25 years.
Presumably, what makes this technology potentially less expensive is it requires less resources to make than silicon solar cells, so it's fairly likely that they have a faster energy payback than silicon cells.
All the solar panel outputs you typically see quote peak output - i.e. with full sunshine, zero haze, with the sun shining directly onto the panel square on (rays at 90 degrees to the panel). Even a little haze (say, some high cirrus, or 7 miles visibility) typically reduces output to 70% of the peak output. A bright overcast day and you're lucky to make 20% of peak. That's with the current most efficient panel design that's easily available (monocrystalline silicon). There's no information that I've seen saying how this new type of solar cell performs in non-ideal conditions that are found in the real world.
However, *if* they can produce it for the price they think they can (note the weasel word eventually in the article) then given the amount of unused roof space that's available, it may not matter unless they are desperately worse than current technology.
We're talking about a helicopter, not a plane. Helicopters are inherently unstable and require the pilot to actively control them _all the time_. Let go of the controls in a plane, and it'll keep flying at its trimmed speed, and generally will roll out of shallow banks. Light aircraft are generally inherently stable.
Helicopters aren't, especially when moving slowly. Let go of the controls in a hovering helicopter and you'll crash in short order. Let go of the controls of a moving helicopter and you'll just crash a little bit later. Being dazzled in a helicopter is orders of magnitude more hazardous than having the same thing happen in a light aircraft.
Is that the same Ball that makes Coke cans? Their logo looks identical.
Not necessarily; bits of Bob still live on in at least Windows XP such as the dog you get when you try a search. I hear they made Vista less patronizing, so perhaps the cartoon dog is gone from the search page.
Blind? Hardly. Remember, Microsoft has been caught red-handed in dishonesty and corruption: just look at how they intefered with the ISO processes with regard to OOXML, leaving the ISO with a bunch of deadbeat P-members.
Yeah, but the lead paint will make it too heavy :-)
If you read TFA, you'll find the mainframe they were decommissioning WAS modern - it was installed in 2005. What the funeral was for was for the line of mainframes, not a 45 year old machine still in service.
Open up an SD card, USB drive, Compact Flash card or whatever and inside... you'll find a chip packaged much in this way. The dimensions they describe are of a common-or-garden BGA (ball grid array) package, which has been used in electronics for _years_.
Actually, it's not that uncommon to use the odd single transistor. Look at any commercial PCB (such as your graphics card, or PCB motherboard), and you'll spot quite a number of SOT-23 packaged transistors.
Almost all of my digital electronics projects include at least one discrete transistor. Quite often, you need an open collector/open drain output from a chip, but it doesn't actually provide one - a single mosfet will do the job (maybe two if you need it to not be inverted). Very often you need to switch some power. A single power mosfet does the job here - very high input impedance, can switch tens of amps. Need to buffer a high impedance output? A single transistor common collector amplifier will often do the job just fine. Need a level shifter for a couple of outputs from 3.3v to 5v? One mosfet and one resistor will usually do the job just fine. Need a single gate inverter, and don't have the space for a 74HC04? One P-channel and one N-channel mosfet, in SOT-23 packages is nice and compact without being too hard to solder. (Although you can get a 74HC1G04 with just one gate, but most people don't have them knocking around in the parts box, but will have a couple of P and N channel mosfets they can use).
The humble discrete transistor is still used all over the place and isn't going away any time soon.
It should be a rite of passage for any computer geek to learn how to create a few CMOS gates with discrete mosfets. Even if they don't intend to do a lot with electronics, it does give an appreciation of what's going on in the real world.
I'd disagree; high density cities ARE the norm. Here in Rightpondia, where we have cities four or five times older than your entire country, all of them are high density. Even our villages are high density - I live in a small town of 2000 people, and most of the houses are terraced (think like the US idea of townhouses). Standalone, detached houses are the exception, not the norm - and indeed, people living in sprawling neighbourhoods of detached houses are very much a late 20th century invention which only came about with cars being ubiquitous.
All cities that grew around natural human transportation systems (i.e. walking and horseback) are extremely high density.
It might be the opposite. About 10 years ago, I read a safety survey which showed that the Mini (a very small but popular car) in this country had one of the lowest accident rates. This was somewhat odd because the Mini was popular generally with inexperienced drivers, and young inexperienced drivers are the ones that tend to do all the crashing (that's why the insurance rates are so high).
It turns out the Mini, being very light compared to most other cars, and also having excellent road holding, just meant when people got themselves into a stupid situation, the car wouldn't let go of the road and the driver avoided the crash altogether. Even an inexpert swerve under braking to avoid some idiot who had pulled out on you - a heavy car would just slide when the front outside wheel gets loaded up - the Mini would still go where the driver pointed it. Indeed, this is why the Mini was a popular rally car of the 1960s and 1970s.
Heavier cars like SUVs... well you know Newton's laws of motion? They don't go round corners so well. A sticky situation in a Mini that leads to stained underwear but not even a scrape in the paintwork, can quite easily be a fatality in an SUV as control is lost and it ends up in a multi-vehicle pileup.
I saw the results of this lack of driver training with most chortlesome results.
I was visiting friends in Utah, and as normal, we were going up to Alta for some skiing. In the 2wd Jetta TDi. In the snow. We were making good (but very careful) progress - the roads had the worst type of slippery compacted snow you usually get, and going up the mountain, you have to be careful to maintain traction.
Then a 4wd SUV roared past us.
Three hundred yards later, the same SUV was stuck in a ditch, back wheels in the air. It was still there when we came back down the mountain later that day.
My friend there had in some ways a downturn in fortune (divorce) and now drives a 16 year old Civic. We still go up the mountain in the Civic. Never got stuck. We still see SUVs stuck in the ditch from time to time. Never cars, always SUVs.
Or the Subaru station wagons - very popular in the mountains. 4 wheel drive, and decent ground clearance - but without being a huge, unaerodynamic brick like an SUV and probably getting twice the fuel economy.
Especially since the Microsoft system in the London Stock Exchange has had at least one serious outage :-) Wonder why those ads have suddenly disappeared...
Perhaps we can now have a "Highly Reliable Times" Slashdot ad saying how the NYSE chose Linux over Windows Server System :-)
No. Systems like this target the weapon in its boost phase. Hopefully, the wreckage of the missile + warheads simply falls back onto the territory of whoever tried to launch them too.
It's a hobby. Some people like to ride, say, horses for a hobby. Not terribly useful now everyone has cars. What's the use? The use is that someone enjoys doing it. Like the horse rider, the time keeping hobbyist enjoys tinkering with highly accurate time pieces.
If you have to question why people have hobbies you don't find interesting, you're amazingly lacking in imagination.
Irregardless is not cromulent. The word simply is "regardless". Just trying to help :-)
Solar panels have *very* long lifetimes. The one I have has a 25 year warranty that it will produce 80% of new power in 25 years time. A properly constructed panel should last for decades.
Oh, I agree - but had the Speccy not existed, it'd have been no home computer for me: the Spectrum was affordable, the C64 and Beeb were not. Britain in the early-mid 80s was not a rich country. Given the first world and third world, we all wondered who was the second world. I think it was us - high unemployment, low productivity, union strife etc.
We did have BBC Micros at school though, and I agree, the mighty BBC Micro stood so tall over the whole competition (including the C64) they were almost in a different class. The best BASIC interpreter of the time (with a built in assembler!), something that passed for an operating system - other machines tended to use bits of their BASIC intepreter for that, but the BBC's MOS was actually very good and had a lot of features we consider modern today. I have a BBC Micro at home now - it has an IDE hard disc, and ADFS. However most programs written for the old DFS will run off a hard disc with the completely different ADFS because the architects of the BBC Micro gave it an abstraction layer. Not only that, they allowed you to re-vector operating system calls so you could write your own extensions and have them work with existing software. The BBC had a proper formalized way of having more than one ROM with the sideways ROM/RAM system that it had. Not many other 8 bit machines had that.