Oh, give me a break, this guy has been wrong for the last 50 years. He's always predicting the next catastrophe that does not come because he has no respect for technology and the ability of humanity to solve problems. Instead, he started back in 1968 with idiotic statements like this:
"We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control."
There's caring about the ecology of the planet and then there's eco-fascists. He's the latter.
That's a terrible example for this article as this was a drug that had been around for decades that just got approved in the US and is dirt cheap everywhere else. For the cost of doing trials and getting FDA approval, Marathon gets a 45x markup. Whereas previously, patients could buy this drug from overseas, now that it's approved by the FDA, they can no longer do that. So they have to pony up the $89K (minus whatever discounts Marathon offers to try and appease the mob). That's BS. The reform has to start at the FDA. If a drug is approved in a place like Canada, where I'm sure they're not just passing out hemlock and saying this might cure something, the process here should at the very least be shortened for approval and if the drug is already available from an existing company(ies), then they should not be handing out these sweetheart deals, like the one to Marathon, to essentially gouge all Americans with these ridiculous prices. The FDA and the Congress are complicit with the drug industry lobbyists for creating this environment where America pays far more for every drug than in the rest of the world. We're floating Big Pharma's profits and their marketing budgets because no one in Washington DC has the will to stand up and protect the American consumer.
You can have a couple of lights that you can turn on/off OR change your temperature from your Smartphone, not both. To have a truly automated home likely would cost about $5000. People are not so dumb. Wink would like you to think you can get real automation for $200 to sell you their $100 hub.
The maximum banking at Talladega Superspeedway is 33 degrees. I've been in a stock car ride-along at Pocono which is just 14 degrees in Turn 1. That was plenty of banking for me. When I read this I was like, wait, April 1st is still days away.
They've also eliminated the ability for you to expand your storage with a JetDrive or other SD card so that if you need, say 512GB, you need to buy the more expensive configuration from them. For a lot of things, like picture or document storage, you can get away with and SD storage device and avoid the Apple toll. Not anymore.
His argument is that EV adoption will be like iPhone. The iPhone was so superior to flip phones people had to gave it. So his argument goes that EVs are so 'superior' to internal combustion vehicles that they'll see the same adoption rate. What a crock. The iPhone didn't require you to adopt a new charging paradigm; you already had 120V (or 220V) electric socket in your abode that you used for your flip phone. Fine if you have a house, install your charger in your garage or in your driveway, but do we really think chargers are going to appear in apartment parking lots? Will renters want to pay for them. Or will Uncle Sam force property owners to install them?
EVs remind me of CFL light bulbs. Daft, inconvenient (see how long it takes for one to come on at night in Minnesota in January), stupid things that were shoved down our throats by the government while LED bulbs that are vastly superior were still in development. Somebody just needed to take a timeout and wait a few more years for the correct technology to arrive. When they get FCVs right, then we'll have our vehicle of the future. New battery technology? We might as well be waiting on cold fusion. A fill up with hydrogen or CNG will take about as long as a fill-up with gasoline. I don't see you ever recharging a battery that fast without blowing it up.
And what's the range of a Tesla S with a boat trailer, anyway?
We need to put trackers on anyone named Brody and see if any sharks are following them around, because, y'know, that family has terrible luck with sharks.
Bus lanes in almost every setting add to congestion and are an inefficient use of roads. I worked (and road the bus) in one of the only places in the US where a dedicated bus lane ever worked, the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel between NJ and NY. For about 3 hours every morning, they took one outbound (from NY) lane and converted it to an inbound bus lane. During that commute time, that lane was full of buses, carrying about 20x the density of cars in adjacent lanes. Also, this was one lane of three outbound which were not heavily used in the morning (people live in NJ and work in NY). That's your absolutely best case scenario. It likely works in other major metro areas for short periods of time in the same way. But now take a more typical small US city and take one of two lanes and convert it to buses only and then put one bus on it every 5 minutes. That's about the maximum density of buses where I live now in Austin TX on Guadalupe, which is a major artery to UT and downtown and probably the most dense 'mass transit' we have. One bus every 5 minutes in that lane is 10 people/minute being conveyed down Guadalupe. In one minute, 30-60 cars can use that same lane. That's 3-6x the capacity if only one person is in each car!
I'm all for mass transit, but it doesn't work at all well in most of the U.S. precisely because the density of our cities and towns is nowhere near that of, say, Europe and the mobility of our workforce is far higher. Add to that most cities pushing 'mixed-use' development makes them even less likely to create the dense, business core where the jobs are that makes mass transit from outlying, largely residential, areas efficient. NY works because it was a damned island and it grew up rather than out and a crap ton of people work there from all over the tri-state area and many of us took trains or buses because they were more convenient than a car (but often times still not cheaper).
In Austin, where I live now, this is a joke. The jobs and people are spread all over Travis and the adjacent counties. I could buy a house tomorrow near where I work and maybe take a bus (although unless your 9-5, the schedules are terrible), but then I'd change jobs and there would be no remotely reasonable path for me. We can't all buy new houses or rent new apartments every time we change jobs!
If you look at some of the other growth areas in the US you'll see the same idiocy. A lot of green types pushing mass transit at the same time they're railing against dense development. Well, you can't have it both ways and in the US land is cheap and outside of the major metro areas it's cheaper to grow out than up, so we need to get over thinking public transport is an option in most places and build efficient roads so we're not all sitting in traffic jams puking out more CO than we have to until electric cars are not basically a joke.
Seriously, NY is the land of one-way streets. Even in the outer boroughs, the number of two-way streets is vanishingly small. There is no practical difference in the position of cars vs. pedestrians in this scenario. On any turn, I'll be turning into pedestrian traffic. When you walk in NYC, you're head is on a swivel. You pay attention or you risk getting hit and if you're in a car, you end up in the middle of intersections waiting on pedestrians. I'd be surprised if Google's algorithm didn't actually favor right hand turns in NYC, as in most places right-on-red is still legal and having driven their for over 3 decades, it's like UPS says, you get there faster if you restrict yourself to right turns.
If you don't know how much your University is spending in licensing for Microsoft software, then you're in no position to influence them about what software they use.
The battery pack in the Tesla roadster is about 1200 pounds! And that gets you about 60 miles. So, if (big if) all the automobile manufacturers could agree on a standard battery form factor and method of replacing the battery pack this simply is not workable. This is akin to changing horse teams on a stagecoach. Now think about 150 million stagecoaches running around the United States alone. Sorry, but this is just nutty.
Changing the flow of high altitude winds by clogging them up with wind generators sounds like yet another "green" energy fallacy, Following in the footsteps of hydro-electric power and tidal/wave power, two of the most environmentally devastating energy technologies ever conceived. So they're carbon neutral; they ain't green. California has already seen local environmental changes around large surface wind farms. Probably a good bet the farther up you go the more far-reaching the effects will be. I hope the VC community and energy companies ignore this one, because while it doesn't sound as scary as carbon sequestration (where we kill ourselves 100 year from now in a cataclysmic release of CO2), it doesn't sound at all smart.
LittleBigPlanet is far more likely to save the PS3--astoundingly cool--then Sony's Second Life clone where you get to buy new couches for your apartment from Sony. Bleck!
In 1985, a new release on LP as noted above cost about $7.99. In fact, most LPs I bought in that time were generally a bit cheaper, as Jazz and Classical were usually lower.
Using the handy dandy CPI calculator @ the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (guess they have to do something up there to occupy themselves in the cold), $7.99 in 1985 = $15.26 in 2007. So, a little more than what a new release will run you today on CD if you buy it from a discounter and not B&N or some of the other retail scoundrels charging $18.99 for new releases.
Of course, that plastic-coated aluminum disc is probably cheaper to produce today than the vinyl was in 1985.
I say let the record industry try and charge $30 for a CD and watch as their industry crumbles. It might be the best thing that ever happened for independent labels. Of course, the majors might simply then collude with the replication houses to force all prices up...
Just sad that people get paid to sit around in offices dreaming this stuff up. It's called a free market people. Argh.
...10 years from now you couldn't buy a CD, but you could still buy LPs. Perhaps I should start making room for another shelf for LPs rather than CDs. Maybe upgrade the Grado to something a bit better, trade in the Thorens for a new Basis table. Get myself a nice tube preamp.
I've done the SACD/DVD-A thing. What a fiasco. But he is right in one respect, most people don't give a rat about quality so if you do, start supporting those companies still producing vinyl. They may be your only source for music that isn't compressed to hell, DRM'd, and optimized for playback on Jobs' crappy earbuds in a few years.
Might be a good idea whatever route you wish to take. I think you meant to say "Reputable" not "Reputed" as I assume you're going to a University that has a good reputation and not one that is just generally thought to be a University.
Just busting your chops. Yeah, hell, hang out in academia for as long as you can. The real world sucks!
Check out the agile game development blog and in particular High Moon Studios who has provided seminars at the last two GDC's on their experience with SCRUM and XP, including tips for unit testing game components. They admit that some elements of game, for example, "fun" is not something you can tests, but since games are so hideously complex, having most of your code covered by unit testing makes regression testing far easier when your 18 months and a few 100k lines of code in.
That said, I've experienced a lot of blowback in game companies about using any agile methodologies. The rank and file in most game companies are, while blindingly talented, often very stubborn and/or passive-aggressive toward anything they perceive as control. The organizations I've been in where XP, in particular, has really worked, was where most if not all of the engineers were tired of priority of the day project management from marketing, sales, etc. and where management was enlightened about the benefits of better software quality and more predictability in development. Unfortunately, to make any agile method to work requires buy-in from the top to bottom of the org chart and very few places will ever get that.
That said, I think in 5 years, most game companies will be using elements of XP, SCRUM, and other agile methodologies in their work. I don't believe game companies will be able to survive without this shift, because although some poo-poo agile for large teams, some of these techniques can work very well for large teams and game teams are only getting larger and the financial stakes of failure and missed schedules will only becoming higher. In that environment, only studios which get a handle on their development will survive. The companies that refuse will become overwhelmed by the complexity and IMHO will start losing their best people to studios that start putting agile processes in place.
Of course, EA and that ilk may continue to just chew through developers, working them 80+ hours a week for years to come, but that will not be an option for most studios and smaller publishers.
And, yes, agile comes with a lot of marketing-speak gobbledy-gook, because you usually have to sell it to management. The reality is that it's as much about controlling management as it is about controlling development, perhaps more so.
And to the example above where XP was implemented at a game company where management thought that they would simply get more features, well, that's management not understanding XP and I'd wager that in the absence of XP those same executives would have been adding the same damned features, still not dropping any features, and still kvetching that the game needs to ship for Xmas. That's the game industry folks. No process can fix that.
Chatting up his cells in Wherever USA, I would not expect a program designed to track domestic calls to have any use in tracking him down. Since he probably is in some hut or cave in the Hindu Kush, not likely to help us find him.
As to why the encryption and 'abuse prevention' aspects of the program were abandoned, isn't it far more likely to assume that they simply didn't work (like so many government computer systems) and therefore they went with whatever they had that worked, rather than spend another 5 years and billion dollars trying to make it work? Never attribute to malice what can be more logically attributed to incompetence.
Reminds me of when apple code-named one of their early powerPC machines Sagan. The astronomer's estate threw a hissy fit and so, supposedly, apple changed the code name to BHA--butt-head astronomer.
Like so many movements, environmentalist groups are driven by the fringe and the fringe of environmentalism are luddites who seem to think we should be living in caves or something. Throw them together with Nimby types and some rich folk that think that coal-fired powerplant would look just fine next to some slum and you've got a coalition that will make it impossible to deploy any renewable or *gasp* nuclear sources in anywhere near the #s we need. Y'know, we don't have much natural gas in this country either and it's already nearly impossible to site a LNG terminal, so pretty soon it's gonna be coal again or $100/barrel oil, take your pick.
The sort of intellectual dishonesty practiced by most environmental groups is as American as apple pie, unfortunately.
Gee, apparently all the companies who have decades of experience working on solar power to improve efficiency and lower cost are a bunch of nit wits. Yeah, I want companies with no experience designing power systems working on solar--that'll work. Gimme a break.
And to imply that a 30-50% improvement makes solar a viable market is absurd. Show me a couple orders of magnitude increase in efficiency and I'll believe that there can be a market for solar beyond the niche of granola eaters living in the desert.
The computer industry was successful early on because even back in the early days when computers took up a room and were one billionth as powerful as the machine I'm writing this on now, the companies building them could make money. There was a need which could only be met by filling a building with slide rule-toting engineers or buying an expensive computer. With coal coming out our ears and oil still not that expensive, there is no great market for solar unless it gets much more cheaper; a 50% improvement isn't even close.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, give me a break, this guy has been wrong for the last 50 years. He's always predicting the next catastrophe that does not come because he has no respect for technology and the ability of humanity to solve problems. Instead, he started back in 1968 with idiotic statements like this:
"We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control."
There's caring about the ecology of the planet and then there's eco-fascists. He's the latter.
That's a terrible example for this article as this was a drug that had been around for decades that just got approved in the US and is dirt cheap everywhere else. For the cost of doing trials and getting FDA approval, Marathon gets a 45x markup. Whereas previously, patients could buy this drug from overseas, now that it's approved by the FDA, they can no longer do that. So they have to pony up the $89K (minus whatever discounts Marathon offers to try and appease the mob). That's BS. The reform has to start at the FDA. If a drug is approved in a place like Canada, where I'm sure they're not just passing out hemlock and saying this might cure something, the process here should at the very least be shortened for approval and if the drug is already available from an existing company(ies), then they should not be handing out these sweetheart deals, like the one to Marathon, to essentially gouge all Americans with these ridiculous prices. The FDA and the Congress are complicit with the drug industry lobbyists for creating this environment where America pays far more for every drug than in the rest of the world. We're floating Big Pharma's profits and their marketing budgets because no one in Washington DC has the will to stand up and protect the American consumer.
You can have a couple of lights that you can turn on/off OR change your temperature from your Smartphone, not both. To have a truly automated home likely would cost about $5000. People are not so dumb. Wink would like you to think you can get real automation for $200 to sell you their $100 hub.
The maximum banking at Talladega Superspeedway is 33 degrees. I've been in a stock car ride-along at Pocono which is just 14 degrees in Turn 1. That was plenty of banking for me. When I read this I was like, wait, April 1st is still days away.
They've also eliminated the ability for you to expand your storage with a JetDrive or other SD card so that if you need, say 512GB, you need to buy the more expensive configuration from them. For a lot of things, like picture or document storage, you can get away with and SD storage device and avoid the Apple toll. Not anymore.
...I want Q at my disposal.
His argument is that EV adoption will be like iPhone. The iPhone was so superior to flip phones people had to gave it. So his argument goes that EVs are so 'superior' to internal combustion vehicles that they'll see the same adoption rate. What a crock. The iPhone didn't require you to adopt a new charging paradigm; you already had 120V (or 220V) electric socket in your abode that you used for your flip phone. Fine if you have a house, install your charger in your garage or in your driveway, but do we really think chargers are going to appear in apartment parking lots? Will renters want to pay for them. Or will Uncle Sam force property owners to install them?
EVs remind me of CFL light bulbs. Daft, inconvenient (see how long it takes for one to come on at night in Minnesota in January), stupid things that were shoved down our throats by the government while LED bulbs that are vastly superior were still in development. Somebody just needed to take a timeout and wait a few more years for the correct technology to arrive. When they get FCVs right, then we'll have our vehicle of the future. New battery technology? We might as well be waiting on cold fusion. A fill up with hydrogen or CNG will take about as long as a fill-up with gasoline. I don't see you ever recharging a battery that fast without blowing it up.
And what's the range of a Tesla S with a boat trailer, anyway?
We need to put trackers on anyone named Brody and see if any sharks are following them around, because, y'know, that family has terrible luck with sharks.
Bus lanes in almost every setting add to congestion and are an inefficient use of roads. I worked (and road the bus) in one of the only places in the US where a dedicated bus lane ever worked, the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel between NJ and NY. For about 3 hours every morning, they took one outbound (from NY) lane and converted it to an inbound bus lane. During that commute time, that lane was full of buses, carrying about 20x the density of cars in adjacent lanes. Also, this was one lane of three outbound which were not heavily used in the morning (people live in NJ and work in NY). That's your absolutely best case scenario. It likely works in other major metro areas for short periods of time in the same way. But now take a more typical small US city and take one of two lanes and convert it to buses only and then put one bus on it every 5 minutes. That's about the maximum density of buses where I live now in Austin TX on Guadalupe, which is a major artery to UT and downtown and probably the most dense 'mass transit' we have. One bus every 5 minutes in that lane is 10 people/minute being conveyed down Guadalupe. In one minute, 30-60 cars can use that same lane. That's 3-6x the capacity if only one person is in each car!
I'm all for mass transit, but it doesn't work at all well in most of the U.S. precisely because the density of our cities and towns is nowhere near that of, say, Europe and the mobility of our workforce is far higher. Add to that most cities pushing 'mixed-use' development makes them even less likely to create the dense, business core where the jobs are that makes mass transit from outlying, largely residential, areas efficient. NY works because it was a damned island and it grew up rather than out and a crap ton of people work there from all over the tri-state area and many of us took trains or buses because they were more convenient than a car (but often times still not cheaper).
In Austin, where I live now, this is a joke. The jobs and people are spread all over Travis and the adjacent counties. I could buy a house tomorrow near where I work and maybe take a bus (although unless your 9-5, the schedules are terrible), but then I'd change jobs and there would be no remotely reasonable path for me. We can't all buy new houses or rent new apartments every time we change jobs!
If you look at some of the other growth areas in the US you'll see the same idiocy. A lot of green types pushing mass transit at the same time they're railing against dense development. Well, you can't have it both ways and in the US land is cheap and outside of the major metro areas it's cheaper to grow out than up, so we need to get over thinking public transport is an option in most places and build efficient roads so we're not all sitting in traffic jams puking out more CO than we have to until electric cars are not basically a joke.
Seriously, NY is the land of one-way streets. Even in the outer boroughs, the number of two-way streets is vanishingly small. There is no practical difference in the position of cars vs. pedestrians in this scenario. On any turn, I'll be turning into pedestrian traffic. When you walk in NYC, you're head is on a swivel. You pay attention or you risk getting hit and if you're in a car, you end up in the middle of intersections waiting on pedestrians. I'd be surprised if Google's algorithm didn't actually favor right hand turns in NYC, as in most places right-on-red is still legal and having driven their for over 3 decades, it's like UPS says, you get there faster if you restrict yourself to right turns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you don't know how much your University is spending in licensing for Microsoft software, then you're in no position to influence them about what software they use.
The battery pack in the Tesla roadster is about 1200 pounds! And that gets you about 60 miles. So, if (big if) all the automobile manufacturers could agree on a standard battery form factor and method of replacing the battery pack this simply is not workable. This is akin to changing horse teams on a stagecoach. Now think about 150 million stagecoaches running around the United States alone. Sorry, but this is just nutty.
Changing the flow of high altitude winds by clogging them up with wind generators sounds like yet another "green" energy fallacy, Following in the footsteps of hydro-electric power and tidal/wave power, two of the most environmentally devastating energy technologies ever conceived. So they're carbon neutral; they ain't green. California has already seen local environmental changes around large surface wind farms. Probably a good bet the farther up you go the more far-reaching the effects will be. I hope the VC community and energy companies ignore this one, because while it doesn't sound as scary as carbon sequestration (where we kill ourselves 100 year from now in a cataclysmic release of CO2), it doesn't sound at all smart.
LittleBigPlanet is far more likely to save the PS3--astoundingly cool--then Sony's Second Life clone where you get to buy new couches for your apartment from Sony. Bleck!
...way back in the original Warcraft. Looks like JPL needs more game programmers to help with their "pathfinding" algorithms.
In 1985, a new release on LP as noted above cost about $7.99. In fact, most LPs I bought in that time were generally a bit cheaper, as Jazz and Classical were usually lower.
Using the handy dandy CPI calculator @ the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (guess they have to do something up there to occupy themselves in the cold), $7.99 in 1985 = $15.26 in 2007. So, a little more than what a new release will run you today on CD if you buy it from a discounter and not B&N or some of the other retail scoundrels charging $18.99 for new releases.
Of course, that plastic-coated aluminum disc is probably cheaper to produce today than the vinyl was in 1985.
I say let the record industry try and charge $30 for a CD and watch as their industry crumbles. It might be the best thing that ever happened for independent labels. Of course, the majors might simply then collude with the replication houses to force all prices up...
Just sad that people get paid to sit around in offices dreaming this stuff up. It's called a free market people. Argh.
...10 years from now you couldn't buy a CD, but you could still buy LPs. Perhaps I should start making room for another shelf for LPs rather than CDs. Maybe upgrade the Grado to something a bit better, trade in the Thorens for a new Basis table. Get myself a nice tube preamp.
I've done the SACD/DVD-A thing. What a fiasco. But he is right in one respect, most people don't give a rat about quality so if you do, start supporting those companies still producing vinyl. They may be your only source for music that isn't compressed to hell, DRM'd, and optimized for playback on Jobs' crappy earbuds in a few years.
Len
Might be a good idea whatever route you wish to take. I think you meant to say "Reputable" not "Reputed" as I assume you're going to a University that has a good reputation and not one that is just generally thought to be a University.
Just busting your chops. Yeah, hell, hang out in academia for as long as you can. The real world sucks!
Check out the agile game development blog and in particular High Moon Studios who has provided seminars at the last two GDC's on their experience with SCRUM and XP, including tips for unit testing game components. They admit that some elements of game, for example, "fun" is not something you can tests, but since games are so hideously complex, having most of your code covered by unit testing makes regression testing far easier when your 18 months and a few 100k lines of code in.
That said, I've experienced a lot of blowback in game companies about using any agile methodologies. The rank and file in most game companies are, while blindingly talented, often very stubborn and/or passive-aggressive toward anything they perceive as control. The organizations I've been in where XP, in particular, has really worked, was where most if not all of the engineers were tired of priority of the day project management from marketing, sales, etc. and where management was enlightened about the benefits of better software quality and more predictability in development. Unfortunately, to make any agile method to work requires buy-in from the top to bottom of the org chart and very few places will ever get that.
That said, I think in 5 years, most game companies will be using elements of XP, SCRUM, and other agile methodologies in their work. I don't believe game companies will be able to survive without this shift, because although some poo-poo agile for large teams, some of these techniques can work very well for large teams and game teams are only getting larger and the financial stakes of failure and missed schedules will only becoming higher. In that environment, only studios which get a handle on their development will survive. The companies that refuse will become overwhelmed by the complexity and IMHO will start losing their best people to studios that start putting agile processes in place.
Of course, EA and that ilk may continue to just chew through developers, working them 80+ hours a week for years to come, but that will not be an option for most studios and smaller publishers.
And, yes, agile comes with a lot of marketing-speak gobbledy-gook, because you usually have to sell it to management. The reality is that it's as much about controlling management as it is about controlling development, perhaps more so.
And to the example above where XP was implemented at a game company where management thought that they would simply get more features, well, that's management not understanding XP and I'd wager that in the absence of XP those same executives would have been adding the same damned features, still not dropping any features, and still kvetching that the game needs to ship for Xmas. That's the game industry folks. No process can fix that.
LQ
Chatting up his cells in Wherever USA, I would not expect a program designed to track domestic calls to have any use in tracking him down. Since he probably is in some hut or cave in the Hindu Kush, not likely to help us find him.
As to why the encryption and 'abuse prevention' aspects of the program were abandoned, isn't it far more likely to assume that they simply didn't work (like so many government computer systems) and therefore they went with whatever they had that worked, rather than spend another 5 years and billion dollars trying to make it work? Never attribute to malice what can be more logically attributed to incompetence.
Reminds me of when apple code-named one of their early powerPC machines Sagan. The astronomer's estate threw a hissy fit and so, supposedly, apple changed the code name to BHA--butt-head astronomer.
Like so many movements, environmentalist groups are driven by the fringe and the fringe of environmentalism are luddites who seem to think we should be living in caves or something. Throw them together with Nimby types and some rich folk that think that coal-fired powerplant would look just fine next to some slum and you've got a coalition that will make it impossible to deploy any renewable or *gasp* nuclear sources in anywhere near the #s we need. Y'know, we don't have much natural gas in this country either and it's already nearly impossible to site a LNG terminal, so pretty soon it's gonna be coal again or $100/barrel oil, take your pick.
The sort of intellectual dishonesty practiced by most environmental groups is as American as apple pie, unfortunately.
When my CPU overheats and I have pile of burning graphite in my case, is there someone offering a concrete "sarcophagus" for it?
/.er.
Disclaimer: Despite subject line, submitted by rabidly pro-nuke
Gee, apparently all the companies who have decades of experience working on solar power to improve efficiency and lower cost are a bunch of nit wits. Yeah, I want companies with no experience designing power systems working on solar--that'll work. Gimme a break.
And to imply that a 30-50% improvement makes solar a viable market is absurd. Show me a couple orders of magnitude increase in efficiency and I'll believe that there can be a market for solar beyond the niche of granola eaters living in the desert.
The computer industry was successful early on because even back in the early days when computers took up a room and were one billionth as powerful as the machine I'm writing this on now, the companies building them could make money. There was a need which could only be met by filling a building with slide rule-toting engineers or buying an expensive computer. With coal coming out our ears and oil still not that expensive, there is no great market for solar unless it gets much more cheaper; a 50% improvement isn't even close.
--Len