The problem with it is longevity and maintenance. The industry is still using lead acid batteries for the same reason that it took 20 years for automakers to get around to having reasonable built in stereo systems. The manufacturers have a perception that what they have is good enough when it really isn't.
lead acid batteries under normal loading will only last about 8 years or so, with constant loss of performance during the entire period of their use. The solar companies started off using them because they concluded that it was the only technology available at that time that had the power density necessary to handle the household load. They were essentially correct, although NiCD and LiPO could both handle it, they offered no advantages over Lead Acid and cost far more. Ultra Caps have been available for about 5 years (and the costs have been steadily decreasing). The reason they are not widely adopted for Solar panel use is because they use a different charging methodology, and so can never be swapped in for lead acid batteries directly. Ultracaps have the advantage that they will outlast the structure, and are 100% maintenance free. This puts their long term (30+ years) cost far below lead acid even today. The cost of switching later is not trivial because that $1000 battery charging and monitoring equipment will have to be completely replaced when going to ultra caps, so it is purely wasted money. As you also noted, the Inverter is a completely different design between the two storage methods, so you can add the cost of a new inverter to the mix as well. So in the very short term (less than 10 years), lead acid is cheaper, and if the installation is not expected to last longer than that, then go for it. For the longer term, the cost of the batteries become non-trivial compared to the cost of ultra caps, and the cost to replace the control electronics makes it so that lead acid installation is a dead looser no matter when you switch over.
At the end of the day, it is why I strongly recommend waiting a few years while the solar industry catches up with the times and creates / markets the control electronics necessary to work with ultra caps, and for the price of ultra caps to come down further. In the long run, waiting 5 years will likely save you more than the 5 years worth of electricity...
Care to pick apart the rest of his post point by point,
I took serious exception with the entire post, although I had only limited time to respond. In complete: Lead Acid is entirely the wrong technology for home solar installation, in spite of it being the relatively cheapest. The root reason is total energy density. Even though a home system does not have the space or weight limitations that a mobile system requires, lead acid has such a low energy density compared to virtually all modern option that it is not really suitable for any application except car starter batteries (where power density is paramount). The guy is clearly an "early adopter" who is trying to sound like he knows more than he does, and giving bad advice to boot. When he claims that ultra caps are unavailable at any price: he is dead wrong. And there is no battery system in the world for a solar installation that will function as well as ultra caps, even at current prices because of the virtually limitless charge discharge cycles of ultracaps vs chemical batteries. The best advice I can give to anyone, is if you are really dead set on getting solar right now, spring for the ultracap storage, because it will be significantly cheaper in the long run. A better bet still would be to wait 5-10 years and let the researchers do their stuff, as both chemical battery, and more importantly ultra cap storage is still improving at double digit rates in all metrics.
In summary, the guys confusion of power vs energy density, along with other shortcomings in his post told me that he had no engineering knowledge whatsoever, and at best was a "power user" / early adopter who was just regurgitating the same crap he read on some blog somewhere. The most dangerous misinformation is the crap that contains half truths, or lies by omission like this one. To people who don't know the difference, this guy sounds like an expert, and those people will repeat anything they hear unless there is an immediate and clear voice to call out the BS.
The power density is really nowhere close to a battery. Supercaps make sense for things where you actually need really massive charge and/or discharge spikes, over very short times.
That is the definition of power density. You're thinking energy density. The fact that you would get the two confused casts aspersions on your knowledge in the field.
It should also be noted that almost all types of batteries have leakage current which renders them unsuitable for long term energy storage. Most super caps have a higher than normal leakage current due to the lower operating resistance of the devices (the same trait which allows them very high power density).
Interesting idea about how the victims are to blame. I spose it's pragmatic advice. Still kind of comes off as douchey. I disagree. I think people, bullies especially, but even dickhead assholes like yourself need to learn manners. Shoving someone and calling someone a name is unacceptable in the real world. That's assault. And yet that type of shit is perfectly acceptable in elementary school. Why is that?
I didn't say the victims are to blame. What I did say is that we should consider alternatives such as "hardening" the victims against these attacks.
the analogy I will use is in public networks. Nobody claims that the guys attacking computer systems remotely are good guys, or that they should be tolerated, but not one sane security professional would fail to recommend hardening the victims against the attacks.
What I am saying is that we may or may not be able to change human behavior as far as bullying is concerned, but why not also try to help improve the social functioning of the victims as well.
I was one of those that got bullied pretty harshly in school. Beat up more than once, stuffed in small containers, had my stuff continually stolen and destroyed. Finally, one day in high school, I sat down and began an exercise in figuring out why I was bullied, and how I could make it stop. Maybe I'm smarter than most, but I finally figured out that it was largely my own behavior that attracted the bullies, and that the things within my own control could be altered to reduce and even prevent the bullying. A few examples: Until that point, I did not pay much attention to my personal appearance or hygiene. I don't think I smelled funny, but who knows, so I undertook a program to clean myself up and improve my wardrobe. In retrospect, I can say I was also very much of an attention whore. I would butt into just about any conversation just to hear myself talk, and so I undertook to exercise self control, and keep my mouth shut for the most part. I would help, when help was asked for, but I would not go out of my way to butt in.
One of the key pivoting points, was deliberately picking a fight with a bully. Once I had decided it needed to be done, I prepared myself for the fight. The key was: I expected to loose, but I didn't have to win the fight to win the war, all I had to do was walk away. I waited until I was being picked on again, and when the tormentor tried to walk away, I started shouting anything and everything I could to insult the guy. I finally hit a chord, and the guy turned around and belted me (bloodied me pretty good too). I got a few hits in, but by no account did I win. My victory came in that I walked away from the fight (we had to be broken up, as I knew we would eventually be). All I had to do was be seen fighting, and not to cave in. After that, I was not tormented anymore. I wasn't accepted into the group by any means, but at least I was left alone.
At the end of the day, I had to work pretty hard to overcome the bullying, because I didn't start to transform myself until very late in high school, but by the time I reached college, I was ready to begin with a complete understanding, and can say I was fairly popular in college, even with the same types of people who used to beat me up. If someone had intervened with me at a younger age and offered to help me get the bullies to leave me alone, I would have jumped at the opportunity. As an adult with the benefit of hindsight, I now understand that bullies are attracted to attacking th weak. Its part of how children establish the pecking order. Disrupting that goes against millions of years of evolution, and I expect you will not be able to remove it from our psyche without destroying all ambition (and possibly annihilating the human race. But those that are bullied have a powerful motivation to make it stop, and lack only a complete enough world view to know how, so lets help them.
Bullies may not hate their victims per-se, but that doesn't really matter. They hurt other people for whatever reason, hate or amusement it doesn't really matter.
I seem to remember a nursery rhyme when I was growing up involving sticks and names and stuff. The point is that bullies only have as much power as their victims give them. The more they let on they have been hurt, the more the bullies hold sway over them. Like it or not, anti-bullying laws don't make the world a better place, they make the victims even less able to cope.
Put another way, when I was growing up, the victims of the bullies were pitied to an extent, but there were some who everyone just thought they had it coming. Those people were the ones who were so socially awkward that no-one had any empathy for them. The bullies were merciless with them. The solution to the problem isnt to make anit-bullying laws, its to reach out to those victims and help them to understand what makes them victims and how they can help themselves.
Much as people didn't feel a whole lot of empathy for these victims, when one of them stood up and fought back against a bully, popular opinion was with them, and everyone loved to cheer for an under-dog. What you will get with the current no-bullying policy, is zero social feedback to help these social outcasts to address the fundamental problems that cause them to be outcasts in the first place. They will remain socially isolated, and the problem will get worse, not better: Unless you want to start legislating whom kids can be friends with, and who they *must* be friends with...
The problem in USA is not that Google and Apple had agreements not to hire from each other, it's that there are so few employers at all, and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.
No, the problem is the free market economy. Economists will tell you that the proper functioning of free markets requires several things. First, It can exist only in the presence of proper supply and demand. This requirement has a prerequisite: Scarcity. without scarcity, Supply and demand cannot work, and the free market economy adjusts to create artificial scarcity.
This problem is compounded in the labor market, where disenfranchised individuals go on to have very high costs for society. The markets approach to these (obsolete) people is to simply discard them, but in sufficient quantities these people can and will destroy society through political action, or in extreme cases, military action.
Both of these problems are compounded by technology which allows the general elimination of scarcity, especially in the labor market. This is having the effect of eroding one of the fundamental requirements of capitalism. In the 1930s, it took a radical social agenda to rip large amounts of capital away from the capitalists and basically give it to the bottom 10% to restore a temporary stability to the markets. Welfare, medicare and social security are all socialist concepts, and yet have been one of the only long term solutions to the problems listed above.
The problem with socialist programs is that, like anarchy, they cant truly exist outside of specific government protections because they require a power vacuum, and as soon as that exists, it is filled by the first people to show up (the last people you want in power).
That mattered briefly during the mobile revolution but was obsoleted after the second or third release. It's a neat skill, but like yodeling, doesn't really matter any more.
Wrong, very wrong, and terribly wrong. On any platform, memory equals money, storage equals money, and cpu cycles equals money. You might scoff and poke fun at the guy who says memory management matters, the extra ram only costs $0.10. The fact is that when you intend to sell 10M units, that $0.10 amounts to a millions dollars. If I told my employer that I saved them 3 weeks of my time by writing shitty code, but they would have to pay an extra $0.10 unit cost, I wouldn't last longer than it took my boss to finish spitting out the tyrade of expletives that I would have coming. If you're only selling 10,000 units, then the devs time is more valuable than performance, but anything above that number, and resource management matters big time. Web programmers get away with lousy code on a more regular basis, because they can offload much of the cost of processing on their customers. Even there they have to be somewhat careful because if the thing uses too much of the system resources, they loose a customer because of it...
I've seen companies dedicate an engineer to figuring out how to remove a $0.01 capacitor from a design because the savings annually amounted to close to 7 figures in unit cost... That's the guy that makes 250k/year and that is why he is earning it. Simply put, you're only worth as much to your employer as the difference to their bottom line because you're there. If they can replace you with an uneducated guy from Elbonia without hurting their bottom line, they're going to do it. If you want to make the real money, you have to know what the hell you're doing.
None of these or any other internal arcana of c have anything to do with designing algorithms or programming computers.
I defy you to write a compiler or kernel without such knowledge. Without that compiler you're not a programmer, youre a technical writer with aspirations. Without the kernel, you dont have a computer, you have a paperweight.
High level programmers can be replaced a dime a dozen because of languages like java. Low level programmers are sought after because they understand the arcane.
Java schools are a menace, but since it's nearly impossible to find grads with a "real" programming curriculum any more, I think we've just sort of given up and accepted our fate as needing to teach new college hires everything.
If you want a recent grad who has a decent understanding of low level programming , you need a computer engineering student as opposed to a computer Science student. computer engineering students are taught what used to be called cs. They will come out of school with a deep understanding of everything they will need to know to handle programming for embedded devices where every byte counts. They are rare, and they are expnesive, but you get what you pay for.
So it's your assertion that Verizon should pay to run lines to the Netflix data center, and give them all the free bandwidth they can use?
No, that would make them Netflix's ISP as well, in which case I would have no issue with them charging Netflix whatever they normally charge commercial customers.
What I have an issue with is Verizon charging Netflix' ISP (or Netflix directly) for moving bits which effectively now belong to me. If they can get Netflix to agree to it great, but if Netflix refuses, and Verizon starts limiting the transmission of those bits through actions within their control, then they are going to answer to me, because *I* am their customer. I am considering dropping their service as a result of this squabble. Not because I use Netflix (I really don't), but because I have to ask the question: How long until they get around to playing this dumb game with a service that I DO use. If they pulled this crap with Google, Skype, Crashplan, or any of the other online services I use, It would take the duration of a phone call to TWC to dump Verizon.
My issue with this whole thing, is what happens to the subscribers who live where there is no alternative? What do they do? The FCC is supposed to look out for those folks, but they have been completely asleep at the switch...
Stupid? I'm the only one here who seems to know what peering agreements are, and how they've worked for the past several decades.
There's no question Verizon has plenty of bandwidth. The problem here is Level-3 breaking their peering agreement, and not wanting to renegotiate, so Verizon has ever right to disconnect Level-3 and Netflix from their customers. Instead, they let the peering point get congested, until a new agreement is worked out.
It's how peering has always worked. You're the one arguing we need to erase the history of the internet, and turn it into a receiver-pays model, where every site you visit gets a few cents from Verizon.
The peering model is flawed. There are effectively four different entities in any given transaction:
ISP1 and Customer1 (aka consumer and ISP). ISP2 and customer 2 (aka service company). Eash customer pays their own ISP to get the bits to or from them to the border between ISPs. These customers have paid their ISP to do this regardless of the direction of the bits. I pay TWC and Verizon to move bits to and from my machines. Google and Netflix pay their providers to do the same. Companies like Level 3 should get paid to move bits from one ISP to another when the ISPs cannot reasonably connect directly to each other. They are paid by the ISPs to move bits from the ISP to the other ISP. As such, the ISPs should never be getting paid by anyone other than the consumer, and the tier 3 providers should not get paid by anyone other than the ISPs. In this regard, direct peering saves both ISPs money in direct proportion to the amount of their own customers traffic. In that regard, peering is always equitable and should be a cash neutral arrangement for everyone involved.
The only time the concept gets more complicated is if there needs to be a 5th party involved in moving bits from one ISP to another, and these parties should be paid by all ISPs, as they have no direct customers of their own. Where it starts getting stupid is when a customer has an arrangement directly with one of these 5th parties. Now everyone seems to think they are owed money by everyone else, when in reality, once the 5th party starts providing internet service directly to the customer, they effectively become either ISP1 or ISP2, and all payments to or from other ISPs should stop. Allowing any other arrangement is idiotic, and will lead only to the kinds of dimwitted inbred redneck fighting we have now. If a tier 3 provider really wants to go into the ISP business, then they should keep that business as a separate entity at arms length. otherwise ISP1 would be fully justified in claiming that it the 5th entity is really ISP2, and as such demanding that the arrangement is a peering one, and not a transit arrangement.
In the end these stupid fights hurt only the consumers and the Internet in general. A tier 3 provider can usually be bypassed pretty automatically, but for end consumers bypassing their own ISP is far more difficult, as many have defacto monopolies in large areas of the country. In the end, Netflix is trying to alleviate the problem by providing content delivery from the ISPs own local blockhouse, thus saving everyone the bandwidth, but when an idiot like Verizon thinks that they are somehow entitled to be paid for allowing someone to save them money, they need to get smacked around.
If Netflix got a free CDN setup without paying ISPs anything, Verizon would quickly see all the other CDNs refusing to pay them, too.
I don't have a problem with that. If Verizon thinks that $60 / month for Internet access in my area is not enough, they are welcome to raise their rates, but TWC doesn't seem to have any problems with providing 50Mb down for that price, and I'm going to guess that they allowed Netflix to co-lo without the double-dipping fees. Again, I re-iterate, I have paid Verizon to move the bits, they have no right to bitch about having to actually move them, and nor do they have the right to charge anyone else to move those same bits.
that link is dedicated netflix and it limits them to the amount of data they send. last year super hd was for a few selected ISP's but then netflix started sending it to everyone over Level 3 and screwed up everyone's service
the point is netflix is trying to increase costs on their business partners who will then have to increase prices of their customers. customers will hate the ISP but like netflix. same strategy as TV companies have used with cable TV and forcing them to sell bundled channels, intel has done this, a lot of companies have done this. customer hates the company they do business with for high prices, but it's really because they are being forced to provide services some may not want
current system is not perfect but it ensures that people who use the service pay the costs and not everyone pays
Verizon was given an "out" and they refused to take it.
Netflix offered to provide co-located CDNs, and all Verizon had to provide was electricity and space (both of which are negligible compared to the cost for Verizon to pay for bandwidth.) Verizon elected not to take the option that would save them money, deciding instead to play a stupid game of chicken with Netflix. While this idiot game may work with smaller companies, Netflix is now the 800Lb gorilla, and Verizon has nothing but downside on this deal. Their best bet would be to quietly put their tail between their legs and give Netflix the Co-lo's they had been asking for. Verizon needs to understand that they do not really have any chance at becoming a significant content provider, and they should know their place. (getting my bits from place to place.) They offer the consumer specific bandwidth, which as far as the consumer is concerned includes Netflix traffic. Verizon needs to understand that in the consumers mind, the customers pay Netflix to provide the bits, and they pay Verizon to get them from Netflix to their device. Verizon can claim all they want to about Netflix not paying for this, or not paying for that, but as far as I am concerned, I am paying Verizon to deliver the bandwidth door to door. I have already payed Verizon for it, and now they are failing to deliver what I paid for.
Given that this would be upwards of 2000x higher density than a lithium battery, does that mean a 60Wh laptop battery has the explosive capacity of half a stick of TNT?
Yes, its just very difficult to get a very fast or efficient energy conversion from the laptop battery to an explosion. In order to produce efficient explosive force, chemical energy needs to be converted into heat extremely fast (milliseconds at least, nanoseconds would be better). Those laptop batteries are designed with exactly the opposite goal, so as to reduce overheating and fire risk.
The remaining 5,500 people are redundancies of the kind you get when you smash a 127,000 employee company together with a 90,000 employee company to get a 217,000 employee company, and then decide that 2.5% of them are duplicate effort which is not necessary.
And I believe it is incumbent upon Microsoft to demonstrate that not one of those existing employees is suitable to replace and H1B visa holder. Should any of those people be capable of doing the job held by the H1B visa holder, Microsoft should be required to ship the H1B holder back instead of laying off the American worker. The fact that the law doesn't address this is in itself a miscarriage of the law.
You have one party that has completely gone off the rails, who puts its own orthodoxy over the law of the land and the country
That would be both parties. The actions of the Justice department fall directly under the purview of the President, and yet those actions are as inscrutable as any of his predecessors. It should also be noted that in spite of the good that has come of the affordable care act, it is a far cry from what it should have been, and that many of the problems could have been avoided with a little bit of compromise, and some bipartisan work instead of trying to ram through what we have now. Single payer was probably a bit too much to ask, but limited liability wouldn't have been such a terrible thing either. Point is, neither side gives a shit about the people who elected them. All they care about is getting re-elected...
The only thing limiting you to two choices is you. Many ballots have third parties. You are free to run in those that don't. By stating to yourself and others that there are only two choices, you are part of the problem.
It is only a problem for you. I am perfectly capable of dealing with whatever government shows up to run things. My only concern is that the transition from what we have now to what we have after the open revolt will be somewhat taxing, and what concern I have for my fellow citizens leads me to want to help out where I can, but the fact remains that regardless of how you vote, the problem remians the system itself, and no amount of fiddling with the dials is going to fix a broken system. The fundamental problem of government isn't that people cannot govern themselves, its that they are fundamentally incapable of refraining from governing others. Once you reach this conclusion, *any* form of government is eventually going to be corrupted to the point of open revolt. It is inevitable. We might or might not be nearing that point in the USA. I tend to believe that we will live to see it in the relatively near future (next 30 years or so). It will be precipitated by a large resource shortage like oil embargo, food crisis, or something else, but our government has been getting less and less stable, and more and more extreme. It wont take nearly as much as most people think to push us into civil war. After the war, we'll get yet another government that might be better, or might be worse, but will eventually fall because all governments eventually fall to greed and corruption.
I think you've taken a valid point and stretched it a little far here. If we'd had eight years of Gore starting in 2000, do you think Iraq would have played out exactly the same? If we were on our way to eight years of McCain starting in 2008, do you think the trends in health insurance would be what they are?
I heard the same basic sentiment in 2008 about another politician. That doesnt seem to have turned out how anyone expected.
Funny thing about politicians: They will say absolutely anything to get elected...
Y'all are missing the point -- Jeff Sessions is a dumb-ass teabagger from AL. His big issue is immigration; he wants to keep any and all immigrants out of the US (excepting his own white self and his family, in the finest "I got mine, screw the rest of ya" republican tradition). He doesn't give a damn about jobs. He doesn't give a damn about engineers. All he wants is to send immigrant children back to the Mexican and Central American drugs-and-guns war zone he and his fellow congress critters created so he can get them dark skinned Spanish speaking people as far from himself as he can get them.
There's a false comparison being made here... who says the Nokia engineer or the Xbox content maker being laid off has the same skills as the programmer they are wanting to hire?
That right there is the problem. The two groups of people have the same basic skills that are necessary to do the jobs, and the only thing either party was lacking is some limited training related to the specifics of the job. Until the late '70s, it was well understood that a company had to plan for and pay for training to bring every new employee up to speed. colleges and trade schools gave them the basic skill set, but the company had to pay for the rest. Since then, companies are trying to cut costs, and one of the easiest cost buckets is the training budget. Simply wipe it and only hire people who already have the exact skill set you need. The problem is that when every company does this, no one gets trained, and there slowly develops a perception of a labor shortage... The reality is that companies expectations from new employees and employment candidates has become unreasonable and untenable The labor pool hasn't really changed, but the corporate attitude towards hiring has changed. This is truly compounded by the trend towards globalization, where you get tens of thousands of applicants for every position, so instead of having an engineering manager go through the few tens of applications and picking the closest fit, you now have an unqualified HR hack going through 150k applications and reporting back that there is nobody who exactly fits the requirements given by the engineering manager. Never mind that at least 10% of those applicants could learn the skills they need in a very short time, and be productive to meet the needs of the position. Congress needs to shut off the supply of H1B, and tell these companies to fix their hiring practices if they want to fix the "labor shortage".
When it comes to engineering, the difference between an XBox application programmer and Nokia OS programmer is many orders of magnitude smaller than the difference between an HR manager and an engineering manager... The guy being laid off could pick up and do any number of jobs currently being occupied by H1B holders without much fuss at all. Its about time, that these companies had their feet held to the fire.
You as Americans have a choice and a vote, each 2-4 years. You can either do something or you don't want to. The spiral and time is working against you.
Every so often we get to vote, but we are limited to two choices, both of which have been given large sums of money by various PACs, which are essentially just fronts for various corporate officers. Often, the same PAC will back both candidates in any given race, just so that they get the benefit of backing the winner every time. There is no democratically elected leadership in this country anymore, there is only a selection between two candidates presented to the masses by the 1%. In all the ways that really matter (fiscal policy, economic policy, regulation, law enforcement, etc...), the candidates are identical. They will debate and argue over the issues that the public has been trained to believe really matter, but in reality the issues that are hotly contested don't really matter, and the ones that do, are quietly agreed upon behind closed doors. How many politicians that truly have power have done anything to end Guantanamo, or the rights abuses happening there? How many have done anything to end the systematic dissolution of our constitutional rights? How many have actually taken steps to fix the systemic problems that led to the recession? How many have taken any action to help eliminate the vastly disproportional power the 1% wield in our political system? How many have taken steps to address the extraordinary and growing wealth and earnings inequalities in our society?
The answer to these questions is now, and has been: none that matter. The only way we will be able to undo the damage the 1% have done to our country will be through an extraordinary action outside the accepted political system, because everything inside the political system has been thoroughly corrupted by those with the real power: the 1%.
The comoditization of embedded hardware designed happened over a decade ago. Have you heard of Kontron? PC104? Com Express? You seem to have missed the 2000's.... this is nothing new. These days it is amazing what is put on a DIMM module - far more than the Beagle Bone and Pi toys provide and at far lower unit prices.
The commoditization of these designs depended on several factors happening all at once.
First, processor power had to pass a threshold. Having a processor that is fast enough to handle an embedded system running a custom operating system (or more likely just a simple set of interrupt handlers and startup code) is a lot slower than the processor needed to run a full fledged kernel like modern Linux. The custom Software saves huge amounts of unit-cost, at the cost of time-to-market.
The second item that was needed was price point. Even $45 per unit is still high for the BBB black, but the RPi at $35 is pretty close. Even the BBB is close enough to work with.
Third, mainstream OS support. This is critical, because it turned a legion of higher-level programmers into embedded programmers. This, again, helps to reduce TTM
Last, the availability and maturity of simple to wire peripherals, and the availability of software libraries for using these peripherals. This is probably the most key part because you now have the ability to buy a modular set of components, and wire them all together with very little, if any, electronics knowledge and get a working system. Again, it all drives TTM, and in todays world TTM is everything. Just ask Microsoft how their tablet and phone business' are doing to find out how important TTM really is.
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so I'm interested why you think it is so wrong?
The problem with it is longevity and maintenance. The industry is still using lead acid batteries for the same reason that it took 20 years for automakers to get around to having reasonable built in stereo systems. The manufacturers have a perception that what they have is good enough when it really isn't.
lead acid batteries under normal loading will only last about 8 years or so, with constant loss of performance during the entire period of their use. The solar companies started off using them because they concluded that it was the only technology available at that time that had the power density necessary to handle the household load. They were essentially correct, although NiCD and LiPO could both handle it, they offered no advantages over Lead Acid and cost far more. Ultra Caps have been available for about 5 years (and the costs have been steadily decreasing). The reason they are not widely adopted for Solar panel use is because they use a different charging methodology, and so can never be swapped in for lead acid batteries directly. Ultracaps have the advantage that they will outlast the structure, and are 100% maintenance free. This puts their long term (30+ years) cost far below lead acid even today. The cost of switching later is not trivial because that $1000 battery charging and monitoring equipment will have to be completely replaced when going to ultra caps, so it is purely wasted money. As you also noted, the Inverter is a completely different design between the two storage methods, so you can add the cost of a new inverter to the mix as well. So in the very short term (less than 10 years), lead acid is cheaper, and if the installation is not expected to last longer than that, then go for it. For the longer term, the cost of the batteries become non-trivial compared to the cost of ultra caps, and the cost to replace the control electronics makes it so that lead acid installation is a dead looser no matter when you switch over.
At the end of the day, it is why I strongly recommend waiting a few years while the solar industry catches up with the times and creates / markets the control electronics necessary to work with ultra caps, and for the price of ultra caps to come down further. In the long run, waiting 5 years will likely save you more than the 5 years worth of electricity...
Care to pick apart the rest of his post point by point,
I took serious exception with the entire post, although I had only limited time to respond. In complete: Lead Acid is entirely the wrong technology for home solar installation, in spite of it being the relatively cheapest. The root reason is total energy density. Even though a home system does not have the space or weight limitations that a mobile system requires, lead acid has such a low energy density compared to virtually all modern option that it is not really suitable for any application except car starter batteries (where power density is paramount). The guy is clearly an "early adopter" who is trying to sound like he knows more than he does, and giving bad advice to boot. When he claims that ultra caps are unavailable at any price: he is dead wrong. And there is no battery system in the world for a solar installation that will function as well as ultra caps, even at current prices because of the virtually limitless charge discharge cycles of ultracaps vs chemical batteries. The best advice I can give to anyone, is if you are really dead set on getting solar right now, spring for the ultracap storage, because it will be significantly cheaper in the long run. A better bet still would be to wait 5-10 years and let the researchers do their stuff, as both chemical battery, and more importantly ultra cap storage is still improving at double digit rates in all metrics.
In summary, the guys confusion of power vs energy density, along with other shortcomings in his post told me that he had no engineering knowledge whatsoever, and at best was a "power user" / early adopter who was just regurgitating the same crap he read on some blog somewhere. The most dangerous misinformation is the crap that contains half truths, or lies by omission like this one. To people who don't know the difference, this guy sounds like an expert, and those people will repeat anything they hear unless there is an immediate and clear voice to call out the BS.
The power density is really nowhere close to a battery. Supercaps make sense for things where you actually need really massive charge and/or discharge spikes, over very short times.
That is the definition of power density. You're thinking energy density. The fact that you would get the two confused casts aspersions on your knowledge in the field.
It should also be noted that almost all types of batteries have leakage current which renders them unsuitable for long term energy storage. Most super caps have a higher than normal leakage current due to the lower operating resistance of the devices (the same trait which allows them very high power density).
Interesting idea about how the victims are to blame. I spose it's pragmatic advice. Still kind of comes off as douchey. I disagree. I think people, bullies especially, but even dickhead assholes like yourself need to learn manners. Shoving someone and calling someone a name is unacceptable in the real world. That's assault. And yet that type of shit is perfectly acceptable in elementary school. Why is that?
I didn't say the victims are to blame. What I did say is that we should consider alternatives such as "hardening" the victims against these attacks.
the analogy I will use is in public networks. Nobody claims that the guys attacking computer systems remotely are good guys, or that they should be tolerated, but not one sane security professional would fail to recommend hardening the victims against the attacks.
What I am saying is that we may or may not be able to change human behavior as far as bullying is concerned, but why not also try to help improve the social functioning of the victims as well.
I was one of those that got bullied pretty harshly in school. Beat up more than once, stuffed in small containers, had my stuff continually stolen and destroyed. Finally, one day in high school, I sat down and began an exercise in figuring out why I was bullied, and how I could make it stop. Maybe I'm smarter than most, but I finally figured out that it was largely my own behavior that attracted the bullies, and that the things within my own control could be altered to reduce and even prevent the bullying. A few examples: Until that point, I did not pay much attention to my personal appearance or hygiene. I don't think I smelled funny, but who knows, so I undertook a program to clean myself up and improve my wardrobe. In retrospect, I can say I was also very much of an attention whore. I would butt into just about any conversation just to hear myself talk, and so I undertook to exercise self control, and keep my mouth shut for the most part. I would help, when help was asked for, but I would not go out of my way to butt in.
One of the key pivoting points, was deliberately picking a fight with a bully. Once I had decided it needed to be done, I prepared myself for the fight. The key was: I expected to loose, but I didn't have to win the fight to win the war, all I had to do was walk away. I waited until I was being picked on again, and when the tormentor tried to walk away, I started shouting anything and everything I could to insult the guy. I finally hit a chord, and the guy turned around and belted me (bloodied me pretty good too). I got a few hits in, but by no account did I win. My victory came in that I walked away from the fight (we had to be broken up, as I knew we would eventually be). All I had to do was be seen fighting, and not to cave in. After that, I was not tormented anymore. I wasn't accepted into the group by any means, but at least I was left alone.
At the end of the day, I had to work pretty hard to overcome the bullying, because I didn't start to transform myself until very late in high school, but by the time I reached college, I was ready to begin with a complete understanding, and can say I was fairly popular in college, even with the same types of people who used to beat me up. If someone had intervened with me at a younger age and offered to help me get the bullies to leave me alone, I would have jumped at the opportunity. As an adult with the benefit of hindsight, I now understand that bullies are attracted to attacking th weak. Its part of how children establish the pecking order. Disrupting that goes against millions of years of evolution, and I expect you will not be able to remove it from our psyche without destroying all ambition (and possibly annihilating the human race. But those that are bullied have a powerful motivation to make it stop, and lack only a complete enough world view to know how, so lets help them.
Bullies may not hate their victims per-se, but that doesn't really matter. They hurt other people for whatever reason, hate or amusement it doesn't really matter.
I seem to remember a nursery rhyme when I was growing up involving sticks and names and stuff. The point is that bullies only have as much power as their victims give them. The more they let on they have been hurt, the more the bullies hold sway over them. Like it or not, anti-bullying laws don't make the world a better place, they make the victims even less able to cope.
Put another way, when I was growing up, the victims of the bullies were pitied to an extent, but there were some who everyone just thought they had it coming. Those people were the ones who were so socially awkward that no-one had any empathy for them. The bullies were merciless with them. The solution to the problem isnt to make anit-bullying laws, its to reach out to those victims and help them to understand what makes them victims and how they can help themselves.
Much as people didn't feel a whole lot of empathy for these victims, when one of them stood up and fought back against a bully, popular opinion was with them, and everyone loved to cheer for an under-dog. What you will get with the current no-bullying policy, is zero social feedback to help these social outcasts to address the fundamental problems that cause them to be outcasts in the first place. They will remain socially isolated, and the problem will get worse, not better: Unless you want to start legislating whom kids can be friends with, and who they *must* be friends with...
If you're citing your 197 IQ as some sort of qualification for something, it's that much dumber.
Not if it acheives the result you were aming for: separating those closer to the 100 mark from their money.
The problem in USA is not that Google and Apple had agreements not to hire from each other, it's that there are so few employers at all, and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.
No, the problem is the free market economy. Economists will tell you that the proper functioning of free markets requires several things. First, It can exist only in the presence of proper supply and demand. This requirement has a prerequisite: Scarcity. without scarcity, Supply and demand cannot work, and the free market economy adjusts to create artificial scarcity.
This problem is compounded in the labor market, where disenfranchised individuals go on to have very high costs for society. The markets approach to these (obsolete) people is to simply discard them, but in sufficient quantities these people can and will destroy society through political action, or in extreme cases, military action.
Both of these problems are compounded by technology which allows the general elimination of scarcity, especially in the labor market. This is having the effect of eroding one of the fundamental requirements of capitalism. In the 1930s, it took a radical social agenda to rip large amounts of capital away from the capitalists and basically give it to the bottom 10% to restore a temporary stability to the markets. Welfare, medicare and social security are all socialist concepts, and yet have been one of the only long term solutions to the problems listed above.
The problem with socialist programs is that, like anarchy, they cant truly exist outside of specific government protections because they require a power vacuum, and as soon as that exists, it is filled by the first people to show up (the last people you want in power).
That mattered briefly during the mobile revolution but was obsoleted after the second or third release. It's a neat skill, but like yodeling, doesn't really matter any more.
Wrong, very wrong, and terribly wrong. On any platform, memory equals money, storage equals money, and cpu cycles equals money. You might scoff and poke fun at the guy who says memory management matters, the extra ram only costs $0.10. The fact is that when you intend to sell 10M units, that $0.10 amounts to a millions dollars. If I told my employer that I saved them 3 weeks of my time by writing shitty code, but they would have to pay an extra $0.10 unit cost, I wouldn't last longer than it took my boss to finish spitting out the tyrade of expletives that I would have coming. If you're only selling 10,000 units, then the devs time is more valuable than performance, but anything above that number, and resource management matters big time. Web programmers get away with lousy code on a more regular basis, because they can offload much of the cost of processing on their customers. Even there they have to be somewhat careful because if the thing uses too much of the system resources, they loose a customer because of it...
I've seen companies dedicate an engineer to figuring out how to remove a $0.01 capacitor from a design because the savings annually amounted to close to 7 figures in unit cost... That's the guy that makes 250k/year and that is why he is earning it. Simply put, you're only worth as much to your employer as the difference to their bottom line because you're there. If they can replace you with an uneducated guy from Elbonia without hurting their bottom line, they're going to do it. If you want to make the real money, you have to know what the hell you're doing.
None of these or any other internal arcana of c have anything to do with designing algorithms or programming computers.
I defy you to write a compiler or kernel without such knowledge. Without that compiler you're not a programmer, youre a technical writer with aspirations. Without the kernel, you dont have a computer, you have a paperweight.
High level programmers can be replaced a dime a dozen because of languages like java. Low level programmers are sought after because they understand the arcane.
Java schools are a menace, but since it's nearly impossible to find grads with a "real" programming curriculum any more, I think we've just sort of given up and accepted our fate as needing to teach new college hires everything.
If you want a recent grad who has a decent understanding of low level programming , you need a computer engineering student as opposed to a computer Science student. computer engineering students are taught what used to be called cs. They will come out of school with a deep understanding of everything they will need to know to handle programming for embedded devices where every byte counts. They are rare, and they are expnesive, but you get what you pay for.
So it's your assertion that Verizon should pay to run lines to the Netflix data center, and give them all the free bandwidth they can use?
No, that would make them Netflix's ISP as well, in which case I would have no issue with them charging Netflix whatever they normally charge commercial customers.
What I have an issue with is Verizon charging Netflix' ISP (or Netflix directly) for moving bits which effectively now belong to me. If they can get Netflix to agree to it great, but if Netflix refuses, and Verizon starts limiting the transmission of those bits through actions within their control, then they are going to answer to me, because *I* am their customer. I am considering dropping their service as a result of this squabble. Not because I use Netflix (I really don't), but because I have to ask the question: How long until they get around to playing this dumb game with a service that I DO use. If they pulled this crap with Google, Skype, Crashplan, or any of the other online services I use, It would take the duration of a phone call to TWC to dump Verizon.
My issue with this whole thing, is what happens to the subscribers who live where there is no alternative? What do they do? The FCC is supposed to look out for those folks, but they have been completely asleep at the switch...
Stupid? I'm the only one here who seems to know what peering agreements are, and how they've worked for the past several decades. There's no question Verizon has plenty of bandwidth. The problem here is Level-3 breaking their peering agreement, and not wanting to renegotiate, so Verizon has ever right to disconnect Level-3 and Netflix from their customers. Instead, they let the peering point get congested, until a new agreement is worked out. It's how peering has always worked. You're the one arguing we need to erase the history of the internet, and turn it into a receiver-pays model, where every site you visit gets a few cents from Verizon.
The peering model is flawed. There are effectively four different entities in any given transaction: ISP1 and Customer1 (aka consumer and ISP). ISP2 and customer 2 (aka service company). Eash customer pays their own ISP to get the bits to or from them to the border between ISPs. These customers have paid their ISP to do this regardless of the direction of the bits. I pay TWC and Verizon to move bits to and from my machines. Google and Netflix pay their providers to do the same. Companies like Level 3 should get paid to move bits from one ISP to another when the ISPs cannot reasonably connect directly to each other. They are paid by the ISPs to move bits from the ISP to the other ISP. As such, the ISPs should never be getting paid by anyone other than the consumer, and the tier 3 providers should not get paid by anyone other than the ISPs. In this regard, direct peering saves both ISPs money in direct proportion to the amount of their own customers traffic. In that regard, peering is always equitable and should be a cash neutral arrangement for everyone involved.
The only time the concept gets more complicated is if there needs to be a 5th party involved in moving bits from one ISP to another, and these parties should be paid by all ISPs, as they have no direct customers of their own. Where it starts getting stupid is when a customer has an arrangement directly with one of these 5th parties. Now everyone seems to think they are owed money by everyone else, when in reality, once the 5th party starts providing internet service directly to the customer, they effectively become either ISP1 or ISP2, and all payments to or from other ISPs should stop. Allowing any other arrangement is idiotic, and will lead only to the kinds of dimwitted inbred redneck fighting we have now. If a tier 3 provider really wants to go into the ISP business, then they should keep that business as a separate entity at arms length. otherwise ISP1 would be fully justified in claiming that it the 5th entity is really ISP2, and as such demanding that the arrangement is a peering one, and not a transit arrangement.
In the end these stupid fights hurt only the consumers and the Internet in general. A tier 3 provider can usually be bypassed pretty automatically, but for end consumers bypassing their own ISP is far more difficult, as many have defacto monopolies in large areas of the country. In the end, Netflix is trying to alleviate the problem by providing content delivery from the ISPs own local blockhouse, thus saving everyone the bandwidth, but when an idiot like Verizon thinks that they are somehow entitled to be paid for allowing someone to save them money, they need to get smacked around.
If Netflix got a free CDN setup without paying ISPs anything, Verizon would quickly see all the other CDNs refusing to pay them, too.
I don't have a problem with that. If Verizon thinks that $60 / month for Internet access in my area is not enough, they are welcome to raise their rates, but TWC doesn't seem to have any problems with providing 50Mb down for that price, and I'm going to guess that they allowed Netflix to co-lo without the double-dipping fees. Again, I re-iterate, I have paid Verizon to move the bits, they have no right to bitch about having to actually move them, and nor do they have the right to charge anyone else to move those same bits.
that link is dedicated netflix and it limits them to the amount of data they send. last year super hd was for a few selected ISP's but then netflix started sending it to everyone over Level 3 and screwed up everyone's service the point is netflix is trying to increase costs on their business partners who will then have to increase prices of their customers. customers will hate the ISP but like netflix. same strategy as TV companies have used with cable TV and forcing them to sell bundled channels, intel has done this, a lot of companies have done this. customer hates the company they do business with for high prices, but it's really because they are being forced to provide services some may not want current system is not perfect but it ensures that people who use the service pay the costs and not everyone pays
Verizon was given an "out" and they refused to take it. Netflix offered to provide co-located CDNs, and all Verizon had to provide was electricity and space (both of which are negligible compared to the cost for Verizon to pay for bandwidth.) Verizon elected not to take the option that would save them money, deciding instead to play a stupid game of chicken with Netflix. While this idiot game may work with smaller companies, Netflix is now the 800Lb gorilla, and Verizon has nothing but downside on this deal. Their best bet would be to quietly put their tail between their legs and give Netflix the Co-lo's they had been asking for. Verizon needs to understand that they do not really have any chance at becoming a significant content provider, and they should know their place. (getting my bits from place to place.) They offer the consumer specific bandwidth, which as far as the consumer is concerned includes Netflix traffic. Verizon needs to understand that in the consumers mind, the customers pay Netflix to provide the bits, and they pay Verizon to get them from Netflix to their device. Verizon can claim all they want to about Netflix not paying for this, or not paying for that, but as far as I am concerned, I am paying Verizon to deliver the bandwidth door to door. I have already payed Verizon for it, and now they are failing to deliver what I paid for.
Given that this would be upwards of 2000x higher density than a lithium battery, does that mean a 60Wh laptop battery has the explosive capacity of half a stick of TNT?
Yes, its just very difficult to get a very fast or efficient energy conversion from the laptop battery to an explosion. In order to produce efficient explosive force, chemical energy needs to be converted into heat extremely fast (milliseconds at least, nanoseconds would be better). Those laptop batteries are designed with exactly the opposite goal, so as to reduce overheating and fire risk.
The remaining 5,500 people are redundancies of the kind you get when you smash a 127,000 employee company together with a 90,000 employee company to get a 217,000 employee company, and then decide that 2.5% of them are duplicate effort which is not necessary.
And I believe it is incumbent upon Microsoft to demonstrate that not one of those existing employees is suitable to replace and H1B visa holder. Should any of those people be capable of doing the job held by the H1B visa holder, Microsoft should be required to ship the H1B holder back instead of laying off the American worker. The fact that the law doesn't address this is in itself a miscarriage of the law.
You have one party that has completely gone off the rails, who puts its own orthodoxy over the law of the land and the country
That would be both parties. The actions of the Justice department fall directly under the purview of the President, and yet those actions are as inscrutable as any of his predecessors. It should also be noted that in spite of the good that has come of the affordable care act, it is a far cry from what it should have been, and that many of the problems could have been avoided with a little bit of compromise, and some bipartisan work instead of trying to ram through what we have now. Single payer was probably a bit too much to ask, but limited liability wouldn't have been such a terrible thing either. Point is, neither side gives a shit about the people who elected them. All they care about is getting re-elected...
The only thing limiting you to two choices is you. Many ballots have third parties. You are free to run in those that don't. By stating to yourself and others that there are only two choices, you are part of the problem.
It is only a problem for you. I am perfectly capable of dealing with whatever government shows up to run things. My only concern is that the transition from what we have now to what we have after the open revolt will be somewhat taxing, and what concern I have for my fellow citizens leads me to want to help out where I can, but the fact remains that regardless of how you vote, the problem remians the system itself, and no amount of fiddling with the dials is going to fix a broken system. The fundamental problem of government isn't that people cannot govern themselves, its that they are fundamentally incapable of refraining from governing others. Once you reach this conclusion, *any* form of government is eventually going to be corrupted to the point of open revolt. It is inevitable. We might or might not be nearing that point in the USA. I tend to believe that we will live to see it in the relatively near future (next 30 years or so). It will be precipitated by a large resource shortage like oil embargo, food crisis, or something else, but our government has been getting less and less stable, and more and more extreme. It wont take nearly as much as most people think to push us into civil war. After the war, we'll get yet another government that might be better, or might be worse, but will eventually fall because all governments eventually fall to greed and corruption.
I think you've taken a valid point and stretched it a little far here. If we'd had eight years of Gore starting in 2000, do you think Iraq would have played out exactly the same? If we were on our way to eight years of McCain starting in 2008, do you think the trends in health insurance would be what they are?
I heard the same basic sentiment in 2008 about another politician. That doesnt seem to have turned out how anyone expected.
Funny thing about politicians: They will say absolutely anything to get elected...
Y'all are missing the point -- Jeff Sessions is a dumb-ass teabagger from AL. His big issue is immigration; he wants to keep any and all immigrants out of the US (excepting his own white self and his family, in the finest "I got mine, screw the rest of ya" republican tradition). He doesn't give a damn about jobs. He doesn't give a damn about engineers. All he wants is to send immigrant children back to the Mexican and Central American drugs-and-guns war zone he and his fellow congress critters created so he can get them dark skinned Spanish speaking people as far from himself as he can get them.
That doesn't make him wrong...
Go read, because you sound like an ignorant ass.
seconded
There's a false comparison being made here... who says the Nokia engineer or the Xbox content maker being laid off has the same skills as the programmer they are wanting to hire?
That right there is the problem. The two groups of people have the same basic skills that are necessary to do the jobs, and the only thing either party was lacking is some limited training related to the specifics of the job. Until the late '70s, it was well understood that a company had to plan for and pay for training to bring every new employee up to speed. colleges and trade schools gave them the basic skill set, but the company had to pay for the rest. Since then, companies are trying to cut costs, and one of the easiest cost buckets is the training budget. Simply wipe it and only hire people who already have the exact skill set you need. The problem is that when every company does this, no one gets trained, and there slowly develops a perception of a labor shortage... The reality is that companies expectations from new employees and employment candidates has become unreasonable and untenable The labor pool hasn't really changed, but the corporate attitude towards hiring has changed. This is truly compounded by the trend towards globalization, where you get tens of thousands of applicants for every position, so instead of having an engineering manager go through the few tens of applications and picking the closest fit, you now have an unqualified HR hack going through 150k applications and reporting back that there is nobody who exactly fits the requirements given by the engineering manager. Never mind that at least 10% of those applicants could learn the skills they need in a very short time, and be productive to meet the needs of the position. Congress needs to shut off the supply of H1B, and tell these companies to fix their hiring practices if they want to fix the "labor shortage".
When it comes to engineering, the difference between an XBox application programmer and Nokia OS programmer is many orders of magnitude smaller than the difference between an HR manager and an engineering manager... The guy being laid off could pick up and do any number of jobs currently being occupied by H1B holders without much fuss at all. Its about time, that these companies had their feet held to the fire.
You as Americans have a choice and a vote, each 2-4 years. You can either do something or you don't want to. The spiral and time is working against you.
Every so often we get to vote, but we are limited to two choices, both of which have been given large sums of money by various PACs, which are essentially just fronts for various corporate officers. Often, the same PAC will back both candidates in any given race, just so that they get the benefit of backing the winner every time. There is no democratically elected leadership in this country anymore, there is only a selection between two candidates presented to the masses by the 1%. In all the ways that really matter (fiscal policy, economic policy, regulation, law enforcement, etc...), the candidates are identical. They will debate and argue over the issues that the public has been trained to believe really matter, but in reality the issues that are hotly contested don't really matter, and the ones that do, are quietly agreed upon behind closed doors. How many politicians that truly have power have done anything to end Guantanamo, or the rights abuses happening there? How many have done anything to end the systematic dissolution of our constitutional rights? How many have actually taken steps to fix the systemic problems that led to the recession? How many have taken any action to help eliminate the vastly disproportional power the 1% wield in our political system? How many have taken steps to address the extraordinary and growing wealth and earnings inequalities in our society?
The answer to these questions is now, and has been: none that matter. The only way we will be able to undo the damage the 1% have done to our country will be through an extraordinary action outside the accepted political system, because everything inside the political system has been thoroughly corrupted by those with the real power: the 1%.
Just remember that companies like Valve were founded by ex-Microsoft software engineers.
I'll bet you anything they were never any of the ones on the chopping block for a layoff...
The comoditization of embedded hardware designed happened over a decade ago. Have you heard of Kontron? PC104? Com Express? You seem to have missed the 2000's.... this is nothing new. These days it is amazing what is put on a DIMM module - far more than the Beagle Bone and Pi toys provide and at far lower unit prices.
The commoditization of these designs depended on several factors happening all at once.
First, processor power had to pass a threshold. Having a processor that is fast enough to handle an embedded system running a custom operating system (or more likely just a simple set of interrupt handlers and startup code) is a lot slower than the processor needed to run a full fledged kernel like modern Linux. The custom Software saves huge amounts of unit-cost, at the cost of time-to-market.
The second item that was needed was price point. Even $45 per unit is still high for the BBB black, but the RPi at $35 is pretty close. Even the BBB is close enough to work with.
Third, mainstream OS support. This is critical, because it turned a legion of higher-level programmers into embedded programmers. This, again, helps to reduce TTM
Last, the availability and maturity of simple to wire peripherals, and the availability of software libraries for using these peripherals. This is probably the most key part because you now have the ability to buy a modular set of components, and wire them all together with very little, if any, electronics knowledge and get a working system. Again, it all drives TTM, and in todays world TTM is everything. Just ask Microsoft how their tablet and phone business' are doing to find out how important TTM really is.