I bought my home fairly cheaply - for this area. Down the road my small home needed a revamp and I had a choice of moving (during the bubble!) or improving what I had. Instead of selling my home, albeit during the bubble, and buying one that would've cost at least $500-$600K I spent $100K+ to add a second story. I paid extra for serious insulation, good heating\cooling, and a tin roof - which is perfect for a standing seam rack mount solar install. When it was all done (I lived in it while the work was done and helped swing hammers) I owed more than $300K after the refi was complete. I rolled in a credit card and paid off my car in this too. Now I currently owe more than $35K more than they say it's worth plus I've just paid off having another $10K worth of heating\cooling\insulation done on the older portion of the home. On the plus side I have a 15 year mortgage and pay a little extra, in like 10 years or so I'll be debt free. I've also kept my credit cards nearly zeroed. Making more sense now? Hey the best part? Apparently my home is nicer than many in my area and thus comps like crap. All of the foreclosures blowing up around me haven't helped either. You do NOT want to be the nicest house on the block:(
When you do the roof do tin BTW. It's not cheap but it goes in FAST and lasts forever, I think it looks awesome great. It's also possible to support solar somewhat easily. Look into a radiant barrier up there too but prices to have it installed are CRAZY. If I can find good material I'll do that myself. If possible spray foam, that stuff seals and I have ZERO drafts in my upstairs and now my downstairs is well sealed too having done my crawl. I still need to do a follow-up blower door test but I have zero doubt it would be light years better:)
Honestly? Tax the "rich" more. Tax ME more too. I'm middle class and if I made my salary someplace other than this area I'd probably be considered somehow rich. But this area isn't cheap and while I'm doing better than average I still sweat every month. But I'd pay more willingly so long as I perceived that the ones above me who have had the money to avoid taxes were no longer quite so able to do so and were taxed more too. Someone has to try and get our shit together here and I'm willing to help but I'm not willing to take on more burden if the ones above me making disgusting CEO bonuses aren't getting hit at least as hard. I live here, I'm willing to help pay for it fairly. I'm NOT one of those running aorund wanting more more more, I just want things done fairly and I'm happy with my current standard of living...
FWIW many of the homes not far from me go for over $500K for even a small place. I bought further out and within my means, I then used equity to improve my home instead of buying another (a home not an investment to roll over in a year). Then the bottom fell out and while others are higher and drier than me I'm still looking at LEAST 2 more years of mortgage payments (on a 15yr loan) before my loan value approaches it's current potential sales cost. My home might once have been able to bring near $500K, right now it would bring less than $230K. Thankfully I didn't go crazy like some folks and I ignored the real estate agent who wanted me to spend double what I did 15 years ago!
Bingo! You summed it up very well. It's not just the $30K it's the $30K plus interest plus the hassle, plus potential maintenance, all for a maybe payoff in 17+ years if not more. I'm not really feeling incentivized there...
Home is already insulated - the upstairs is completely spray foamed plus rigid foam and housewrap. In the attic there's about 4inches of blown in fluffy on top of the sprayfoam. The SEER on the unit upstairs is unknown offhand but it's not bad and barely runs Winter or Summer. Downstairs is much older construction but it has blown in for the walls, new windows that do NOT leak, and my crawlspace was recently sprayfoamed and sealed. My heating\cooling unit downstairs is a year old and while I don't have the number for it offhand either it more than qualified for the Govt. rebate last year - all ductwork swapped with insulated stuff too. I JUST finally paid off the interest free loan on that puppy - I could've bought a nice used car for what it cost me. My lights are mostly all LED or CF, I can count on less than two hands the number of decorative ones that aren't and I seldom use them. Appliances are fairly new within the past 6 years, replacing them to save pennies makes no sense right now. Oh my hot water is tankless on demand natural gas, you'd be surprised at how much this saves even for just one person in the home.
My computers... they suck juice. But many of them are ATOM based and my HDD ALL spin down in my servers. My desktop pulls less than 200Watts, I allow myself that luxury. ALL of my computers use high efficiency PSU and none of them are heyuge 1KW monsters - I think my desktop might have a 650W rated unit. Trust me, I'm doing what I can and my bills aren't huge compared to some I know. I simply want to do even better and think that Solar is a wise move overall if it were within reach...
That's working on the assumption that I have $30K cash. I don't and would have to borrow the money. Figure in the fact that the property is upside down already (else I'd have already F'ing refinanced!) and it's clear this won't be a loan using my property as collateral or a refi to draw equity. That means I'll be getting a fairly standard loan which further skews the ROI since the interest rate on that will suck.:-( It also means that should the worst happen in this job market my ass is even further out in the wind trying to make payments - a prospect that already terrifies me!
That's the thing - I CAN'T afford tens of thousands for an install. I'd consider doing it for say $15K and even then the ROI would be ages. If I did an install my lesser reliance on grid power, possibly even contributing back, would lower the cost of power for others. For every watt I take off the grid it's another watt my power company doesn't have to support and worry about building a plant for. Putting up solar panels on as many homes and businesses as possible BENEFITS society as a whole IMO particularly since it's distributed power and doesn't need high tension lines to run it. Not only that but the work of putting up all of those panels is a job for someone who might otherwise not be employed. I don't see a downside to rolling out solar, wind too if you're in a good area for it (I'm not).
Yes and no. Right now the codes for doing solar installs aren't completely clear. Electricians doing this work are having to have some special training it appears, I know because HomePower magazine follows this and outlines some of the tricky areas. It's tricky enough that having someone come over to do it who isn't familiar with it makes me nervous. That doesn't mean that I'm not keeping my eyes open for deals on inverters and panels though believe me! I'm familiar with the whole GC thing, I had a pretty serious addition done to my home and before that my garage. I did it by finding an honest guy who didn't gouge me and who allowed me to insert myself all along the way. He worked WITH me to save money on more than one occasion. But a solar install isn't something I'd goto him for and all of the local guys, the few of them, I know little about that I don't trust them. So yeah no matter what I'll be heavily investing my time in this, I'll be helping choose the efficient panels, the right mounting racks, the right inverter, the data collection process to check efficiency. No matter what I'll be knee deep in it. Now, I can swing a hammer, I can run a wire, but getting permits and inspections and doing it all safe worries me as does finding guys who could do it for me - solar is new enough that few can claim much experience. I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount but I'm not willing to put someone else's kid through college. Fair price is all I ask
SolarCity advertises to do just that! Unfortunately when contacted, in an area where they are heavily advertising, they tell me they don't service my area. Argh!
You're missing a key point, this isn't just a widget. This is a widget that allows us to NOT have to build the next multi-bazillion dollar nuke plant or coal fired generator. This is a widget that allows us to lower peak loads on an infrastructure. This is a widget that benefits not only me but my neighbors in that they who don't do this might still benefit in that their bills won't go up due to my power company not needing to add capacity. Obviously just one person doing this isn't enough but if enough of us do this then the overall effect is beneficial to all.
Okay but 17 years for say $30K invested is too long. I'm upside down on the property for far more than the cost of this solar install and this is a home I've owned for many years not something bought during the recent bubble. Investing still more in a property I'm already hurting on and expecting to get a return 17 YEARS away seems insane. $150 a month would be nice to have but not that far down the road. I know it sounds like I'm not thinking far enough ahead, and maybe I'm not, but right now I'm worried about the next 6 months more than I am 17 years in the future. I've not got anyone paying for this but myself, going further in debt to make it back so far down the road seems an awful risk. That $30K could go somewhere else and probably return more. Yes, energy prices could spike but right now my electricity cost isn't my biggest fear in that dept. I've insulated, I've upgraded appliances, and I've done quite a few other things that were lower hanging fruit already - now I'd like to put up solar but the costs of that sunk into a home that might never be worth what I put in seems like folly.
This works great to get efficiency up. We've got pretty efficient cells now though and the INSTALLED pricing of them is still sky high despite whatever price per watt they cry about at the wholesale level. You need to incentivize adoption not production right now. No one is buying this stuff if they are struggling, not with payoffs measured in decades. Electricity bills for me are under $200 a month and a panel install of decent size would cost tens of thousands of dollars, the math doesn't add up. The grid and society benefits though if I do the install but I won't take that risk at these prices no matter how much they claim it's gotten cheaper because to me, as an end consumer, the cost of an individual panel hasn't budged the overall cost of install much at all.
I disagree. A subsidy on installations of high efficiency panels at the end user level makes sense IMO. The problem here is that prices for the end user are sky high with returns taking decades to payoff the investment. The benefit to having these installations, as a nation, is lower load on our grid. that's like being able to take trucks off of a heavily traveled highway and thus not have to repair it and widen it every couple of years. How is that not a good idea?
I agree that a subsidy done poorly is a bad idea. But subsidies like the Govt. was doing to get people to upgrade their heating and insulation were a GREAT idea (I took full advantage!) and is one way to get people to upgrade\update in order to use less resources. My gas bills have plummeted due to my insulation and updating and while I would've done the upgrades anyway the incentives forced me to choose top tier equipment that someone else might have skipped to save a few bucks. I am now using less electricity and less natural gas, I'd LOVE to go with a high end solar system too but not for $30K or more!
Look, I WANT solar power on my home. I have a good location South facing, near full time sun during the day, am tech oriented, and I'm not dirt poor! I get HomePower magazine, I track the technology, I'm a buyer looking to do this.
So why don't I have it? Because my home like so many others is upside down and the cost of a solar install of decent size is looking like $30K or more which will be saving me something like $150 a month on my electric bill. How exactly does THAT make sense? Prices are down per watt? You could've fooled me! The price of raw cells on the wholesale market may have dropped some but the installed price is in the stratosphere IF you can even find a company local to you willing to do it.
There's a company near me advertising solar LEASING like crazy. They install and maintain the system and you pay them a monthly fee that's lower than your existing electric bill. Now this sounded possibly interesting despite my trepidation about anything that says "lease". I tried to sign up for an estimate - they don't service my area! Say what?! These guys are putting out printed ads and radio like mad here and then won't take my money? Kripes it's like trying to get high speed internet all over again! SolarCity -> asshats!
Now I know that my area isn't big on subsidies and it's also not someplace like Fla. where the sun roasts anything not moving but there's good potential in my site just no damned affordable way to do it no matter how much these guys claim to have reduced cost. Certainly installing solar makes huge sense in many ways but if the pricing is going to be $30K per house in a market where people are $40K upside down or more with a payoff measured in decades I think the reasons why few are buying are pretty damned clear! The local and federal Govt subsidies need to crank up, this is infrastructure we're talking about and it needs to be supported IMO. This is the technology that can take loads off our grid, why isn't there any incentive to go for it?
P.S. My neighbors just had to cut down all of their trees that used to shade the front of my home during parts of the day. It was awful but I now have no obstructions and full exposure but cannot take advantage of it. This sucks!
Well for starters they WON'T market you. Unless you're the likes of Stephen King they barely market anyone from what I can see. Talk to other authors, most of them end up driving all over the place doing book signings - on their own dime - and building their own websites\mailing lists. Publisher's idea of marketing seems to be that of getting a book facing vs a spine showing on the shelf. It won't stay on a shelf long either and after awhile they will refuse to print it - or give you the rights back.
The nice thing about ebooks is they never go out of print, Amazon will cheerfully have them available for darned near forever and there are about 3 other electronic book markets too! Yes this holds true for the big publisher selling electronically too but I can tell you that when I see a book published 5+ years ago selling electronically for $15 I pass (and have!). That just stinks of greed and considering who's setting the price and taking the lion's share of the money I know who it is that's greedy...
If Publishers sell ebooks they price them too high and give you zero control over it, expect to see prices as high or higher than hardcover. A lower price will sell more copies and you'd be getting a higher cut of the sales price too as pointed out above. Wouldn't you rather have that control? At those prices piracy comes into play and what's really bad is that the books are SO small pirates don't just pirate one book they pirate entire collections, often for not much more disk space than a few MP3 and you know how well the RIAA fight has been going. I haven't bought a single ebook since the new "agency model" hit, I can assure you of that!
I can tell you what I don't see - authors who have tried Amazon publishing talking about how it didn't work and how traditional publishers were better. Instead all I see is authors who have been screwed over by the big guys relieved to have found a better way. If you've found any author screaming about how Amazon didn't help them and a big publisher somehow did better I'd be really interested in reading about it! I really truly see only one advantage to going with a big publisher - the desire to see printed copies sold. That medium is better for some books but not for the majority IMO and ebook sales are only growing, what is happening to printed sales?
BTW, what exactly does "more reach" mean anyway? Between B&N, Amazon, and the smaller book markets online I think you can cover things pretty well. Do you really think a big time publisher will do better - for you?
I wouldn't give it to them, I would instead tell them that you've been thinking about how it could be done and would perhaps like to build it - on company time. Or perhaps get them to hire someone to do it.
Here's the thing - no good deed goes unpunished. If you give them this and it breaks or something unforeseen happens they will blame you. They will be upset. they may think less of you for not having built it perfect. They will almost certainly not understand all of the work that goes into doing it right despite documentation and honestly it's possible that while you did your best it might not perform as expected when implemented - then what? Who will be fixing it and at what cost? that will be when you get to experience exploitation I'm afraid. Frankly, if they were very very careful about outlining job responsibilities then that would set off alarms with me in the first place.
That said - if raises have been shut down then the point of going beyond scope is not being first on the chopping block. I'd polish up the resume though just in case!
Interesting, I'd heard there was error correction or at least some form of parity to try and recover missing data - like a.PAR file - but it seems with some Googling that it's not as well protected as I'd been led to believe. Thankfully none of my stuff has ever had issues and I've not ever had to do out of spec length runs. If I ever go with a projector though I'll need to do something. There's a system that uses CAT5 cabling that looks good but hardware for each end is expensive:-(
I'll say this one more time - no I do NOT need anyone's permission to watch BD. My players have never been updated, I own NO players. I rip the silly thing, encode it, and I watch at my leisure. The decrypting software, which has zippo industry affiliation, is updated occasionally.
Lastly, the encoding process isn't that hard. X.264 is well documented, terrific profiles exist, and if you look around you can even figure out what it is that "pros" are using for options if you really wanted. 50 hours sounds great but if I added up the time spent on encoding my stuff you'd fall over. Once you have the process it's just rinse and repeat and I've been doing this since HD-DVD first came out
Very nicely done! Chrome had no issue translating:-) That's a pretty good idea and if it doesn't overheat that's even better! I like the little USB controllers, those would have been perfect to integrate. I wish that emulators were a little more easily integrated into XBMC, then you'd be able to play real Nintendo games on the box too!
Then do the math for yourself. Konrath has done the math using real numbers, showing his real sales, and talked pretty frankly about how he's done much much better by bypassing publishers. If you cannot understand that publishers taking MORE money from each sale is going to cost you money then you're in real trouble....
Honestly what you're doing sounds like a ton of redundancy and work. I'm also not sure how well HDD will respond to having their power snapped on and off via relays or what that might do to a PC power supply having that sort of loads removed and added. I'd at least look to do something solid state for the switching or better yet use a pure software solution which unRAID is. Having multiple copies of files to preserve them is just as bad as pure RAID or worse from an efficiency prospective with the exception of the fact that you won't lose it as easily.
unRAID isn't perfect but mine have been running almost like an appliance for YEARS with the only changes being software updates, hardware updates, and an occasional lengthy power failure that's drained my UPS. I just checked, last power cycle on one of them was 135 days ago. Sadly I'm also noticing that it's time to upgrade a disk, darn thing is nearly full!:-(
I don't know, I'm sure some of them did. Even if they didn't the chances are their reading skills were improved by the time they finished the series! I swear the books just kept getting fatter and fatter! Some people I know have read them 4-5 times each too.:-)
ah so not the original Slashdot post but some post here referring to warez, yeah fine. I'd agree that shifting to a different medium is the way to go, works for me - covered that too. You may think you're educated on BD but you sure don't seem educated on encoding if you somehow think a pirate somewhere does it better...
Ah, so you're willing to support them with DVD because it's easier to break but not BD because it's harder?
As for storage size, yeah HD video takes more disk space. It takes more disk space because there's MORE data. If you're happy with SD quality then fine ignore BD but don't bitch when others want that quality. Frankly SD looks like crap on a big HD display which is what many of us, myself included, have moved to. Encoding to reduce size by a third or more is EASY albeit time consuming. It doesn't look like 720P either unless you want it to. Some BD movies, especially animation, squash down to almost the same size as DVD and the quality is much much better than DVD, H.264 is a way better algorithm and it shows. the quality is as good as you make it, shrugging and saying that pirates somehow do it better is laughable, they use the same tools as you would and I do. As for the size of BD rips, I wouldn't know what a download size would be because I've not ever downloaded one. If it's 25-30Gig then it's the entire movie in it's native format, too big and filled with extras I'm not likely to want. I'll make my own from original media thanks...
So yeah, I AM saying that by purchasing DVD you're supporting them in the same way - you are! Sure they would love to make BD somehow an internet connected model, when that speedbump occurs I'll happily cease buying and so will most everyone else - they will hit a brick wall. In fact they have slammed into a wall a few times now with BD and had to back off. As it stands right now I no more need anyone's permission to watch BD as I do DVD, when they try to force that it won't last long...
Slashdot Mirror
I bought my home fairly cheaply - for this area. Down the road my small home needed a revamp and I had a choice of moving (during the bubble!) or improving what I had. Instead of selling my home, albeit during the bubble, and buying one that would've cost at least $500-$600K I spent $100K+ to add a second story. I paid extra for serious insulation, good heating\cooling, and a tin roof - which is perfect for a standing seam rack mount solar install. When it was all done (I lived in it while the work was done and helped swing hammers) I owed more than $300K after the refi was complete. I rolled in a credit card and paid off my car in this too. Now I currently owe more than $35K more than they say it's worth plus I've just paid off having another $10K worth of heating\cooling\insulation done on the older portion of the home. On the plus side I have a 15 year mortgage and pay a little extra, in like 10 years or so I'll be debt free. I've also kept my credit cards nearly zeroed. Making more sense now? Hey the best part? Apparently my home is nicer than many in my area and thus comps like crap. All of the foreclosures blowing up around me haven't helped either. You do NOT want to be the nicest house on the block :(
When you do the roof do tin BTW. It's not cheap but it goes in FAST and lasts forever, I think it looks awesome great. It's also possible to support solar somewhat easily. Look into a radiant barrier up there too but prices to have it installed are CRAZY. If I can find good material I'll do that myself. If possible spray foam, that stuff seals and I have ZERO drafts in my upstairs and now my downstairs is well sealed too having done my crawl. I still need to do a follow-up blower door test but I have zero doubt it would be light years better :)
Honestly? Tax the "rich" more. Tax ME more too. I'm middle class and if I made my salary someplace other than this area I'd probably be considered somehow rich. But this area isn't cheap and while I'm doing better than average I still sweat every month. But I'd pay more willingly so long as I perceived that the ones above me who have had the money to avoid taxes were no longer quite so able to do so and were taxed more too. Someone has to try and get our shit together here and I'm willing to help but I'm not willing to take on more burden if the ones above me making disgusting CEO bonuses aren't getting hit at least as hard. I live here, I'm willing to help pay for it fairly. I'm NOT one of those running aorund wanting more more more, I just want things done fairly and I'm happy with my current standard of living...
FWIW many of the homes not far from me go for over $500K for even a small place. I bought further out and within my means, I then used equity to improve my home instead of buying another (a home not an investment to roll over in a year). Then the bottom fell out and while others are higher and drier than me I'm still looking at LEAST 2 more years of mortgage payments (on a 15yr loan) before my loan value approaches it's current potential sales cost. My home might once have been able to bring near $500K, right now it would bring less than $230K. Thankfully I didn't go crazy like some folks and I ignored the real estate agent who wanted me to spend double what I did 15 years ago!
Bingo! You summed it up very well. It's not just the $30K it's the $30K plus interest plus the hassle, plus potential maintenance, all for a maybe payoff in 17+ years if not more. I'm not really feeling incentivized there...
Home is already insulated - the upstairs is completely spray foamed plus rigid foam and housewrap. In the attic there's about 4inches of blown in fluffy on top of the sprayfoam. The SEER on the unit upstairs is unknown offhand but it's not bad and barely runs Winter or Summer. Downstairs is much older construction but it has blown in for the walls, new windows that do NOT leak, and my crawlspace was recently sprayfoamed and sealed. My heating\cooling unit downstairs is a year old and while I don't have the number for it offhand either it more than qualified for the Govt. rebate last year - all ductwork swapped with insulated stuff too. I JUST finally paid off the interest free loan on that puppy - I could've bought a nice used car for what it cost me. My lights are mostly all LED or CF, I can count on less than two hands the number of decorative ones that aren't and I seldom use them. Appliances are fairly new within the past 6 years, replacing them to save pennies makes no sense right now. Oh my hot water is tankless on demand natural gas, you'd be surprised at how much this saves even for just one person in the home.
My computers... they suck juice. But many of them are ATOM based and my HDD ALL spin down in my servers. My desktop pulls less than 200Watts, I allow myself that luxury. ALL of my computers use high efficiency PSU and none of them are heyuge 1KW monsters - I think my desktop might have a 650W rated unit. Trust me, I'm doing what I can and my bills aren't huge compared to some I know. I simply want to do even better and think that Solar is a wise move overall if it were within reach...
Can you say you've done as much work?
That's working on the assumption that I have $30K cash. I don't and would have to borrow the money. Figure in the fact that the property is upside down already (else I'd have already F'ing refinanced!) and it's clear this won't be a loan using my property as collateral or a refi to draw equity. That means I'll be getting a fairly standard loan which further skews the ROI since the interest rate on that will suck. :-( It also means that should the worst happen in this job market my ass is even further out in the wind trying to make payments - a prospect that already terrifies me!
That's the thing - I CAN'T afford tens of thousands for an install. I'd consider doing it for say $15K and even then the ROI would be ages. If I did an install my lesser reliance on grid power, possibly even contributing back, would lower the cost of power for others. For every watt I take off the grid it's another watt my power company doesn't have to support and worry about building a plant for. Putting up solar panels on as many homes and businesses as possible BENEFITS society as a whole IMO particularly since it's distributed power and doesn't need high tension lines to run it. Not only that but the work of putting up all of those panels is a job for someone who might otherwise not be employed. I don't see a downside to rolling out solar, wind too if you're in a good area for it (I'm not).
Yes and no. Right now the codes for doing solar installs aren't completely clear. Electricians doing this work are having to have some special training it appears, I know because HomePower magazine follows this and outlines some of the tricky areas. It's tricky enough that having someone come over to do it who isn't familiar with it makes me nervous. That doesn't mean that I'm not keeping my eyes open for deals on inverters and panels though believe me! I'm familiar with the whole GC thing, I had a pretty serious addition done to my home and before that my garage. I did it by finding an honest guy who didn't gouge me and who allowed me to insert myself all along the way. He worked WITH me to save money on more than one occasion. But a solar install isn't something I'd goto him for and all of the local guys, the few of them, I know little about that I don't trust them. So yeah no matter what I'll be heavily investing my time in this, I'll be helping choose the efficient panels, the right mounting racks, the right inverter, the data collection process to check efficiency. No matter what I'll be knee deep in it. Now, I can swing a hammer, I can run a wire, but getting permits and inspections and doing it all safe worries me as does finding guys who could do it for me - solar is new enough that few can claim much experience. I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount but I'm not willing to put someone else's kid through college. Fair price is all I ask
SolarCity advertises to do just that! Unfortunately when contacted, in an area where they are heavily advertising, they tell me they don't service my area. Argh!
You're missing a key point, this isn't just a widget. This is a widget that allows us to NOT have to build the next multi-bazillion dollar nuke plant or coal fired generator. This is a widget that allows us to lower peak loads on an infrastructure. This is a widget that benefits not only me but my neighbors in that they who don't do this might still benefit in that their bills won't go up due to my power company not needing to add capacity. Obviously just one person doing this isn't enough but if enough of us do this then the overall effect is beneficial to all.
Okay but 17 years for say $30K invested is too long. I'm upside down on the property for far more than the cost of this solar install and this is a home I've owned for many years not something bought during the recent bubble. Investing still more in a property I'm already hurting on and expecting to get a return 17 YEARS away seems insane. $150 a month would be nice to have but not that far down the road. I know it sounds like I'm not thinking far enough ahead, and maybe I'm not, but right now I'm worried about the next 6 months more than I am 17 years in the future. I've not got anyone paying for this but myself, going further in debt to make it back so far down the road seems an awful risk. That $30K could go somewhere else and probably return more. Yes, energy prices could spike but right now my electricity cost isn't my biggest fear in that dept. I've insulated, I've upgraded appliances, and I've done quite a few other things that were lower hanging fruit already - now I'd like to put up solar but the costs of that sunk into a home that might never be worth what I put in seems like folly.
This works great to get efficiency up. We've got pretty efficient cells now though and the INSTALLED pricing of them is still sky high despite whatever price per watt they cry about at the wholesale level. You need to incentivize adoption not production right now. No one is buying this stuff if they are struggling, not with payoffs measured in decades. Electricity bills for me are under $200 a month and a panel install of decent size would cost tens of thousands of dollars, the math doesn't add up. The grid and society benefits though if I do the install but I won't take that risk at these prices no matter how much they claim it's gotten cheaper because to me, as an end consumer, the cost of an individual panel hasn't budged the overall cost of install much at all.
I disagree. A subsidy on installations of high efficiency panels at the end user level makes sense IMO. The problem here is that prices for the end user are sky high with returns taking decades to payoff the investment. The benefit to having these installations, as a nation, is lower load on our grid. that's like being able to take trucks off of a heavily traveled highway and thus not have to repair it and widen it every couple of years. How is that not a good idea?
I agree that a subsidy done poorly is a bad idea. But subsidies like the Govt. was doing to get people to upgrade their heating and insulation were a GREAT idea (I took full advantage!) and is one way to get people to upgrade\update in order to use less resources. My gas bills have plummeted due to my insulation and updating and while I would've done the upgrades anyway the incentives forced me to choose top tier equipment that someone else might have skipped to save a few bucks. I am now using less electricity and less natural gas, I'd LOVE to go with a high end solar system too but not for $30K or more!
Look, I WANT solar power on my home. I have a good location South facing, near full time sun during the day, am tech oriented, and I'm not dirt poor! I get HomePower magazine, I track the technology, I'm a buyer looking to do this.
So why don't I have it? Because my home like so many others is upside down and the cost of a solar install of decent size is looking like $30K or more which will be saving me something like $150 a month on my electric bill. How exactly does THAT make sense? Prices are down per watt? You could've fooled me! The price of raw cells on the wholesale market may have dropped some but the installed price is in the stratosphere IF you can even find a company local to you willing to do it.
There's a company near me advertising solar LEASING like crazy. They install and maintain the system and you pay them a monthly fee that's lower than your existing electric bill. Now this sounded possibly interesting despite my trepidation about anything that says "lease". I tried to sign up for an estimate - they don't service my area! Say what?! These guys are putting out printed ads and radio like mad here and then won't take my money? Kripes it's like trying to get high speed internet all over again! SolarCity -> asshats!
Now I know that my area isn't big on subsidies and it's also not someplace like Fla. where the sun roasts anything not moving but there's good potential in my site just no damned affordable way to do it no matter how much these guys claim to have reduced cost. Certainly installing solar makes huge sense in many ways but if the pricing is going to be $30K per house in a market where people are $40K upside down or more with a payoff measured in decades I think the reasons why few are buying are pretty damned clear! The local and federal Govt subsidies need to crank up, this is infrastructure we're talking about and it needs to be supported IMO. This is the technology that can take loads off our grid, why isn't there any incentive to go for it?
P.S. My neighbors just had to cut down all of their trees that used to shade the front of my home during parts of the day. It was awful but I now have no obstructions and full exposure but cannot take advantage of it. This sucks!
Well for starters they WON'T market you. Unless you're the likes of Stephen King they barely market anyone from what I can see. Talk to other authors, most of them end up driving all over the place doing book signings - on their own dime - and building their own websites\mailing lists. Publisher's idea of marketing seems to be that of getting a book facing vs a spine showing on the shelf. It won't stay on a shelf long either and after awhile they will refuse to print it - or give you the rights back.
The nice thing about ebooks is they never go out of print, Amazon will cheerfully have them available for darned near forever and there are about 3 other electronic book markets too! Yes this holds true for the big publisher selling electronically too but I can tell you that when I see a book published 5+ years ago selling electronically for $15 I pass (and have!). That just stinks of greed and considering who's setting the price and taking the lion's share of the money I know who it is that's greedy...
If Publishers sell ebooks they price them too high and give you zero control over it, expect to see prices as high or higher than hardcover. A lower price will sell more copies and you'd be getting a higher cut of the sales price too as pointed out above. Wouldn't you rather have that control? At those prices piracy comes into play and what's really bad is that the books are SO small pirates don't just pirate one book they pirate entire collections, often for not much more disk space than a few MP3 and you know how well the RIAA fight has been going. I haven't bought a single ebook since the new "agency model" hit, I can assure you of that!
I can tell you what I don't see - authors who have tried Amazon publishing talking about how it didn't work and how traditional publishers were better. Instead all I see is authors who have been screwed over by the big guys relieved to have found a better way. If you've found any author screaming about how Amazon didn't help them and a big publisher somehow did better I'd be really interested in reading about it! I really truly see only one advantage to going with a big publisher - the desire to see printed copies sold. That medium is better for some books but not for the majority IMO and ebook sales are only growing, what is happening to printed sales?
BTW, what exactly does "more reach" mean anyway? Between B&N, Amazon, and the smaller book markets online I think you can cover things pretty well. Do you really think a big time publisher will do better - for you?
I wouldn't give it to them, I would instead tell them that you've been thinking about how it could be done and would perhaps like to build it - on company time. Or perhaps get them to hire someone to do it.
Here's the thing - no good deed goes unpunished. If you give them this and it breaks or something unforeseen happens they will blame you. They will be upset. they may think less of you for not having built it perfect. They will almost certainly not understand all of the work that goes into doing it right despite documentation and honestly it's possible that while you did your best it might not perform as expected when implemented - then what? Who will be fixing it and at what cost? that will be when you get to experience exploitation I'm afraid. Frankly, if they were very very careful about outlining job responsibilities then that would set off alarms with me in the first place.
That said - if raises have been shut down then the point of going beyond scope is not being first on the chopping block. I'd polish up the resume though just in case!
Interesting, I'd heard there was error correction or at least some form of parity to try and recover missing data - like a .PAR file - but it seems with some Googling that it's not as well protected as I'd been led to believe. Thankfully none of my stuff has ever had issues and I've not ever had to do out of spec length runs. If I ever go with a projector though I'll need to do something. There's a system that uses CAT5 cabling that looks good but hardware for each end is expensive :-(
Yeah, not exactly any incentive for them to try and SAVE money now is there? Dumbest govt. rule I've ever heard of....
I'll say this one more time - no I do NOT need anyone's permission to watch BD. My players have never been updated, I own NO players. I rip the silly thing, encode it, and I watch at my leisure. The decrypting software, which has zippo industry affiliation, is updated occasionally.
Lastly, the encoding process isn't that hard. X.264 is well documented, terrific profiles exist, and if you look around you can even figure out what it is that "pros" are using for options if you really wanted. 50 hours sounds great but if I added up the time spent on encoding my stuff you'd fall over. Once you have the process it's just rinse and repeat and I've been doing this since HD-DVD first came out
Error correction in the signal format shoudl take care of this unless the cable is out of spec....
Very nicely done! Chrome had no issue translating :-) That's a pretty good idea and if it doesn't overheat that's even better! I like the little USB controllers, those would have been perfect to integrate. I wish that emulators were a little more easily integrated into XBMC, then you'd be able to play real Nintendo games on the box too!
Very nice project, thanks for sharing it :-)
Then do the math for yourself. Konrath has done the math using real numbers, showing his real sales, and talked pretty frankly about how he's done much much better by bypassing publishers. If you cannot understand that publishers taking MORE money from each sale is going to cost you money then you're in real trouble....
Honestly what you're doing sounds like a ton of redundancy and work. I'm also not sure how well HDD will respond to having their power snapped on and off via relays or what that might do to a PC power supply having that sort of loads removed and added. I'd at least look to do something solid state for the switching or better yet use a pure software solution which unRAID is. Having multiple copies of files to preserve them is just as bad as pure RAID or worse from an efficiency prospective with the exception of the fact that you won't lose it as easily.
unRAID isn't perfect but mine have been running almost like an appliance for YEARS with the only changes being software updates, hardware updates, and an occasional lengthy power failure that's drained my UPS. I just checked, last power cycle on one of them was 135 days ago. Sadly I'm also noticing that it's time to upgrade a disk, darn thing is nearly full! :-(
I don't know, I'm sure some of them did. Even if they didn't the chances are their reading skills were improved by the time they finished the series! I swear the books just kept getting fatter and fatter! Some people I know have read them 4-5 times each too. :-)
ah so not the original Slashdot post but some post here referring to warez, yeah fine. I'd agree that shifting to a different medium is the way to go, works for me - covered that too. You may think you're educated on BD but you sure don't seem educated on encoding if you somehow think a pirate somewhere does it better...
Ah, so you're willing to support them with DVD because it's easier to break but not BD because it's harder?
As for storage size, yeah HD video takes more disk space. It takes more disk space because there's MORE data. If you're happy with SD quality then fine ignore BD but don't bitch when others want that quality. Frankly SD looks like crap on a big HD display which is what many of us, myself included, have moved to. Encoding to reduce size by a third or more is EASY albeit time consuming. It doesn't look like 720P either unless you want it to. Some BD movies, especially animation, squash down to almost the same size as DVD and the quality is much much better than DVD, H.264 is a way better algorithm and it shows. the quality is as good as you make it, shrugging and saying that pirates somehow do it better is laughable, they use the same tools as you would and I do. As for the size of BD rips, I wouldn't know what a download size would be because I've not ever downloaded one. If it's 25-30Gig then it's the entire movie in it's native format, too big and filled with extras I'm not likely to want. I'll make my own from original media thanks...
So yeah, I AM saying that by purchasing DVD you're supporting them in the same way - you are! Sure they would love to make BD somehow an internet connected model, when that speedbump occurs I'll happily cease buying and so will most everyone else - they will hit a brick wall. In fact they have slammed into a wall a few times now with BD and had to back off. As it stands right now I no more need anyone's permission to watch BD as I do DVD, when they try to force that it won't last long...