In some small applications, yes, but nothing serious. There are several reason:
1) the electrolyte is a liquid. It loses efficiency in cold weather, and eventually stops working.
2) well before that limit, expansion and contraction is a serious issue and large-scale structures have problems with sealing and leakage.
3) the electrolyte dissolves silver. It can be used for small-scale systems where the cost of platinum is not a major factor compared to construction costs, but for large low-cost solutions silver is the only practical solution.
4) the solvents used to mix the dye with the TiO degrade plastics.
None of these is unsolvable. It just needs another decade of work. I install mSi panels now, I suspect I will be installing DSSCs in 15 years.
And 24 hours a day for others. Sure, it's not California, but if we can get a 1/2 reduction in price (totally doable) then it's perfectly economical even in Finland. In the meantime, you need to build infrastructure.
> As for wind, if you look at the spikes, you still depend on coal or hydro for supply stability
Or gas peaker plants. Wind + solar + gas + hydro can give us all the power we need.
We can reduce the amount of gas we need by improving the grid, allowing us to time-shift east-west, and season-shift north-south. Toronto, for instance, uses more power in the winter, when solar panels in Texas and Nevada are pumping out unused watts.
You did read the WHOLE section, right? You didn't just immediately stop at the first number you saw in the article? You did get to this part...
A resolution of 2 arcminutes per line pair, equivalent to a 1 arcminute gap in an optotype, corresponds to 20/20 (normal vision) in humans.
The iris, well, irises. Depending on the level of background light, the resolution changes dramatically. The claim that this screen is in that area is by no means a stretch.
They may be revolutionary, but their outright lying that they invented stuff is just too much. See multitouch quote in 2007, the last time they presented something truly revolutionary.
I don't recall anyone claiming that Apple invented this stuff, except the Apple haters. This has a long history. Haters have stated that Apple claimed to invent...
1) the mouse 2) the GUI 3) USB 4) touch screen phones 5) multi-touch 6) an endless list...
Yet Apple has never claimed to invent any of these. No, it's just the haters making these claims, so they can then claim that Apple fanbois are full of crap.
The only thing I can recall them inventing in the last little bit is magsafe. And thank god for that, it's saved my laptop about a dozen crashes now.
We'll see. When 3G first launched in the UK, the carriers tried to sell the phones based around video calling. All the phones had front facing, or swivell, cameras, and threw in lots of minutes. They really didn't take off. If anyone can do it, apple can, but I'm not convinced.
And, like so many other claimed features, they were largely unusable. Tried one on Bell, gave up.
Exactly. You don't care about the reality of what's offered, but instead by your ideological aversion to having only one app store.
Indeed, note the lack of concrete examples.
Not wanting to be stuck with a single app store is not stupid, but choosing an inferior product for the primary reason that it has the option for additional sources of apps tends towards the irrational. I.e., fanboyism.
Sure, but the world is filled with such behavior all around. I find embracing it all to be excellent for the brain cells.
But in this particular case the broader consumer base has already voted with their dollars, in spite of impediments. Outside the US, where there are multiple carriers, I have seen very very few platforms other than RIM and iPhone. Android appears extremely rare here in Toronto, and yes, I do look. I don't believe that to be a case of myopia, but I would argue the opposite may be true: sales figures in the US may be a reflection of carriers, not platforms?
Nothing I can do or say will change the fact that Apple retains control over what you can and can't do with your device. The only thing I can do is vote with my wallet, so that's what I do. Forgive me for being a consumer who pays attention.
And forgive me for being a netizen that does the same.
For those that didn't bother to click through to Pojut's blog, I'll save you the trouble of poking about: Pojut reviews many games for the PS3, PSP, XBox 360, DS, etc., and his ebay store is filled with used games for these platforms. These platforms are, obviously, "walled gardens" that he protests to hate so much that he won't buy them.
Read it again: "needs more megapixels than his lens can resolve"
If you have more pixels than the lens can resolve, then you're cropping noise.
But I disagree with the original post. Adding more megapixels than the lens can resolve makes the pictures *worse*, because the light gathering ability per-pixel is reduced. That's why I find the use of a back-illuminated sensor far more interesting than the extra pixels.
One wonders how you do your PS3 reviews if you're really so unhappy with those walled gardens. Methinks you doth protest too much.
Maury
p.s. In case anyone's wondering, http://livingwithanerd.com/fairytale-fights-ps3-version/ Or check out their ebay auctions, with lots of PS3 and XB360 games for sale.
Every other feature Apple announced has already been done by someone else.
Lots of phones had browsers on them before the iPhone. They were completely useless. To denigrate the iPhone's advancement in mobile browsing as a "me too" is the height of stupidity, yet I see flavors of this everywhere, including this message.
I'm going to wait and see on FaceTime, but I have a feeling it's going to rock the video chat world. You understand how it works right? You call someone on the _phone_, and if they can support it, you can enter a video chat from _within the call_. I'm sorry, but that is a huge improvement on current tech.
A more accurate name would be "back-wired sensor". Like the human eye, older cameras had the wiring in front of the sensor elements. Back-illuminated ones have the wiring in the back. That gets you about 45% more light, because it doesn't have to make it past the wiring and transistors.
Been around for a while, but only making its way into the consumer space recently. Basically boosts your low-light performance by roughly half. That means you can either double the number of pixels per space and still get the same performance (which is what apple did), or leave the spacing alone and make killer security cameras and astronomy sensors.
In either event, this really is a major jump in camera tech. I'll be interested to know if they also used Sony's CMOS process for it.
It's never been ok to ship crap and fix it later. During the period that MS was doing so, its competition was shipping crapper products, releasing slower, and selling for more money. By any reasonable definition, they were the only game in town. Windows and Office had time to mature into the powerhouses they became.
Because the government has been worried that they will suddenly need a new generation of nukes because some country will decide to start a big building program. If we let these guys disappear into the commercial world, the centres of excellence won't be there.
It's a good argument, but the reality has been the exact opposite for 40 years. There are no credible new threats that require new warheads, the ones we have a perfectly usable, and the total number of enemy warheads continues to drop.
For a lot less effort we could come up with a treaty eliminating all of them.
> I recall reading that the NIF is the first stage of a prototype > for an actual method of producing steady thermal power > from fusion, i.e. a viable electricity source.
LLNL has been saying this for years, but it's never been true.
The primary purpose of the NIF is to give the bomb-making establishment something to do so all the physicists won't find real jobs. I am not making this up, it's well recorded and easy to verify.
The justification they release into the defence establishment is that NIF will be used to tune the hydrodynamics code they use to design h-bombs. Everyone outside LLNL dismisses the need for such a project, and the other weapons labs (like LANL and Sandia) have been particularly scathing.
To the public, LLNL releases a stream of reports about "unlimited power" and such, but calculations made over 30 years ago demonstrated there is no hope for this. At best, with completely new solid-state drivers, you might be able to get 1/10th the power out that you put in, BEFORE conversion from thermal to electrical.... with the current designs. Look up HiPER.
> solar cells, in realistic scenarios are starting to get to a factor of 2 or 3 harvested energy
Uhh, no, more like 10+ times. This tired old canard continues to be trotted out by the green haters even though its repeatedly shown false. A major report by a non-industry group in Europe put the payback time on the order of 50 kilometers distance after 2 transformation cycles on the electric grid
Huh? Using 768 HVDC we can transmit power across the CONUS with losses on the order of 5%.
> The only way to increase energy output it to take more energy away from nature
The VAST majority of energy on Earth is re-radiated into space at night. Capturing a tiny fraction of that, which is all we need, would have zero effect on anything. This argument is utterly bogus.
> So harvesting solar energy for human use means something else must die.
Well that's just completely untrue as well. Who gets killed when you put a panel on an existing roof? That's enough power for a large percentage of the world's population, like in Peru where they now have light and a TV for the first time in history.
For those of you who don't get your environmental information from Fox and then spread it as if its a fact:
What we really need is a North American grid of HVDC lines. Apparently the President has committed to delivering such a system, but it has to extend to Canada as well.
There's tremendous renewable potential out there ready to be developed, but sitting undeveloped because they have no way to get it to market. For instance, the James Bay plants already built spend much of their time venting water to the tune of 40% of their capacity, and that's ignoring the fact that another 50% capacity was never built due to lack of markets. That's just James Bay, in total there's something like 50 GWp of hydro in Canada undeveloped for lack of wires.
California, NM, Nevada and Texas have solar capacity to power all of the US. Once again, it is very difficult to get it to a market. Los Angeles is a perfect one, but there's a lack of additional capacity to get it there. The east coast is completely inaccessible. With a route to these markets, solar power as a peaking system becomes fairly competitive with existing sources.
Now consider the bigger picture. Let's build the grid and then incentivize low-carbon power. We built solar plants in the southwest, wind in James Bay and the mideast, and gas peaking plants at the wellhead. Now keep in mind that you can time-shift from the east to west coast, and seasonal shift across the Mason-Dixon (here in Toronto we use MUCH more power in the winter, when Nevada isn't using any) and you start to get where you want to be.
Now some wags will complain that this mix still has nuclear and gas. Sure, but every watt we get from hydro, solar and wind is one we don't generate from one of the others. That's good enough.
And that's that. There's no new technology needed, we have everything we need to make drastic cuts to the carbon load of the continent. All we need is money, and it's not even that much of it in the big scheme. Its less then Iraq, even a year of it.
Between VentureStar and Constellation, exactly how many tax dollars have been wasted because some penny-pinching bureaucrat decided it would be "cheaper in the long run?"
You do understand that there was a very real possibility that Constellation *would not work*, right? Again, look to your history:
When NASA was first planning their moon shots they were looking at the Saturn C-3 as being large enough to carry the needed payload. There was a good margin of safety. Going with the C-3 would have saved them LOTS of money. But they decided to go for the more expensive C-5 because they didn't know if their capsule estimates were solid.
They weren't. As the weight of everything started going up, that margin of safety was eroded, then eliminated. If they had stayed with the C-3 they wouldn't have made it to the moon until the 1970s, if ever. The lesson here has been repeated since with practically every launcher program, ESPECIALLY the Shuttle.
So what about Constellation? In this case they calculated that the SRBs could *just* do the job. If nothing started getting heavier then it had the power to get the module into orbit with a small margin of safety on the growth side. But then things started getting heavier. So then the upper stage grew along with it, eliminating the margin. Then it kept growing. Then they had to re-engineer the SRBs to get the power back to just enough. That cycle showed no signs of ending, and history suggests that it had a couple more iterations to go.
The lesson remains clear: build much more rocket than you need, or you'll likely end up not flying.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they'll get scared and let go the market a little.
Worked on MS.
Maury
> Have this guy's solar cells left the lab yet?
In some small applications, yes, but nothing serious. There are several reason:
1) the electrolyte is a liquid. It loses efficiency in cold weather, and eventually stops working.
2) well before that limit, expansion and contraction is a serious issue and large-scale structures have problems with sealing and leakage.
3) the electrolyte dissolves silver. It can be used for small-scale systems where the cost of platinum is not a major factor compared to construction costs, but for large low-cost solutions silver is the only practical solution.
4) the solvents used to mix the dye with the TiO degrade plastics.
None of these is unsolvable. It just needs another decade of work. I install mSi panels now, I suspect I will be installing DSSCs in 15 years.
Maury
> Sun shines a few hours a day most of the year
And 24 hours a day for others. Sure, it's not California, but if we can get a 1/2 reduction in price (totally doable) then it's perfectly economical even in Finland. In the meantime, you need to build infrastructure.
Maury
It's far less than 11% in production, closer to 7 to 8. That's not terrible compared to other thin-film approaches however.
Maury
> As for wind, if you look at the spikes, you still depend on coal or hydro for supply stability
Or gas peaker plants. Wind + solar + gas + hydro can give us all the power we need.
We can reduce the amount of gas we need by improving the grid, allowing us to time-shift east-west, and season-shift north-south. Toronto, for instance, uses more power in the winter, when solar panels in Texas and Nevada are pumping out unused watts.
Maury
> The big deal is that it's false advertising
Really? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/iphone-4-does-not-have-a-resolution-higher-than-the-retina-or-does-it/8586
> If another company like GM or BP had made a false claim, you'd be all over them
Whereas if you *think* SJ did you, you demonstrate the same behaviour.
Pot, kettle.
Maury
You did read the WHOLE section, right? You didn't just immediately stop at the first number you saw in the article? You did get to this part...
A resolution of 2 arcminutes per line pair, equivalent to a 1 arcminute gap in an optotype, corresponds to 20/20 (normal vision) in humans.
The iris, well, irises. Depending on the level of background light, the resolution changes dramatically. The claim that this screen is in that area is by no means a stretch.
Maury
They may be revolutionary, but their outright lying that they invented stuff is just too much. See multitouch quote in 2007, the last time they presented something truly revolutionary.
I don't recall anyone claiming that Apple invented this stuff, except the Apple haters. This has a long history. Haters have stated that Apple claimed to invent...
1) the mouse
2) the GUI
3) USB
4) touch screen phones
5) multi-touch
6) an endless list...
Yet Apple has never claimed to invent any of these. No, it's just the haters making these claims, so they can then claim that Apple fanbois are full of crap.
The only thing I can recall them inventing in the last little bit is magsafe. And thank god for that, it's saved my laptop about a dozen crashes now.
Maury
We'll see. When 3G first launched in the UK, the carriers tried to sell the phones based around video calling. All the phones had front facing, or swivell, cameras, and threw in lots of minutes. They really didn't take off. If anyone can do it, apple can, but I'm not convinced.
And, like so many other claimed features, they were largely unusable. Tried one on Bell, gave up.
Maury
Wait, 2100 IS supported.
What is T-Mobile using in the US? I think the new players here in the GWN are on 1700.
Maury
Exactly. You don't care about the reality of what's offered, but instead by your ideological aversion to having only one app store.
Indeed, note the lack of concrete examples.
Not wanting to be stuck with a single app store is not stupid, but choosing an inferior product for the primary reason that it has the option for additional sources of apps tends towards the irrational. I.e., fanboyism.
Sure, but the world is filled with such behavior all around. I find embracing it all to be excellent for the brain cells.
But in this particular case the broader consumer base has already voted with their dollars, in spite of impediments. Outside the US, where there are multiple carriers, I have seen very very few platforms other than RIM and iPhone. Android appears extremely rare here in Toronto, and yes, I do look. I don't believe that to be a case of myopia, but I would argue the opposite may be true: sales figures in the US may be a reflection of carriers, not platforms?
Maury
Nothing I can do or say will change the fact that Apple retains control over what you can and can't do with your device. The only thing I can do is vote with my wallet, so that's what I do. Forgive me for being a consumer who pays attention.
And forgive me for being a netizen that does the same.
For those that didn't bother to click through to Pojut's blog, I'll save you the trouble of poking about: Pojut reviews many games for the PS3, PSP, XBox 360, DS, etc., and his ebay store is filled with used games for these platforms. These platforms are, obviously, "walled gardens" that he protests to hate so much that he won't buy them.
Seriously, glass houses.
Maury
You need resolution to allow for cropping.
*sigh*
Read it again: "needs more megapixels than his lens can resolve"
If you have more pixels than the lens can resolve, then you're cropping noise.
But I disagree with the original post. Adding more megapixels than the lens can resolve makes the pictures *worse*, because the light gathering ability per-pixel is reduced. That's why I find the use of a back-illuminated sensor far more interesting than the extra pixels.
Maury
One wonders how you do your PS3 reviews if you're really so unhappy with those walled gardens. Methinks you doth protest too much.
Maury
p.s. In case anyone's wondering, http://livingwithanerd.com/fairytale-fights-ps3-version/ Or check out their ebay auctions, with lots of PS3 and XB360 games for sale.
Well Apple's tech page has the bad news: no support for 1200 MHz, so no AWS. :-(
Maury
> It's AT&T network only
Ummm, you know there's other countries in the world, right?
Maury
Every other feature Apple announced has already been done by someone else.
Lots of phones had browsers on them before the iPhone. They were completely useless. To denigrate the iPhone's advancement in mobile browsing as a "me too" is the height of stupidity, yet I see flavors of this everywhere, including this message.
I'm going to wait and see on FaceTime, but I have a feeling it's going to rock the video chat world. You understand how it works right? You call someone on the _phone_, and if they can support it, you can enter a video chat from _within the call_. I'm sorry, but that is a huge improvement on current tech.
Maury
Worst name EVAR!
A more accurate name would be "back-wired sensor". Like the human eye, older cameras had the wiring in front of the sensor elements. Back-illuminated ones have the wiring in the back. That gets you about 45% more light, because it doesn't have to make it past the wiring and transistors.
Been around for a while, but only making its way into the consumer space recently. Basically boosts your low-light performance by roughly half. That means you can either double the number of pixels per space and still get the same performance (which is what apple did), or leave the spacing alone and make killer security cameras and astronomy sensors.
In either event, this really is a major jump in camera tech. I'll be interested to know if they also used Sony's CMOS process for it.
Maury
New radios, including 802.11N (nice!) but no mention of AWS support. Mobilicity offers $65 unlimited _everything_ in Toronto, but only on AWS.
Maury
It's never been ok to ship crap and fix it later. During the period that MS was doing so, its competition was shipping crapper products, releasing slower, and selling for more money. By any reasonable definition, they were the only game in town. Windows and Office had time to mature into the powerhouses they became.
> the evil DRM that it brings
There are degrees of evil. Speeding is evil, but not much. Resetting your country to "year zero" through mass murder is also evil, much more so.
Steam's DRM is less evil.
Maury
> Um, this could be a silly question, but: why?
Because the government has been worried that they will suddenly need a new generation of nukes because some country will decide to start a big building program. If we let these guys disappear into the commercial world, the centres of excellence won't be there.
It's a good argument, but the reality has been the exact opposite for 40 years. There are no credible new threats that require new warheads, the ones we have a perfectly usable, and the total number of enemy warheads continues to drop.
For a lot less effort we could come up with a treaty eliminating all of them.
Maury
> I recall reading that the NIF is the first stage of a prototype
> for an actual method of producing steady thermal power
> from fusion, i.e. a viable electricity source.
LLNL has been saying this for years, but it's never been true.
The primary purpose of the NIF is to give the bomb-making establishment something to do so all the physicists won't find real jobs. I am not making this up, it's well recorded and easy to verify.
The justification they release into the defence establishment is that NIF will be used to tune the hydrodynamics code they use to design h-bombs. Everyone outside LLNL dismisses the need for such a project, and the other weapons labs (like LANL and Sandia) have been particularly scathing.
To the public, LLNL releases a stream of reports about "unlimited power" and such, but calculations made over 30 years ago demonstrated there is no hope for this. At best, with completely new solid-state drivers, you might be able to get 1/10th the power out that you put in, BEFORE conversion from thermal to electrical. ... with the current designs. Look up HiPER.
Maury
> solar cells, in realistic scenarios are starting to get to a factor of 2 or 3 harvested energy
Uhh, no, more like 10+ times. This tired old canard continues to be trotted out by the green haters even though its repeatedly shown false. A major report by a non-industry group in Europe put the payback time on the order of 50 kilometers distance after 2 transformation cycles on the electric grid
Huh? Using 768 HVDC we can transmit power across the CONUS with losses on the order of 5%.
> The only way to increase energy output it to take more energy away from nature
The VAST majority of energy on Earth is re-radiated into space at night. Capturing a tiny fraction of that, which is all we need, would have zero effect on anything. This argument is utterly bogus.
> So harvesting solar energy for human use means something else must die.
Well that's just completely untrue as well. Who gets killed when you put a panel on an existing roof? That's enough power for a large percentage of the world's population, like in Peru where they now have light and a TV for the first time in history.
For those of you who don't get your environmental information from Fox and then spread it as if its a fact:
What we really need is a North American grid of HVDC lines. Apparently the President has committed to delivering such a system, but it has to extend to Canada as well.
There's tremendous renewable potential out there ready to be developed, but sitting undeveloped because they have no way to get it to market. For instance, the James Bay plants already built spend much of their time venting water to the tune of 40% of their capacity, and that's ignoring the fact that another 50% capacity was never built due to lack of markets. That's just James Bay, in total there's something like 50 GWp of hydro in Canada undeveloped for lack of wires.
California, NM, Nevada and Texas have solar capacity to power all of the US. Once again, it is very difficult to get it to a market. Los Angeles is a perfect one, but there's a lack of additional capacity to get it there. The east coast is completely inaccessible. With a route to these markets, solar power as a peaking system becomes fairly competitive with existing sources.
Now consider the bigger picture. Let's build the grid and then incentivize low-carbon power. We built solar plants in the southwest, wind in James Bay and the mideast, and gas peaking plants at the wellhead. Now keep in mind that you can time-shift from the east to west coast, and seasonal shift across the Mason-Dixon (here in Toronto we use MUCH more power in the winter, when Nevada isn't using any) and you start to get where you want to be.
Now some wags will complain that this mix still has nuclear and gas. Sure, but every watt we get from hydro, solar and wind is one we don't generate from one of the others. That's good enough.
And that's that. There's no new technology needed, we have everything we need to make drastic cuts to the carbon load of the continent. All we need is money, and it's not even that much of it in the big scheme. Its less then Iraq, even a year of it.
Maury
Between VentureStar and Constellation, exactly how many tax dollars have been wasted because some penny-pinching bureaucrat decided it would be "cheaper in the long run?"
You do understand that there was a very real possibility that Constellation *would not work*, right? Again, look to your history:
When NASA was first planning their moon shots they were looking at the Saturn C-3 as being large enough to carry the needed payload. There was a good margin of safety. Going with the C-3 would have saved them LOTS of money. But they decided to go for the more expensive C-5 because they didn't know if their capsule estimates were solid.
They weren't. As the weight of everything started going up, that margin of safety was eroded, then eliminated. If they had stayed with the C-3 they wouldn't have made it to the moon until the 1970s, if ever. The lesson here has been repeated since with practically every launcher program, ESPECIALLY the Shuttle.
So what about Constellation? In this case they calculated that the SRBs could *just* do the job. If nothing started getting heavier then it had the power to get the module into orbit with a small margin of safety on the growth side. But then things started getting heavier. So then the upper stage grew along with it, eliminating the margin. Then it kept growing. Then they had to re-engineer the SRBs to get the power back to just enough. That cycle showed no signs of ending, and history suggests that it had a couple more iterations to go.
The lesson remains clear: build much more rocket than you need, or you'll likely end up not flying.
Maury