If you believe that it makes sense to meet our future power needs with nuclear or fossil, then you are the one who is smoking..
I never suggested that we should have *all* our power needs from solar, just that its one option that makes sense in some places. Amorphous silicon cells are relatively new, are very cheap to make, and if efficiency can be improved would certainly make solar pay in all sorts of situations. Solar roofing is a reality, I already gave a link to a project in Australia, where they had effectively zero electric bills - the roof made as much electricity as the house used, net. (minus heating admittedly) Other uses for incidental solar power, like solar power windows in office buildings, are even now a practical reality.
Normal solar cells, based on crystalline silicon, are much more efficient than they used to be too, although still expensive. But you can use steered mirrors to increase the effectiveness of the cells. Put in just a fraction of the money squandered on Nuclear into development, and you will see results.
Hydrogen is already on the cards, fuel cells development is being pushed as the long term replacement for petrol in the US. And by what other means do you make Hydrogen, if not by electricity from renewables of some sort?? Sure there is some loss when you electrolyse H2O, but what of it? What system doesnt have some % loss? Coal, gas, oil do not just switch in so easily on demand either, large stations take a considerable amount of time to fire up, so often spare capacity is running/wasted with fossil/nuclear too.
Not only are off-shore wind farms feasable, they are already a working, paying, reality in the UK, see here, also in other European countries too. Damn sight cheaper than nuclear too, when you add all the hidden costs in. We should have 20% UK power from wind by 2020, and there is no reason why we cannot have 200%+, the sites are there. Wind power,contrary to expectations is about as stable as other forms of energy on a national scale - its always windy somewhere..
The trouble with nuclear is that it is safe, until an accident happens..
It is just incredibly uneconomic - the practical issues of what to do with waste, how to decommission sites, etc have effectivly killed nuclear in the UK. If you dont have re-processing, you end up with Plutonium that has to be safely stored and guarded until the end of time, in case a terrorist gets hold of it. Re-processing still generates huge amounts of waste, despite the theoretical idea that it destroys the plutonium, and the costs of hadling materials just keep going up.
Its not just chernobyl - the Irish sea is the most radioactive in the world now thanks to BNFL, and you will find similar problems with "low level" discharges worldwide..
In the end, alternatives are far far cheaper, if you add in the true development/decommissioning costs.
That would be the idea - all batteries would comply to one format - maybe some differences in capacity size for different vehicles, but otherwise a standard system. The system could be automatic, a machine is aligned to a panel & takes the old one out & puts a new one in. Remember petrol is not easy to handle safely, a lot of development & technology goes into making a modern service station safe.
At the moment in the EU we pay US $50+ for a full tank, and the station owner makes peanuts on that, so there is room for profit.
Continuing to pump & rely on increasingly rare oil resources creates political problems in ares like the Middle-east, as well as causing pollution and global warming. Furthermore oil is a resource that should be preserved for thingslike manufacturing plastics in future generations, not just burned for cheap'n'dirty energy..
Even 5gb is not really enough for me to back up my HD (or DV footage) efficiently - but its the best compromise so far. Ive had enough of obsolete data-formats in the past - I have film on "Digital-8" format that is going to be expensive to find a camera to read it.. Stick t the big formats - Mini-DV, CD-R, DVD-R, you will always be able to find a reader for these. Handy if you need to access your data on someone elses system too, without lugging a drive around. Mind you, I would like to see a 10gb version of DVD-R..
By the way I was trying to back up loads of 1 hour DV films onto DVD - any thoughts on the most efficient process, the best MPEG2 encoder, etc?
I can only suggest that people who believe that should be forced to spend some time in a city/area with real pollution problems..
Some of the farmers *welcome* wind farms on thier properties - it brings in extra income, and they can still use 90% of the land around the turbines for livestock/farming..
If you had to pay the *real* cost of oil/coal/nuclear, then alternatives start looking a lot cheaper. Solar/wind never had the same scale of investment as nuclear, despite that it is starting to make inroads. Fossil will eventually become unacceptable for all sorts of reasons - the "easy to get at" resources wil be used up, so increasing environmental damage will be done to access what is left. Not to mention global warming, general pollution etc. Why not just bite the bullet and go for renewables now?
Yes, the link
I gave you showed you the maths - indeed to generate *all* the
power needed just with solar would require large areas of land.
That is why I was suggesting that such scheme should operate in
conjunction with other alternatives. You dont need to meet "peak" demand in the way you suggest. Dont forget that there is an
area in your home that can be used to generate free power - your
roof. You can cover the roof of your home with solar tiles,
combined with systems that directly heat water for the house etc.
Do you think that nuclear is a better option? Or cheaper? The
UK (and many other countries) has squandered truely huge amounts
of money on nuclear, now, it appears, with no positive end result
- they are going to be left with a collection of reactor sites
that are going to be very expensive to
decommission and clean up. If they had invested just a fraction
of that money on renewables, we would be burning a heck of a lot
less coal/oil/gas now. There are actually parts of the world (ie
Chernobyl) that are too radioactive to live, thanks to
mistakes/miscalculations made by the nuclear power industry..
And the point is - why bother with nuclear, why take the risk?
It is becoming very apparent that alternatives really can deliver
cheap electricity, without the same level of pollution and waste.
Furthermore, costs of solar cells will drop as
volumes increase. Case in point - look at the monitor you are
(probably) looking at now - if it is TFT - and think how much the
price has decreased in the last few years as manufacturing
techniques have improved and volumes increased.. Push the
production volumes up, and have every house in the country use
solar tiling..
The UK is setting a target of getting 20% of its power from
re-newables by 2020, and a lot of that will be wind-power. There
are soon to be huge offsiore wind
farms in construction.. And they are not noisy, nor do they
upset wildlife - thats basically a myth - same site documents the
evidence. The USA has a similar wealth on uneploited wind sites too..
In the UK we could in fact have 200% power needs just from
offshore/onshore wind without too much difficulty. What do you do
when you have too much power? Turn it into hydrogen for cars.
What do you do when you dont have enough power? Burn some
hydrogen.. We already have infrastructure to transport gas.
The race itself is a "tour-de-force" of solar technology - these cars will not be fully economic/affordable until we have a solar cell that delivers 50%+ efficiency at a low cost-per-cell. As a supplementary power source for a smart-type battery car it could eventually prove interesting - leave your car parked in the sun when you go to work, and get a free ride home!
One thought I had on battery cars - why not "swap" batteries at a garage, instead of pumping in fuel (petrol, hydrogen..) - you dont "own" the batteries, just hire them, and keep swapping them for a fully charged set at each garage..
I am quite convinced now that alternatives have evolved to the stage where either they are totally practical (like wind) or that the problems will be solved when economy-of-scales kicks in when we actually implement it. The point is, if you dont like it, well, just rip it up and scrap it - a wind/solar/tide farm doesnt leave plutonium or other pollution around for our grandchildren to worry about..
1) the deserts and sea floor are ecosystems that would be
disrupted by the solar and wind farms thereby raising the ire of
environmentalists (sounds dumb but you know this would happen).
Well it sort of seems to be getting accepted more, but there
wil always be NIMBYs. There is a turbine farm not so far from me,
I think its quite elegant, certainly not polluting, or noisy like a
motorway or some industrial plant. And if you dont like them,
well, just rip them up - they dont leave any plutonium behind for
our grandchildren to worry about.. You cant have a zero-impact power generation system - all you can say is that alternatives have *less* impact than coal, oil, nuclear - the evidence is there and all too clear..
2) centralizing your power producing devices in one area
is a bad idea (huge power losses sending electricity over great
distances, natural disaster, terrorists, etc).
I dont think an alternative power system would be very
centralised - by definition it must gather energy over large
areas.ot compared to nuclear, coal, etc..
Solar power has evolved massively in the last decade or so, but the sort of very-high-efficiency cells used here - and they have to be because of the small surface area - are still very expensive, they need "chip grade" silicon. What is more cost effective for stationary generators are amorphous cells - much lower efficiency, but potentially very cheap to make. If you could get the efficiency of these cells up then you could have genuine solar/electic combo transport. Oh you need cheap, light batteries too, another technology that is evolving quickly - look at mobile phones..
As a supplementary charger there may be some value to solar in a car, but at the moment not as the prime source for a full sized/weight car or truck. You need to get some power from elsewhere..
Proving that solar (and other alterntives) have come on leaps
and bounds in the last decade or so. Why do we still persist with
nuclear, oil, coal, with all the attendant problems (pollution,
wars over oil, etc), when we could cover a small proportiion of the deserts of the
world with solar cells, and the roofs of our buildings, and
the coasts with huge offsiore wind
farms & tidal turbines, and have all the power we need?
You may be aware that the version of Linux you are using has some sections of UNIX code developed by Sun. We are not at liberty to disclose the code just yet, but rest assured you can believe us that this is the case. To continue using Linux you need to pay SUN a runtime license of $699 per user. Please send the aforementioned amount in used notes in a plain brown envolope to:
Darl McBride (no connection with SCO), New CEO of Sun Microsystems California USA
Yes thats an impressive picture that make a good point. It shows that one of the best ways to see the night sky is with a pair of fairly low mag binoculars with big lenses to concentrate the light.
I think if I wanted to do serious editing on material on backed up on DVD, I would turn it back to DV-AVI first. I just wonder, at 1 hour per DVD if thats workable? You can see JPG style artifacts even on commercial 2 hour+ DVDs. Does the quality of the MPG-2 encoder make a big difference? I notice with MP3 that some encoders are more intelligent how they stretch the encoding rate to avoid corruption..
Yeh, in theory a 5400 RPM drive should do the job for normal DV - which is 3 mb/sec. I think the "pro" DV standard is more demanding. I suppose the problem can occur on play-back, if a package is trying to do a transition/effect that involves 2 or more DV files - here you can get dropped frames.
On a related side note - I have a lot of Mini-DV material that I want to back up onto my new DVD writer. I want to do it at a quality setting that would allow me to re-edit/use the material later without too much loss. If I store only 1 hour per DVD, is the quality loss acceptable? Or do I need to make 2 DVDs per 1 hour tape, or use MPG4?
What are other video people doing to archieve material?
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe that it makes sense to meet our future power needs with nuclear or fossil, then you are the one who is smoking..
I never suggested that we should have *all* our power needs from solar, just that its one option that makes sense in some places. Amorphous silicon cells are relatively new, are very cheap to make, and if efficiency can be improved would certainly make solar pay in all sorts of situations. Solar roofing is a reality, I already gave a link to a project in Australia, where they had effectively zero electric bills - the roof made as much electricity as the house used, net. (minus heating admittedly) Other uses for incidental solar power, like solar power windows in office buildings, are even now a practical reality.
Normal solar cells, based on crystalline silicon, are much more efficient than they used to be too, although still expensive. But you can use steered mirrors to increase the effectiveness of the cells. Put in just a fraction of the money squandered on Nuclear into development, and you will see results.
Hydrogen is already on the cards, fuel cells development is being pushed as the long term replacement for petrol in the US. And by what other means do you make Hydrogen, if not by electricity from renewables of some sort?? Sure there is some loss when you electrolyse H2O, but what of it? What system doesnt have some % loss? Coal, gas, oil do not just switch in so easily on demand either, large stations take a considerable amount of time to fire up, so often spare capacity is running/wasted with fossil/nuclear too.
Not only are off-shore wind farms feasable, they are already a working, paying, reality in the UK, see here, also in other European countries too. Damn sight cheaper than nuclear too, when you add all the hidden costs in. We should have 20% UK power from wind by 2020, and there is no reason why we cannot have 200%+, the sites are there. Wind power,contrary to expectations is about as stable as other forms of energy on a national scale - its always windy somewhere..
The trouble with nuclear is that it is safe, until an accident happens..
It is just incredibly uneconomic - the practical issues of what to do with waste, how to decommission sites, etc have effectivly killed nuclear in the UK. If you dont have re-processing, you end up with Plutonium that has to be safely stored and guarded until the end of time, in case a terrorist gets hold of it. Re-processing still generates huge amounts of waste, despite the theoretical idea that it destroys the plutonium, and the costs of hadling materials just keep going up.
Its not just chernobyl - the Irish sea is the most radioactive in the world now thanks to BNFL, and you will find similar problems with "low level" discharges worldwide..
In the end, alternatives are far far cheaper, if you add in the true development/decommissioning costs.
That would be the idea - all batteries would comply to one format - maybe some differences in capacity size for different vehicles, but otherwise a standard system. The system could be automatic, a machine is aligned to a panel & takes the old one out & puts a new one in. Remember petrol is not easy to handle safely, a lot of development & technology goes into making a modern service station safe.
At the moment in the EU we pay US $50+ for a full tank, and the station owner makes peanuts on that, so there is room for profit.
Continuing to pump & rely on increasingly rare oil resources creates political problems in ares like the Middle-east, as well as causing pollution and global warming. Furthermore oil is a resource that should be preserved for thingslike manufacturing plastics in future generations, not just burned for cheap'n'dirty energy..
Its largely a myth, but are you seriously suggesting that other forms of power generation have no environmental impact?
I was hoping to find some hands on gen about various MPG2 encoders, particularly open-source/freeware ones, how good are they?
Even 5gb is not really enough for me to back up my HD (or DV footage) efficiently - but its the best compromise so far. Ive had enough of obsolete data-formats in the past - I have film on "Digital-8" format that is going to be expensive to find a camera to read it.. Stick t the big formats - Mini-DV, CD-R, DVD-R, you will always be able to find a reader for these. Handy if you need to access your data on someone elses system too, without lugging a drive around. Mind you, I would like to see a 10gb version of DVD-R..
By the way I was trying to back up loads of 1 hour DV films onto DVD - any thoughts on the most efficient process, the best MPEG2 encoder, etc?
I can only suggest that people who believe that should be forced to spend some time in a city/area with real pollution problems..
Some of the farmers *welcome* wind farms on thier properties - it brings in extra income, and they can still use 90% of the land around the turbines for livestock/farming..
If you had to pay the *real* cost of oil/coal/nuclear, then alternatives start looking a lot cheaper. Solar/wind never had the same scale of investment as nuclear, despite that it is starting to make inroads. Fossil will eventually become unacceptable for all sorts of reasons - the "easy to get at" resources wil be used up, so increasing environmental damage will be done to access what is left. Not to mention global warming, general pollution etc. Why not just bite the bullet and go for renewables now?
Yes, the link I gave you showed you the maths - indeed to generate *all* the power needed just with solar would require large areas of land. That is why I was suggesting that such scheme should operate in conjunction with other alternatives. You dont need to meet "peak" demand in the way you suggest. Dont forget that there is an area in your home that can be used to generate free power - your roof. You can cover the roof of your home with solar tiles, combined with systems that directly heat water for the house etc.
Zero annual electricity bills for these guys - the tiles make as much electricity as they take from the grid. (ok with gas heating). Check also This link, This link , This link or This link
Do you think that nuclear is a better option? Or cheaper? The UK (and many other countries) has squandered truely huge amounts of money on nuclear, now, it appears, with no positive end result - they are going to be left with a collection of reactor sites that are going to be very expensive to decommission and clean up. If they had invested just a fraction of that money on renewables, we would be burning a heck of a lot less coal/oil/gas now. There are actually parts of the world (ie Chernobyl) that are too radioactive to live, thanks to mistakes/miscalculations made by the nuclear power industry..
And the point is - why bother with nuclear, why take the risk? It is becoming very apparent that alternatives really can deliver cheap electricity, without the same level of pollution and waste. Furthermore, costs of solar cells will drop as volumes increase. Case in point - look at the monitor you are (probably) looking at now - if it is TFT - and think how much the price has decreased in the last few years as manufacturing techniques have improved and volumes increased.. Push the production volumes up, and have every house in the country use solar tiling..
The UK is setting a target of getting 20% of its power from re-newables by 2020, and a lot of that will be wind-power. There are soon to be huge offsiore wind farms in construction.. And they are not noisy, nor do they upset wildlife - thats basically a myth - same site documents the evidence. The USA has a similar wealth on uneploited wind sites too..
In the UK we could in fact have 200% power needs just from offshore/onshore wind without too much difficulty. What do you do when you have too much power? Turn it into hydrogen for cars. What do you do when you dont have enough power? Burn some hydrogen.. We already have infrastructure to transport gas.
The race itself is a "tour-de-force" of solar technology - these cars will not be fully economic/affordable until we have a solar cell that delivers 50%+ efficiency at a low cost-per-cell. As a supplementary power source for a smart-type battery car it could eventually prove interesting - leave your car parked in the sun when you go to work, and get a free ride home!
One thought I had on battery cars - why not "swap" batteries at a garage, instead of pumping in fuel (petrol, hydrogen..) - you dont "own" the batteries, just hire them, and keep swapping them for a fully charged set at each garage..
I am quite convinced now that alternatives have evolved to the stage where either they are totally practical (like wind) or that the problems will be solved when economy-of-scales kicks in when we actually implement it. The point is, if you dont like it, well, just rip it up and scrap it - a wind/solar/tide farm doesnt leave plutonium or other pollution around for our grandchildren to worry about..
1) the deserts and sea floor are ecosystems that would be disrupted by the solar and wind farms thereby raising the ire of environmentalists (sounds dumb but you know this would happen).
Well it sort of seems to be getting accepted more, but there wil always be NIMBYs. There is a turbine farm not so far from me, I think its quite elegant, certainly not polluting, or noisy like a motorway or some industrial plant. And if you dont like them, well, just rip them up - they dont leave any plutonium behind for our grandchildren to worry about.. You cant have a zero-impact power generation system - all you can say is that alternatives have *less* impact than coal, oil, nuclear - the evidence is there and all too clear..
2) centralizing your power producing devices in one area is a bad idea (huge power losses sending electricity over great distances, natural disaster, terrorists, etc).
I dont think an alternative power system would be very centralised - by definition it must gather energy over large areas.ot compared to nuclear, coal, etc..
And the most important reason:
3) the oil companies said we're not allowed.
You have me there, that is a fair point.. :-)
..Expense.
Solar power has evolved massively in the last decade or so, but the sort of very-high-efficiency cells used here - and they have to be because of the small surface area - are still very expensive, they need "chip grade" silicon. What is more cost effective for stationary generators are amorphous cells - much lower efficiency, but potentially very cheap to make. If you could get the efficiency of these cells up then you could have genuine solar/electic combo transport. Oh you need cheap, light batteries too, another technology that is evolving quickly - look at mobile phones..
As a supplementary charger there may be some value to solar in a car, but at the moment not as the prime source for a full sized/weight car or truck. You need to get some power from elsewhere..
Proving that solar (and other alterntives) have come on leaps and bounds in the last decade or so. Why do we still persist with nuclear, oil, coal, with all the attendant problems (pollution, wars over oil, etc), when we could cover a small proportiion of the deserts of the world with solar cells, and the roofs of our buildings, and the coasts with huge offsiore wind farms & tidal turbines, and have all the power we need?
Dear Linux user,
You may be aware that the version of Linux you are using has some sections of UNIX code developed by Sun. We are not at liberty to disclose the code just yet, but rest assured you can believe us that this is the case. To continue using Linux you need to pay SUN a runtime license of $699 per user. Please send the aforementioned amount in used notes in a plain brown envolope to:
Darl McBride (no connection with SCO),
New CEO of Sun Microsystems
California
USA
I thought you were going to make the Beowulf joke..
"By accepting this agreement, The end user hereby agrees to sign over the deeds of their house to MS.."
..of the recent software patent lawsuit (won against MS/explorer) for Mozilla?
Yes thats an impressive picture that make a good point. It shows that one of the best ways to see the night sky is with a pair of fairly low mag binoculars with big lenses to concentrate the light.
Oh and you need dark skies too..
You beat me to it. But I do have a cunning plan..
Thanks for those thoughts..
I think if I wanted to do serious editing on material on backed up on DVD, I would turn it back to DV-AVI first. I just wonder, at 1 hour per DVD if thats workable? You can see JPG style artifacts even on commercial 2 hour+ DVDs. Does the quality of the MPG-2 encoder make a big difference? I notice with MP3 that some encoders are more intelligent how they stretch the encoding rate to avoid corruption..
..as long as /.ers can make beowulf jokes about it..
Answer is - either a top tape backup, or lots of DVD-R's, or you organise things better so your backup is more selective, or you dont..
If the standard backup media (like DVD) were big enough, then HDs would be too small to master them, and people complain.
If HDs are a lot bigger than the standard backup media (like DVD) you need loads of them, then people complain..
no win either way..
Yeh, in theory a 5400 RPM drive should do the job for normal DV - which is 3 mb/sec. I think the "pro" DV standard is more demanding. I suppose the problem can occur on play-back, if a package is trying to do a transition/effect that involves 2 or more DV files - here you can get dropped frames.
On a related side note - I have a lot of Mini-DV material that I want to back up onto my new DVD writer. I want to do it at a quality setting that would allow me to re-edit/use the material later without too much loss. If I store only 1 hour per DVD, is the quality loss acceptable? Or do I need to make 2 DVDs per 1 hour tape, or use MPG4?
What are other video people doing to archieve material?
..but where is its Unix Nappy?