All modern inverters? Or only grid intertie inverters? Ump, something to look into... Ah there are still stand-alone inverters. So just have a stand-alone inverter supplying the building with a intertied inverter connected to the grid.
Sorry, I meant all inverters that are meant to be able to connect to the grid. Meaning inverters that send power to the grid from say solar without a battery, and inverters that can maintain a battery bank. The former shuts off completely, while the latter just disconnects from the grid.
If you're building a system on grid, it might not be a bad idea actually to go with two systems like you mentioned, from a practicality standpoint. IE, design a small backup system that doesn't interact with the grid, and use it to backup say your refrigerator, computer, ham radio, whatever. (In fact, you could probably use this system as a constant source of DC for things like the router for your Net connection, if you designed it so that you're not draining too much to prevent it from being useful as a backup.) Then you could add on grid connected PV as you like. This would make sense if the grid is very reliable in your area, as once the grid goes down you can't do anything with the intertied system. Then again, if you wanted to back up more of your house and only have one system, you could look into the hybrid inverter (that does both).
I don't know about now but at one tyme restaurants had to pay others to haul off the used grease. You're right about having a backup, some people demand it and others adjust. For my own home, I want a backup if not a hybrid system. Ideally I'd have geothermal, solar, wind, and maybe a micro hydro system. Of course such a system would cost a lot. But before I ever get to where I can build my home off the grid I'll log energy usage for at least a year and see where I can be more efficient.
Falcon
I've heard stories of restaurants dumping their waste grease out in the back, right next to the dumpster. I'm not sure about the laws about that, but I'd imagine if you asked they'd be more than happy to give it to you. They might also be interested in a way to become greener.;)
You can start out with a small backup system by picking out a stand-alone inverter and battery bank. That'll act like a big UPS, basically, and you can add a little solar later if you want, or other RE source, whatever. You have the right idea about logging energy usage. Remember that using more efficient appliances will make covering your usage much cheaper.
If you are looking for off-grid property, you'll really luck out if you can do microhydro. It's the cheapest source, and you get it 24 hrs/day a decent portion of the year (depending on how the stream acts seasonably, obviously). If you get enough flow you'll almost have energy to burn. (And you probably will, since most if not all microhydro plants need a constant load. A lot of people use air and water heaters for this.) If you have a lot of flow you can look for a centrifugal pump from an old industrial site and actually run it backwards for power, Google around, it's been done.
You can always start small, maybe enough to charge your laptop, and get a little experience. Check out my setup here, not too much going on yet. Once you play with a little, though, the bug bites.
I believe that everywhere in the US in order to pass inspection you have to be using UL listed equipment if you want to intertie (IE, run in phase with the grid and sell your extra power back.) All modern inverters built for this have to pass all sorts of anti-islanding tests. In addition to this a lot of areas require a separate, labeled, lockable disconnect so that the utility workers can disconnect your system from the grid.
You could of course not get the system inspected, but if you purchase a grid interactive inverter in this country from a reputable manufacturer it will still have the anti-islanding protection. (Don't even think of trying to intertie a homebrew inverter.)
Some inverters can tie to the grid and maintain batteries at the same time, so if the power goes out it just disconnects from the grid. You loose some power charging the batteries, but it's part of the price you pay for the backup power. (Especially since systems without batteries tend to run the DC side at lower voltages.)
Biodiesel for backup would be pretty cool, especially if you can get grease from a restaurant to use to make it. A lot of people far off the grid will have a generator as backup, but some do without. When you don't have the grid the trick is to watch what your system produces, and adjust your load accordingly.
For a typical residential setting in say the suburbs, this is true. However there are times when things aren't so cut and dry. For instance, with a small power system you can get some backup power when the grid goes down. The ability to communicate and run your refrigerator in, say, a hurricane-induced blackout makes the system more valuable than simply what it can displace from your electric bill each month. A more efficient (and cheaper) technology would make a small solar power backup system closer to a gas generator as far as ease of use and energy density.
And then of course there are the cases when it's a choice between solar and paying a ton to bring the grid in, in which case quite a few people do find solar (or other small-scale RE) cheaper. In such cases where having the utility poles need to be installed cheaper solar will make the RE option a lot more attractive, spurring early adoption.
True, but photovoltaics themselves are becoming cheaper. There are already people who are not bothered by the investment who are buying them, and with technology like what Nanosolar has going more people may very well invest. Along with this, with the potential for some battery backup the systems may take on more value than just what they'd save on an electric bill. For people in storm-prone areas, for instance, the ability to keep the refrigerator and a line of communication going during a long power failure is attractive.
Solar thermal is awesome, and can even work at night. I would like to see more adoption of residential photovoltaics, though. Despite having all that open land in the desert think about all the space we have on roofs in the suburbs and in metropolitan areas. During the day we could take the edge off of the peak load with this sort of a setup, using things like solar thermal and nuclear for base load. This would also be great for taking the load off the power grid.
It could also be because of the crappy power those UPSes put out, usually not a true sine wave. I was using that as an example due to the transfer time. Many of the inverter tend to have a relatively clean sine wave output like the higher end UPSes.
I don't think that transfer time is much different than the cheapie UPSes you can buy, which I have had on several occasions keep a PC running without problem. Then again depending on everything I guess it could cause problems.
I've heard actually it's a bigger problem with AC motors, which may have trouble with the sudden phase jump that would result. I think a lot of desktop supplies are switchers which just rectify the incoming AC and then step it down to whatever voltage is needed. Guess it depends on exactly what he's running.
Actually, a generator plus flywheel storage might be the way to go. Get some flywheel units that can run everything for maybe thirty seconds, and have plenty of time for the generator to kick in. Now downtime at all.
Not sure how it compares to some of the purpose built UPSes around, but you could go find a big power inverter like those used in renewable energy systems and get a bunch of deep cycle batteries, maybe a 48 volt bank. A lot of those big inverters have built in chargers and transfer switches, allowing you to basically use them like a UPS. You'd have to roll your own auto shutdown solution, though. And I guess it wouldn't be a true UPS, as there would be some transfer time (20 ms maybe?) as the relay switched over. Though I doubt this would have much of an impact.
I was browsing Wikipedia a while back and found a this prgram, SGO Mistika, which is intended to run on SuSE. It looks pretty high end, though the Wiki page says it has a reputation for having a difficult UI and seems to have a small but dedicated following. Still, it's neat that there's something like this on Linux.
I see what you're saying. But it's still pretty neat that we'd basically be creating something similar like that. I hope that however it does get publicized there's not too much backlash.
You're right, it was still kind of obvious that it was rendered for most of it. But I thought they used that too their advantage. For me, at least, it was enough that most of the time suspension of disbelief kicked in and I didn't think about it. I thought they did a good job making it that.
Then again I did end up thinking instead about the plot similarities to Pocahontas, but that's another matter.
I'm not too familiar with how the botnets operate, but that may or may not be easy. First of all if a bot is meant to do something like take part in a DDoS attack it may very well be making port 80 requests, so easily filtering that means blocking Web traffic, which is what most people use their Internet connections for. (The bot could also do something like send out Email, similar problem.) As for command and control, I guess that depends. I'm sure a lot of the botnets these days don't just use IRC and actually have some sort of encrypted protocol, but it's hard to tell, especially if they use a range of ports for the traffic. Heck, maybe they even just make and respond to HTTP requests to talk to each other, bringing back the first problem.
Then Apple acquired Shake and made sure that Shake + a PowerMac/MacPro cost the same as Shake for Linux. And then dropped the price to $500 for OSX three months after I paid $3k for the software....
I'm not super familiar with the industry, but I believe that even after they did this Shake for Linux was pretty popular. A lot of effects houses still used it (some even licensed the source code, I believe), and due to having invested a lot in a Linux pipeline were more willing to dump Shake than to switch platforms. As a result they kept the Linux version, even after killing the Windows and Irix versions (I believe; not sure if the Windows version was gone before they acquired Shake).
At any rate Shake's discontinued now, and most of the studios seem to be using Nuke instead.
I've got an M Audio Delta 44 that works pretty well with Ubuntu Studio. I've used Ardour/Jackd for a few years now (first on Gentoo and now on Ubuntu Studio) and they work great.
If you're thinking of an arrangement where the batteries have huge capacity which allows them to be fully charged, then to quit drawing power while supplying the load until they run low, I defy you to find such a commercially available unit outside of the submarine service.
This depends largely on what kind of load you want to power, but you could put something like this together with commercial products. If I understand the parent correctly the idea is to create a big buffer. Well, you could charge the batteries at a relatively constant rate and then supply power via an inverter (or just using DC, if the loads allow it) for quite a few things using off-the-shelf technology. A lot of this can be bought at places that sell gear for renewable energy systems, and while you could spend well into the thousands, it's not like you couldn't assemble something like this in your basement with some deep cycle batteries, a charger, and an inverter.
It would be inefficient, but if there was some spike in power you wanted to mask you could do it if you planned the system correctly. It'd still probably look suspicious in some way, though.
Sounds to me like they screwed up, and now they're covering themselves. It sounds much better if they can say some nasty hacker brought the problem to their attention by trying to break in, as opposed to it being shown that they ignored an innocent guy who was willing to help them for months. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity (I think that's the quote). Or in this case laziness.
This seems like the way a lot of people would react, so you're probably right that getting out of the country is the best way to be safe.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc.
You could set an exit policy to do just that, check the tor documentation. It might not stop other people from allowing Web traffic, but it would ensure people wouldn't be using your exit node for child porn. (Binary Usenet transfers or transfers over IRC aside.)
Hell, you could even limit what Web sites people can get to through your node. So you could still allow access to, say, Google and Wikipedia but no other sites.
During Blizzards, when there's a foot of snow on the roof.
Well, that's why you start with a small system;). I have two panels that right now I have set up on the ground outside. (I move them around sometimes for better sun exposure.) Thus the snow's not that much of a problem, and the little bit of power is helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
All modern inverters? Or only grid intertie inverters? Ump, something to look into... Ah there are still stand-alone inverters. So just have a stand-alone inverter supplying the building with a intertied inverter connected to the grid.
Sorry, I meant all inverters that are meant to be able to connect to the grid. Meaning inverters that send power to the grid from say solar without a battery, and inverters that can maintain a battery bank. The former shuts off completely, while the latter just disconnects from the grid.
If you're building a system on grid, it might not be a bad idea actually to go with two systems like you mentioned, from a practicality standpoint. IE, design a small backup system that doesn't interact with the grid, and use it to backup say your refrigerator, computer, ham radio, whatever. (In fact, you could probably use this system as a constant source of DC for things like the router for your Net connection, if you designed it so that you're not draining too much to prevent it from being useful as a backup.) Then you could add on grid connected PV as you like. This would make sense if the grid is very reliable in your area, as once the grid goes down you can't do anything with the intertied system. Then again, if you wanted to back up more of your house and only have one system, you could look into the hybrid inverter (that does both).
I don't know about now but at one tyme restaurants had to pay others to haul off the used grease. You're right about having a backup, some people demand it and others adjust. For my own home, I want a backup if not a hybrid system. Ideally I'd have geothermal, solar, wind, and maybe a micro hydro system. Of course such a system would cost a lot. But before I ever get to where I can build my home off the grid I'll log energy usage for at least a year and see where I can be more efficient.
Falcon
I've heard stories of restaurants dumping their waste grease out in the back, right next to the dumpster. I'm not sure about the laws about that, but I'd imagine if you asked they'd be more than happy to give it to you. They might also be interested in a way to become greener. ;)
You can start out with a small backup system by picking out a stand-alone inverter and battery bank. That'll act like a big UPS, basically, and you can add a little solar later if you want, or other RE source, whatever. You have the right idea about logging energy usage. Remember that using more efficient appliances will make covering your usage much cheaper.
If you are looking for off-grid property, you'll really luck out if you can do microhydro. It's the cheapest source, and you get it 24 hrs/day a decent portion of the year (depending on how the stream acts seasonably, obviously). If you get enough flow you'll almost have energy to burn. (And you probably will, since most if not all microhydro plants need a constant load. A lot of people use air and water heaters for this.) If you have a lot of flow you can look for a centrifugal pump from an old industrial site and actually run it backwards for power, Google around, it's been done.
You can always start small, maybe enough to charge your laptop, and get a little experience. Check out my setup here, not too much going on yet. Once you play with a little, though, the bug bites.
I believe that everywhere in the US in order to pass inspection you have to be using UL listed equipment if you want to intertie (IE, run in phase with the grid and sell your extra power back.) All modern inverters built for this have to pass all sorts of anti-islanding tests. In addition to this a lot of areas require a separate, labeled, lockable disconnect so that the utility workers can disconnect your system from the grid.
You could of course not get the system inspected, but if you purchase a grid interactive inverter in this country from a reputable manufacturer it will still have the anti-islanding protection. (Don't even think of trying to intertie a homebrew inverter.)
Some inverters can tie to the grid and maintain batteries at the same time, so if the power goes out it just disconnects from the grid. You loose some power charging the batteries, but it's part of the price you pay for the backup power. (Especially since systems without batteries tend to run the DC side at lower voltages.)
Biodiesel for backup would be pretty cool, especially if you can get grease from a restaurant to use to make it. A lot of people far off the grid will have a generator as backup, but some do without. When you don't have the grid the trick is to watch what your system produces, and adjust your load accordingly.
For a typical residential setting in say the suburbs, this is true. However there are times when things aren't so cut and dry. For instance, with a small power system you can get some backup power when the grid goes down. The ability to communicate and run your refrigerator in, say, a hurricane-induced blackout makes the system more valuable than simply what it can displace from your electric bill each month. A more efficient (and cheaper) technology would make a small solar power backup system closer to a gas generator as far as ease of use and energy density.
And then of course there are the cases when it's a choice between solar and paying a ton to bring the grid in, in which case quite a few people do find solar (or other small-scale RE) cheaper. In such cases where having the utility poles need to be installed cheaper solar will make the RE option a lot more attractive, spurring early adoption.
True, but photovoltaics themselves are becoming cheaper. There are already people who are not bothered by the investment who are buying them, and with technology like what Nanosolar has going more people may very well invest. Along with this, with the potential for some battery backup the systems may take on more value than just what they'd save on an electric bill. For people in storm-prone areas, for instance, the ability to keep the refrigerator and a line of communication going during a long power failure is attractive.
Solar thermal is awesome, and can even work at night. I would like to see more adoption of residential photovoltaics, though. Despite having all that open land in the desert think about all the space we have on roofs in the suburbs and in metropolitan areas. During the day we could take the edge off of the peak load with this sort of a setup, using things like solar thermal and nuclear for base load. This would also be great for taking the load off the power grid.
It could also be because of the crappy power those UPSes put out, usually not a true sine wave. I was using that as an example due to the transfer time. Many of the inverter tend to have a relatively clean sine wave output like the higher end UPSes.
I don't think that transfer time is much different than the cheapie UPSes you can buy, which I have had on several occasions keep a PC running without problem. Then again depending on everything I guess it could cause problems.
I've heard actually it's a bigger problem with AC motors, which may have trouble with the sudden phase jump that would result. I think a lot of desktop supplies are switchers which just rectify the incoming AC and then step it down to whatever voltage is needed. Guess it depends on exactly what he's running.
Actually, a generator plus flywheel storage might be the way to go. Get some flywheel units that can run everything for maybe thirty seconds, and have plenty of time for the generator to kick in. Now downtime at all.
Not sure how it compares to some of the purpose built UPSes around, but you could go find a big power inverter like those used in renewable energy systems and get a bunch of deep cycle batteries, maybe a 48 volt bank. A lot of those big inverters have built in chargers and transfer switches, allowing you to basically use them like a UPS. You'd have to roll your own auto shutdown solution, though. And I guess it wouldn't be a true UPS, as there would be some transfer time (20 ms maybe?) as the relay switched over. Though I doubt this would have much of an impact.
No, you need Emacs.
I was browsing Wikipedia a while back and found a this prgram, SGO Mistika, which is intended to run on SuSE. It looks pretty high end, though the Wiki page says it has a reputation for having a difficult UI and seems to have a small but dedicated following. Still, it's neat that there's something like this on Linux.
All it takes is someone posting the Verizon CEO's home phone number on /b/. It's bound to happen.
Or juvenile Congressmen.
Lawsuit-lawsuit-lawsuit....
Build a nuclear reactor in the US or EU, and it's "AGGGH! GIANT ANTS!"
Giant ants would be awesome.
I see what you're saying. But it's still pretty neat that we'd basically be creating something similar like that. I hope that however it does get publicized there's not too much backlash.
Would this basically be like creating a tiny star?
You're right, it was still kind of obvious that it was rendered for most of it. But I thought they used that too their advantage. For me, at least, it was enough that most of the time suspension of disbelief kicked in and I didn't think about it. I thought they did a good job making it that.
Then again I did end up thinking instead about the plot similarities to Pocahontas, but that's another matter.
I'm not too familiar with how the botnets operate, but that may or may not be easy. First of all if a bot is meant to do something like take part in a DDoS attack it may very well be making port 80 requests, so easily filtering that means blocking Web traffic, which is what most people use their Internet connections for. (The bot could also do something like send out Email, similar problem.) As for command and control, I guess that depends. I'm sure a lot of the botnets these days don't just use IRC and actually have some sort of encrypted protocol, but it's hard to tell, especially if they use a range of ports for the traffic. Heck, maybe they even just make and respond to HTTP requests to talk to each other, bringing back the first problem.
Then Apple acquired Shake and made sure that Shake + a PowerMac/MacPro cost the same as Shake for Linux. And then dropped the price to $500 for OSX three months after I paid $3k for the software....
I'm not super familiar with the industry, but I believe that even after they did this Shake for Linux was pretty popular. A lot of effects houses still used it (some even licensed the source code, I believe), and due to having invested a lot in a Linux pipeline were more willing to dump Shake than to switch platforms. As a result they kept the Linux version, even after killing the Windows and Irix versions (I believe; not sure if the Windows version was gone before they acquired Shake).
At any rate Shake's discontinued now, and most of the studios seem to be using Nuke instead.
I've got an M Audio Delta 44 that works pretty well with Ubuntu Studio. I've used Ardour/Jackd for a few years now (first on Gentoo and now on Ubuntu Studio) and they work great.
If you're thinking of an arrangement where the batteries have huge capacity which allows them to be fully charged, then to quit drawing power while supplying the load until they run low, I defy you to find such a commercially available unit outside of the submarine service.
This depends largely on what kind of load you want to power, but you could put something like this together with commercial products. If I understand the parent correctly the idea is to create a big buffer. Well, you could charge the batteries at a relatively constant rate and then supply power via an inverter (or just using DC, if the loads allow it) for quite a few things using off-the-shelf technology. A lot of this can be bought at places that sell gear for renewable energy systems, and while you could spend well into the thousands, it's not like you couldn't assemble something like this in your basement with some deep cycle batteries, a charger, and an inverter.
It would be inefficient, but if there was some spike in power you wanted to mask you could do it if you planned the system correctly. It'd still probably look suspicious in some way, though.
Don't forget about Benjamin Button.
Sounds to me like they screwed up, and now they're covering themselves. It sounds much better if they can say some nasty hacker brought the problem to their attention by trying to break in, as opposed to it being shown that they ignored an innocent guy who was willing to help them for months. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity (I think that's the quote). Or in this case laziness.
This seems like the way a lot of people would react, so you're probably right that getting out of the country is the best way to be safe.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc.
You could set an exit policy to do just that, check the tor documentation. It might not stop other people from allowing Web traffic, but it would ensure people wouldn't be using your exit node for child porn. (Binary Usenet transfers or transfers over IRC aside.)
Hell, you could even limit what Web sites people can get to through your node. So you could still allow access to, say, Google and Wikipedia but no other sites.
During Blizzards, when there's a foot of snow on the roof.
Well, that's why you start with a small system ;). I have two panels that right now I have set up on the ground outside. (I move them around sometimes for better sun exposure.) Thus the snow's not that much of a problem, and the little bit of power is helpful.
The generator is a good idea though.