Seriously, the blame could just as easily be laid at the feet of the OS developers. There is a long standing history of disk manufacturers using base 10 counting numbers.
It's not a longstanding history. It started in mid-1990s. In the early 1990s, if you bought a 300 MB drive, you got 300*1024^2 = 314,572,800 bytes.
In the mid-1990s, one marketing dweeb at a low-end hard drive manufacturer (I want to say Maxtor but don't recall for sure) convinced his company to start defining 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes. It let them sell a smaller (and thus cheaper to manufacture) drive while labeling it as the same capacity as everyone else's drives. The others resisted for about a year, then gave in and started mis-labeling their drives. IBM was the last holdout, I think they went for 3 years selling bigger drives than everyone else labeled with the same capacity. Eventually they gave in too, shortly before selling their hard drive division to Hitachi.
Around 1998, the international standards bodies mandated that MB = 1,000,000 and GB = 1,000,000,000, while MiB = 1,048,576 and GiB = 1,073,741,824. But like metric in the U.S., these units have never really caught on in the computer industry. Personally I can see the standards bodies' point, but they're going to have to collaborate with OS, memory, hard drive, and other computer hardware manufacturers to get the change implemented. They can't just stand on a pedestal mandating that this change be made, and expect it to happen.
The whole fiasco is an example of a class of situations I haven't found a name for but which is similar to the Tragedy of the Commons. In these situations, one member of the group does something which gives him an advantage of the others. The others then follow suit to remain competitive, and in doing so eliminate the advantage. The end result is that the situation is now identical to what it was before the change (everyone's 500 GB drives are the same size), but now everybody is worse off because of the change (1 GB on a drive does not equal 1 GB in memory). Other situations within this class include campaign spending in politics (everyone has to spend more on advertising each year just to stay even with everyone else), and net neutrality (if everyone pays the Telecos more money for priority, they have gained nothing because the total bandwidth hasn't increased, and are now losers because they're paying more for the same bandwidth).
The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens.
If it's happened before, then they must know that an intact shrinkwrap is not sufficient proof of an untampered box. Assuming they have a shrink-wrapping machine in the store, they should open all returned products regardless of shrinkwrap to verify that it contains the original box contents. If it does, re-shrinkwrap it and put it back on the shelf (or send it back to the manufacturer if defective). If it contains a brick, the police can tote the customer off to jail and scammers would be discouraged from trying to do this. It would cost, what, 5 cents in plastic and a few minutes of labor? The important thing is it needs to be a store-wide policy for it to work - you need to know that anything shrinkwrapped on your shelves is direct from the manufacturer or was inspected by your staff to verify it was pristine before shrinkwrapping.
All of today's $100 cards perform better than cards from 5 years ago. Happy?
The same complaint you've just made can be made for -all- computer components. The high-end ($400) stuff -is- insanely expensive, and only for the true die-hard hobbyists. The hobbyist ($200) stuff is for those that want to enjoy the sport, but can't afford to throw their money away. And the cheap stuff ($100) is for those that don't really care and the low-end stuff is good enough.
I think the OP was getting more at how the price strata of computer equipment has changed over the years.
CPUs: 5 years ago, ~$1k was top, ~$300 mid-line, ~$125 low-end. Today, same.
HD: 5 years ago, ~$700 was top, ~$200 mid-line, ~$80 low-end. Today, same, maybe a bit lower.
RAM: 5 years ago, ~$500 was top, ~$200 mid-line, ~$100 low-end. Today, same, maybe a bit lower.
However, I would argue against the OP: From a market standpoint the reason video card pricing has increased is because the customers are more willing to spend more on a video card than the other components. Certainly GPUs have increased in complexity to where they've equaled or surpassed CPUs in circuits thus increasing manufacturing costs, but ATI and nVidia wouldn't have pushed GPUs to that point if the public weren't willing to buy them. It leaves the folks who can only afford a $150 video card feeling as if they have a smaller penis because the high-end is now $700 instead of $400. But as you point out, any low end card out today would smoke the high-end cards from 5 years ago.
Now if we can just get the game developers to write code which will run at acceptable FPS on mid- to low-end video hardware...
by which I can assume there is still a lot of money to be made from music that is clearly beyond copyright?
The music is beyond copyright. The graphical representation of that music on paper is still under copyright. The folks publishing all this out-of-copyright music just come up with a new arrangement and typesetting every couple decades and get a brand-new copyright on it. The older publications fall into the public domain, and some are available in various places if you know where to look. Unfortunately most people living 70+ years ago didn't think to save us a copy in a bank vault or in a trunk in the attic. So the out-of-copyright stuff is actually pretty hard to come by. Moreso when you run into problems like IMSLP did, with folks in other countries trying to impose their copyright laws onto you.
What's really needed is a Gutenberg-like project just for music. Right now the way most old music is stored is a raw scan, just like when Project Gutenberg makes raw scans of the text in books. We need some sort of OCR software and human eyeballs (and fingers) to look over those scans and encode them in a way that's open and freely available for anyone or anything to use. Something like an enhanced MIDI format which allows you to add various notations you normally see in printed music. Unfortunately the population that's capable of doing this with music is markedly smaller than the population who can do this with books (which is basically anyone who can read text).
Amazing. Once upon a time, the only valid reason for withholding information was if it would affect the nation's security. Now, "commercial welfare" is just as valid as "national security".
That's an interesting ethical dilemma. In this case, the public tends to overreact to news of air safety. So do you do the intellectually honest thing and go public with the data, knowing the public will overreact, causing more of them to die because they chose to drive instead of fly? Or do you censor the data in the interest of economics and public safety?
I've used Sprint's EV-DO 3G service for about two years now. I average about 800kbps - 1.5mbps. Best I've gotten was slightly over 2mbps. It was actually faster at file transfers than the shared T1 at my previous workplace.
Does this mean the only reason we see "Wal-mart sucks" ads are because none of those companies PR/legal departments have asked Google to stop using their trademarks?
I think we need to make a distinction between names as a trademark and names as an identifier. It seems trademark protection exists only within the sphere of commerce. So trademark protection should cover use of the trademarked name for identifying products or services. e.g. If you try to advertise a verizonphones.com site or something. But for advertising to spread criticism or rebuttal, it's being used solely as an identifier and not for commerce, and thus is not trademark infringement. So a site like verizonsucks.com should be able to advertise themselves as long as they are not selling products or services in direct competition with Verizon.
What the US is saying is it's legal for its citizens to gamble in places hosted inside the country, but illegal outside the country in places we have an otherwise unfettered trade relationship with. (i.e., if the place was hosted in Cuba, it'd be illegal regardless.)
This is different than cocaine because cocaine is an illegal substance throughout the US, imports and domestic distribution is prohibited, period.
It's blatent hypocrisy and the exact sort of thing the WTO was created to prevent.
There's something bigger going on that's behind this seeming contradiction. The Internet has created a paradigm shift in the way people interact socially. It used to be that, aside from phone calls or the occasional live TV broadcast, people could only interact with each other if they were in the same location. So you could regulate social activities on a geographic basis. Gambling is only allowed in certain states and Indian reservations. Nudie bars can only be in certain areas of town. Businesses cannot be run out of a residence. etc.
The Internet destroyed that paradigm. You can now interact virtually in a socially meaningful way with nearly anyone else in the world. You can gamble with your neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world. You can view a girl in Russia at home as your own personal nudie bar. And of course your Internet business can run on a server in your den with nobody (except the curious geek) being the wiser. This whole controversy is due to trying to apply laws built for the old paradigm to the new paradigm. What's needed are new laws for the new paradigm.
As of yet, material products cannot be transferred over the Internet. So illegal substance distribution laws can still operate under the old geography-based paradigm. If we ever invent Star Trek-style replicators, those laws will have to change as well.
I can see a lot of uses for something like this. If the system won't boot, you can plug it into a working computer to diagnose it. If you need to mirror the system files to a new drive, you can do so without any annoying "file in use" errors. If a system is so chock full of viruses and spyware that you can't even get anti-virus/anti-spyware software to run, you can just mount it as an external hard drive and run the scan from a working system.
Sounds like they have a patent on the concept of taking a tool with you. e.g. A wrist watch lets you tell the time via the same interface regardless of whether you're at home, work, out to eat, or driving in the car. The concept is historically obvious and not worthy of a patent.
Why stop a war when you can prevent a war. Doesn't that save more lives in the end.
Because if you prevent a war, it's impossible to prove any lives were saved. This is the issue that has hounded safety- and security-conscientious engineers, designers, admins, and law-enforcement officials since civilization began.
If you went back in time and killed Hitler in, say, 1900, you'd probably be tried and convicted of murdering an 11-year old boy and sent to spend the rest of your life in prison. You could argue all you wanted about how you'd just prevented tens of millions of people from being killed, but it wouldn't matter because in 1900 it would all be just hypothetical.
When engineers protested the launch of Challenger in such cold weather conditions, they were overruled because the risk they brought up was hypothetical. It took a loss of life to get it into everyone's heads that, hey, these hypothetical risks can become real. Likewise, when the FBI/CIA claims to have thwarted a terrorist plot, the peanut gallery scoffs at them saying that they're exaggerating and there was no real threat. Yet when 9/11 happened, they bore the brunt of the blame for failing to uncover the plot.
The same thing is going to happen to Gore now. People will argue, "but we don't know if he's right!" And they will have a valid point because we really don't know for sure if he's right. If you can figure out a solution to this conundrum, I'm sure the everyone whose job involves advocating preventative measures will be eternally grateful. Until then, most of society's policy changes are going to be reactionary rather than preventative. At least that way we don't waste time and breath arguing about whether our preventative actions really accomplished anything.
Actually, I don't think they "read" the mail. Yes, they have some program that "scans" your mails and indexes it in some way, and then , it shows you the ads if they find some key words. Technically, they are scanning your mail, but a program cannot "read" (ie. process and "understand" the writing). So is it a violation of privacy? May be... this is a border line case.
That's essentially what the FBI's Carnivore program did, except it checked if packets were subject to a warrant, instead of searching for ad keywords. It'll be interesting to see the stance chosen in this by some of those who were opposed to Carnivore but fans of Google.
There's really no sense buying the junky bootlegs on a street corner. I honestly don't understand how any for-profit duplicators make it these days. It was one thing in the age of VHS tapes, but in our current environment, it's far easier for the average consumer to get his hands on a legitimate, high quality copy (and "back it up") than it's worth attempting to purchase a counterfeit copy.
The MPAA has been busy trying to destroy or make illegal people's access to DeCSS, which is what you need to "back it up". On the other hand, buying a counterfeit copy from TVBoxSet.com is no more difficult than buying from a legitimate retailer (in fact most would probably mistake it for a legitimate retailer at first and second glance). So I would disagree with your conclusion that renting and copying is easier than buying counterfeit copies.
It's an unfortunate side effect of physics which contributed to fueling the SUV boom over the last decade. When two vehicles collide, momentum is conserved, meaning if when two vehicles collide, the crumpled masses end up moving in the general direction of the heavier vehicle. This means the occupants of the heavier vehicle experience lower accelerations (safer), while the occupants of the lighter vehicle experience greater accelerations (more dangerous). This is why car vs. train accidents are almost always deadly for the car's occupants.
Given how important a factor safety has become when people buy cars, it may not be bad to consider legislating something to moderate the beneficial effect that additional mass has on safety. Something like a safety tax or increased insurance premiums for heavier vehicles, to add a financial disincentive to making cars heavy (and gas-guzzlers). As long as everyone's vehicle weight decreases in step, nobody is exposed to additional risk than before.
the Federal Communications Commissions has been favoring lobbyists a little too much
"a little too much" ? Isn't that like saying "the government is committing crimes a little too much" ?
Any amount of favoring lobbyists is a problem. I'm not saying lobbyists can't exist. But the (idealized) purpose of a lobbyist is to bring pertinent information and arguments to the attention of political officials. They should have no political influence beyond the persuasiveness of their arguments and the truthfulness of the data they present.
Ideally that'd be the case. But realistically you're not going to eliminate all corruption, it'd be prohibitively expensive to do so. So you accept that government will favor lobbyists a little. But when they start to favor it "a little too much" is about when you should start to clamp down on it.
But because Microsoft updates system files so often, AVG just flags them as "changed" and notifies you as such. Also, most anti-virus tools are probably checking against a blacklist, not blocking any and all suspicious activity.
Sarcasm aside, that is exactly the same reason why unlockers shouldn't bitch if their iPhones become iBricks. They are using them in a way the manufacturer hadn't intended them to be used.
That reasoning would render inert almost every product liability lawsuit in history, wouldn't it? The only ones I can think of which would survive your standard would be ones where manufacturers continued peddling their products even though they knew normal use would cause problems (e.g. cigarettes).
Liability has to extend past the manufacturer's intent, to cover what a purchaser might reasonably be considered to do with a product. Q-tips emblazons on every package that they're not supposed to be put into your ear. But everyone knows that you use them to clean out your ear canal. There's no way their disclaimer would hold up in court. Likewise for the iPhone, if the only reason it doesn't work on other networks is an artificial software lock, then I think it's very reasonable to expect people to try to unlock the phone.
For those who don't remember, the reason for the "95" name was likely because Windows "Chicago" kept getting delayed. Eventually Gates announced it was going to be released under the name "Windows 95". Speculation was that the name was chosen to pressure the development team to get it released in 1995 instead of letting it slip to 1996. They released it in late summer 1995, arguably too soon.
~1600 W/m^2 is the solar energy flux in space (I've heard 1500, but let's go with your figure). The atmosphere absorbs a good chunk of that, so on the ground you're talking more like 700-900 W/m^2. Then you factor in:
Night (50% averaged for the year).
Suboptimal angling on the panel relative to the sun throughout the day (guessing pi/4 since I'm too lazy to do the integral).
Weather (highly dependent on location but this report says 54% in the northern hemisphere, let's use 30% to account for light that manages to get through the clouds).
Panel efficiency (12%).
Conversion losses. I should be including losses converting solar panel DC into the AC most household appliances use, but let's be optimistic and say these panels spur development of DC appliances.
Battery efficiency. Unless you plan to use your lights only during the day, you're going to have to store electricity for night use. Lead acid batteries are about 90% efficient. Wild guess, but say a half of your daily electricity use will be drawn off the batteries, yielding an average 95% battery efficiency. Yeah you could draw electricity off the grid at night, but since we're hypothesizing DC appliances and throwing away conversion losses, I think this is the smaller of the two.
Phew. So what do we have? 1600 W/m^2 * 0.5 (atmosphere) * 0.5 (night) * pi/4 (angling) * 0.7 (weather) * 0.12 (panel) * 0.95 (battery) = 25 W/m^2. That's probably a more realistic figure to use if you want to calculate how much electricity use the panels will save you over a year. The average U.S. home consumes about 1 kW (averaged over the year), so to completely take each home off the grid would require about 40 m^2 of panels. You'd probably want more than that to get you through the Winter months and long bouts of bad weather, but that's very location-specific. We'll just use 40 m^2 and calculate a minimum.
Assume the $1 per Watt figure is under ideal conditions (companies love to do that). 800 W/m^2 *.12 = 96 W/m^2. So a square meter of this stuff will run you $96. Multiply by the required 40 m^2 to yield $3840 per home.
Figure an average electricity cost of $0.13 per kWh (in the higher priced areas where this stuff will be used first). Average home burning 1 kW (yearly time-average) would thus spend 24*365*1 kWh = 8760 kWh for the year. At $0.13 per kWh, that's $1139/yr in electricity costs. Ignoring installation labor, the panels would pay for themselves in 3 years and 4.5 months at earliest. Adjust up depending on your latitude and weather. Adjust down if you aren't as power-hungry as homes in the U.S.
Just use two counter-rotating drills simultaneously. Might be tricky when you first start and one bit bites into the rock before the other, but once they're both in the torque just gets converted into tensile and compressive stresses in the cojoining structure (like in a Chinook helicopter)
Getting sufficient down force sounds like it'd be the hard part. A few clamps or climbing cams might do the trick if you can find a good location to insert them.
My point is the USD has not "suddenly" dropped. The USD rose over the past few decades relative to Canadian dollar, and is now dropping towards levels seen in the 1970s (admittedly right after the Arab oil embargo).
German Mark / Euro (1 Euro = 1.95583 Marks)
1976 = 1.3398 Euro equiv (2.6205 German Marks)
1981 = 1.0021 Euro equiv (1.9600 German Marks)
1986 = 1.2510 Euro equiv (2.4468 German Marks)
1991 = 0.7627 Euro equiv (1.4917 German Marks, post-reunification)
1996 = 0.7348 Euro equiv (1.4371 German Marks)
2001 = 1.0620 Euros (2.0771 German Marks)
2006 = 0.8446 Euros
curr = 0.7100 Euros
So if you look at just the last 6 years, yes it looks like the US dollar is crashing. But compare over 30 years and you see that the British Pound and Canadian dollar first dropped against the US dollar, and are now returning to levels seen in 1976.
The Yen rose during the 1980s when Japan became an economic powerhouse, and has held pretty steady during the dollar's recent drop. In other words, the Yen is dropping right along with the dollar relative to the Euro, Pound, and CAD.
The German Mark and Euro have been up and down in 30 years, but the current rate is really not that far off from historical rates against the Mark.
Claiming that the US dollar is dropping into obscurity like some have been saying is like looking at a sports team's last 6 games and seeing that they're 0-6 and claiming they're dying; all the while ignoring that in the previous 24 games they were 15-9. Yes there are serious problems, but it's probably better characterized as "coming back down to earth" rather than crashing.
When I was growing up in Michigan in the 1970s, the USD and CAD were so close everyone just used both interchangeably in stores. So another way to view this is that after 30+ years, the Canadian dollar has finally made it back to where it was in 1976.
Slashdot Mirror
In the mid-1990s, one marketing dweeb at a low-end hard drive manufacturer (I want to say Maxtor but don't recall for sure) convinced his company to start defining 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes. It let them sell a smaller (and thus cheaper to manufacture) drive while labeling it as the same capacity as everyone else's drives. The others resisted for about a year, then gave in and started mis-labeling their drives. IBM was the last holdout, I think they went for 3 years selling bigger drives than everyone else labeled with the same capacity. Eventually they gave in too, shortly before selling their hard drive division to Hitachi.
Around 1998, the international standards bodies mandated that MB = 1,000,000 and GB = 1,000,000,000, while MiB = 1,048,576 and GiB = 1,073,741,824. But like metric in the U.S., these units have never really caught on in the computer industry. Personally I can see the standards bodies' point, but they're going to have to collaborate with OS, memory, hard drive, and other computer hardware manufacturers to get the change implemented. They can't just stand on a pedestal mandating that this change be made, and expect it to happen.
The whole fiasco is an example of a class of situations I haven't found a name for but which is similar to the Tragedy of the Commons. In these situations, one member of the group does something which gives him an advantage of the others. The others then follow suit to remain competitive, and in doing so eliminate the advantage. The end result is that the situation is now identical to what it was before the change (everyone's 500 GB drives are the same size), but now everybody is worse off because of the change (1 GB on a drive does not equal 1 GB in memory). Other situations within this class include campaign spending in politics (everyone has to spend more on advertising each year just to stay even with everyone else), and net neutrality (if everyone pays the Telecos more money for priority, they have gained nothing because the total bandwidth hasn't increased, and are now losers because they're paying more for the same bandwidth).
CPUs: 5 years ago, ~$1k was top, ~$300 mid-line, ~$125 low-end. Today, same.
HD: 5 years ago, ~$700 was top, ~$200 mid-line, ~$80 low-end. Today, same, maybe a bit lower.
RAM: 5 years ago, ~$500 was top, ~$200 mid-line, ~$100 low-end. Today, same, maybe a bit lower.
Video: 5 years ago, ~$400 was top, ~$150 mid-line, ~$50 low-end. Today, it's gone up. ~$700 top, ~$300 mid-line, ~$100 low-end.
However, I would argue against the OP: From a market standpoint the reason video card pricing has increased is because the customers are more willing to spend more on a video card than the other components. Certainly GPUs have increased in complexity to where they've equaled or surpassed CPUs in circuits thus increasing manufacturing costs, but ATI and nVidia wouldn't have pushed GPUs to that point if the public weren't willing to buy them. It leaves the folks who can only afford a $150 video card feeling as if they have a smaller penis because the high-end is now $700 instead of $400. But as you point out, any low end card out today would smoke the high-end cards from 5 years ago.
Now if we can just get the game developers to write code which will run at acceptable FPS on mid- to low-end video hardware...
What's really needed is a Gutenberg-like project just for music. Right now the way most old music is stored is a raw scan, just like when Project Gutenberg makes raw scans of the text in books. We need some sort of OCR software and human eyeballs (and fingers) to look over those scans and encode them in a way that's open and freely available for anyone or anything to use. Something like an enhanced MIDI format which allows you to add various notations you normally see in printed music. Unfortunately the population that's capable of doing this with music is markedly smaller than the population who can do this with books (which is basically anyone who can read text).
But isn't it the fate of most cockroaches in the wild to be eaten alive by something else?
http://i.somethingawful.com/goldmine/02-04-2003/torsoboy.jpg
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/gulf-war-ii.php
I've used Sprint's EV-DO 3G service for about two years now. I average about 800kbps - 1.5mbps. Best I've gotten was slightly over 2mbps. It was actually faster at file transfers than the shared T1 at my previous workplace.
The Internet destroyed that paradigm. You can now interact virtually in a socially meaningful way with nearly anyone else in the world. You can gamble with your neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world. You can view a girl in Russia at home as your own personal nudie bar. And of course your Internet business can run on a server in your den with nobody (except the curious geek) being the wiser. This whole controversy is due to trying to apply laws built for the old paradigm to the new paradigm. What's needed are new laws for the new paradigm.
As of yet, material products cannot be transferred over the Internet. So illegal substance distribution laws can still operate under the old geography-based paradigm. If we ever invent Star Trek-style replicators, those laws will have to change as well.
I can see a lot of uses for something like this. If the system won't boot, you can plug it into a working computer to diagnose it. If you need to mirror the system files to a new drive, you can do so without any annoying "file in use" errors. If a system is so chock full of viruses and spyware that you can't even get anti-virus/anti-spyware software to run, you can just mount it as an external hard drive and run the scan from a working system.
Sounds like they have a patent on the concept of taking a tool with you. e.g. A wrist watch lets you tell the time via the same interface regardless of whether you're at home, work, out to eat, or driving in the car. The concept is historically obvious and not worthy of a patent.
If you went back in time and killed Hitler in, say, 1900, you'd probably be tried and convicted of murdering an 11-year old boy and sent to spend the rest of your life in prison. You could argue all you wanted about how you'd just prevented tens of millions of people from being killed, but it wouldn't matter because in 1900 it would all be just hypothetical.
When engineers protested the launch of Challenger in such cold weather conditions, they were overruled because the risk they brought up was hypothetical. It took a loss of life to get it into everyone's heads that, hey, these hypothetical risks can become real. Likewise, when the FBI/CIA claims to have thwarted a terrorist plot, the peanut gallery scoffs at them saying that they're exaggerating and there was no real threat. Yet when 9/11 happened, they bore the brunt of the blame for failing to uncover the plot.
The same thing is going to happen to Gore now. People will argue, "but we don't know if he's right!" And they will have a valid point because we really don't know for sure if he's right. If you can figure out a solution to this conundrum, I'm sure the everyone whose job involves advocating preventative measures will be eternally grateful. Until then, most of society's policy changes are going to be reactionary rather than preventative. At least that way we don't waste time and breath arguing about whether our preventative actions really accomplished anything.
Given how important a factor safety has become when people buy cars, it may not be bad to consider legislating something to moderate the beneficial effect that additional mass has on safety. Something like a safety tax or increased insurance premiums for heavier vehicles, to add a financial disincentive to making cars heavy (and gas-guzzlers). As long as everyone's vehicle weight decreases in step, nobody is exposed to additional risk than before.
But because Microsoft updates system files so often, AVG just flags them as "changed" and notifies you as such. Also, most anti-virus tools are probably checking against a blacklist, not blocking any and all suspicious activity.
Liability has to extend past the manufacturer's intent, to cover what a purchaser might reasonably be considered to do with a product. Q-tips emblazons on every package that they're not supposed to be put into your ear. But everyone knows that you use them to clean out your ear canal. There's no way their disclaimer would hold up in court. Likewise for the iPhone, if the only reason it doesn't work on other networks is an artificial software lock, then I think it's very reasonable to expect people to try to unlock the phone.
For those who don't remember, the reason for the "95" name was likely because Windows "Chicago" kept getting delayed. Eventually Gates announced it was going to be released under the name "Windows 95". Speculation was that the name was chosen to pressure the development team to get it released in 1995 instead of letting it slip to 1996. They released it in late summer 1995, arguably too soon.
- Night (50% averaged for the year).
- Suboptimal angling on the panel relative to the sun throughout the day (guessing pi/4 since I'm too lazy to do the integral).
- Weather (highly dependent on location but this report says 54% in the northern hemisphere, let's use 30% to account for light that manages to get through the clouds).
- Panel efficiency (12%).
- Conversion losses. I should be including losses converting solar panel DC into the AC most household appliances use, but let's be optimistic and say these panels spur development of DC appliances.
- Battery efficiency. Unless you plan to use your lights only during the day, you're going to have to store electricity for night use. Lead acid batteries are about 90% efficient. Wild guess, but say a half of your daily electricity use will be drawn off the batteries, yielding an average 95% battery efficiency. Yeah you could draw electricity off the grid at night, but since we're hypothesizing DC appliances and throwing away conversion losses, I think this is the smaller of the two.
Phew. So what do we have? 1600 W/m^2 * 0.5 (atmosphere) * 0.5 (night) * pi/4 (angling) * 0.7 (weather) * 0.12 (panel) * 0.95 (battery) = 25 W/m^2. That's probably a more realistic figure to use if you want to calculate how much electricity use the panels will save you over a year. The average U.S. home consumes about 1 kW (averaged over the year), so to completely take each home off the grid would require about 40 m^2 of panels. You'd probably want more than that to get you through the Winter months and long bouts of bad weather, but that's very location-specific. We'll just use 40 m^2 and calculate a minimum.Assume the $1 per Watt figure is under ideal conditions (companies love to do that). 800 W/m^2 * .12 = 96 W/m^2. So a square meter of this stuff will run you $96. Multiply by the required 40 m^2 to yield $3840 per home.
Figure an average electricity cost of $0.13 per kWh (in the higher priced areas where this stuff will be used first). Average home burning 1 kW (yearly time-average) would thus spend 24*365*1 kWh = 8760 kWh for the year. At $0.13 per kWh, that's $1139/yr in electricity costs. Ignoring installation labor, the panels would pay for themselves in 3 years and 4.5 months at earliest. Adjust up depending on your latitude and weather. Adjust down if you aren't as power-hungry as homes in the U.S.
I think we have a winner.
Getting sufficient down force sounds like it'd be the hard part. A few clamps or climbing cams might do the trick if you can find a good location to insert them.
http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxhistory
At 5 year intervals, Jan 1, beginning 1976. US$1 =
British Pounds
1976 = 0.4943
1981 = 0.4186
1986 = 0.6923
1991 = 0.5165
1996 = 0.6445
2001 = 0.6696
2006 = 0.5781
curr = 0.4980
Canadian dollars
1976 = 1.0168
1981 = 1.1945
1986 = 1.3985
1991 = 1.1604
1996 = 1.3645
2001 = 1.4988
2006 = 1.1641
curr = 1.0134
Japanese Yen
1976 = 305
1981 = 203
1986 = 200
1991 = 135
1996 = 103
2001 = 114
2006 = 117
curr = 116
German Mark / Euro (1 Euro = 1.95583 Marks)
1976 = 1.3398 Euro equiv (2.6205 German Marks)
1981 = 1.0021 Euro equiv (1.9600 German Marks)
1986 = 1.2510 Euro equiv (2.4468 German Marks)
1991 = 0.7627 Euro equiv (1.4917 German Marks, post-reunification)
1996 = 0.7348 Euro equiv (1.4371 German Marks)
2001 = 1.0620 Euros (2.0771 German Marks)
2006 = 0.8446 Euros
curr = 0.7100 Euros
So if you look at just the last 6 years, yes it looks like the US dollar is crashing. But compare over 30 years and you see that the British Pound and Canadian dollar first dropped against the US dollar, and are now returning to levels seen in 1976.
The Yen rose during the 1980s when Japan became an economic powerhouse, and has held pretty steady during the dollar's recent drop. In other words, the Yen is dropping right along with the dollar relative to the Euro, Pound, and CAD.
The German Mark and Euro have been up and down in 30 years, but the current rate is really not that far off from historical rates against the Mark.
Claiming that the US dollar is dropping into obscurity like some have been saying is like looking at a sports team's last 6 games and seeing that they're 0-6 and claiming they're dying; all the while ignoring that in the previous 24 games they were 15-9. Yes there are serious problems, but it's probably better characterized as "coming back down to earth" rather than crashing.
When I was growing up in Michigan in the 1970s, the USD and CAD were so close everyone just used both interchangeably in stores. So another way to view this is that after 30+ years, the Canadian dollar has finally made it back to where it was in 1976.