And that's from a strict cost basis. Consider the independence it gives you to produce your own power. Blackout takes down the grid, so what? You're still living in a first world country courtesy of your solar panels.
Only if you leave the grid entirely. Grid-tied systems generally go down with the grid, to prevent danger to the electricians who are trying to fix the grid and expect it to be unpowered. Obviously it is just an engineering problem, but few people are willing to pay what it costs to have a grid-connected system which can go into island mode.
If you commute to work less than 100 miles every day and own an EV or plug-in hybrid, you save tons of money on gas too.
You don't really save any more or less than you would if you didn't have a solar panel. The cost of electricity is the same whether you get it from the grid or you withhold solar panel power from the grid to use it yourself. If you want to leave the grid entirely, the large batteries in an EV can be a great help for the night, but you need to cover quite a large area with solar panels.
Ahh yes, pushing useless energy back into the grid in order to get useful energy back when you need it and aren't producing any.
You mean, producing power at peak consumption times (AC running, factories running) while consuming it at night when power plants are wasting coal staying online but can't get rid of the electricity?
(This obviously isn't true if you install the solar panel in an area with electric heating and long winter nights)
Anyone who thinks that a company in an open and free market should only make $x amount of profit, doesn't believe in an open and free market. If that was the case, the products from Apple wouldn't have ever gotten to market anyway.
In open and free markets, competitors catch up and price approaches marginal cost.
The mac clones killed Apple sales because they were too GOOD. Apple had hoped they would take the low end, but instead they generally went for the real high end using components which Apple itself had not yet managed to integrate.
Stunt Car racer on the Amiga would go below 3fps on some tracks. It was perfectly manageable. That doesn't mean I'd ever go back to that kind of frame rate, and I would gladly have sacrificed visual quality to get better frame rate. Unfortunately there was not much visual quality to cut. I suppose they could have switched to wireframes to save on the Z-ordering, but that's about it.
there's a reason most locomotives are hybrids these days (and rail frieght takes a tiny fraction of the energy-per-ton of road frieght).
Locomotives aren't hybrids to improve efficiency. They are hybrids because you basically can't make a gearbox which will provide sufficient torque to start a loaded freight train -- at least not if you want it to last for more than a few days. The hybrid drivetrain on most diesel locomotives is a horrible waste of energy. Heck, they even have regenerative brakes but they don't actually store the energy. The electricity is burned in huge resistor arrays.
I could do with a simpler phone which didn't do voice calls. However it's a simple enough function to throw in once you have built a basic PDA with 3g/4g connectivity anyway that it doesn't make much sense to cut it out.
If I actually needed voice calls I would definitely go with a dedicated device; "smartphones" are notoriously crappy at that.
Being small does not help. If you split the US into tiny bits, average speed will still be the same. Population density helps, but Lithuania is at 47 km^-2 and the US is at 32 km^-2, so that does not really explain the difference.
Start/stop is inefficient and should be avoided. E.g "Energiforbrug i kølehuset" which is admittedly in Danish but claims 20% improvements in efficiency when using a frequency controlled compressor in the air conditioning rather than a traditional thermostat start/stop control.
I'm fairly sure that fridges rated A+++ use variable speed compressors in order to achieve sufficient efficiency for that rating. Panasonic makes some.
On the other hand DC also doesn't make your heart fibrillate.
Why would you use power distribution panels and screws? Plain old power cables and connectors work fine for AC, they'll work fine for DC too. Polarized connectors can be an advantage, but for this purpose it isn't even necessary, you can make a power supply which will work for reversed current. C13 and similar are polarized anyway, so they would be a good start, although you would obviously have to make the connectors incompatible with standard AC connectors.
There's no particular reason that 380 VDC distribution should help efficiency. You still need about two more levels of switching power supply before power reaches the ICs.
It is easier to step down DC than AC. You don't have to contend with keeping current up during the parts of the wave where AC supplies close to zero power. Instead you just chop at a sufficiently high frequency that your ripple current gets sufficiently low.
When I think of the things in our house that *must* run on AC, it's only our fridge, freezer, and HVAC
If your fridge, freezer, and HVAC are halfway decent, they convert to variable-frequency AC. Fixed-frequency AC motors are inefficient unless the load is constant (and load isn't constant in those applications).
nschubach has it right with the mirrors etc. There is obviously a limit to how many stories you could do, but 3 or 4 should be easy in the subtropics. "Easy" in comparison to shipping billions of people into space, that is.
No, I have been postulating that in order for mankind to survive we will need to move off the surface of the planet so it can be used almost exclusively to grow food as our population increases to beyond what we can currently sustain.
Wouldn't it be significantly easier to move the food production off the surface of the planet? Although easier still, just do food production in multiple stories. For much of the Earth, the current limit to food production isn't light but water, and if you have the energy to move a significant proportion of the population off-planet, you surely have enough energy for desalination.
No, that is wrong. A decrease in natural resources leads to a decrease in supply. Decrease in supply equals an increase in demand. Prices rise due to supply and demand in that case, not inflation.
I have no idea where you get this from. Common usage is on my side. See also the references listed under 1) in the Wikipedia entry for inflation.
Inflation means any general increase in prices, no matter what the cause is. This is also why you can speak of different measures of inflation, e.g. "core inflation" and "headline inflation". If inflation only measured money supply, there would only be one kind of inflation.
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Apart from the history challenges which are quite easily solved, this solution has problems with SELinux as well as ACL's.
And that's from a strict cost basis. Consider the independence it gives you to produce your own power. Blackout takes down the grid, so what? You're still living in a first world country courtesy of your solar panels.
Only if you leave the grid entirely. Grid-tied systems generally go down with the grid, to prevent danger to the electricians who are trying to fix the grid and expect it to be unpowered. Obviously it is just an engineering problem, but few people are willing to pay what it costs to have a grid-connected system which can go into island mode.
If you commute to work less than 100 miles every day and own an EV or plug-in hybrid, you save tons of money on gas too.
You don't really save any more or less than you would if you didn't have a solar panel. The cost of electricity is the same whether you get it from the grid or you withhold solar panel power from the grid to use it yourself. If you want to leave the grid entirely, the large batteries in an EV can be a great help for the night, but you need to cover quite a large area with solar panels.
Ahh yes, pushing useless energy back into the grid in order to get useful energy back when you need it and aren't producing any.
You mean, producing power at peak consumption times (AC running, factories running) while consuming it at night when power plants are wasting coal staying online but can't get rid of the electricity?
(This obviously isn't true if you install the solar panel in an area with electric heating and long winter nights)
Anyone who thinks that a company in an open and free market should only make $x amount of profit, doesn't believe in an open and free market. If that was the case, the products from Apple wouldn't have ever gotten to market anyway.
In open and free markets, competitors catch up and price approaches marginal cost.
The mac clones killed Apple sales because they were too GOOD. Apple had hoped they would take the low end, but instead they generally went for the real high end using components which Apple itself had not yet managed to integrate.
Stunt Car racer on the Amiga would go below 3fps on some tracks. It was perfectly manageable. That doesn't mean I'd ever go back to that kind of frame rate, and I would gladly have sacrificed visual quality to get better frame rate. Unfortunately there was not much visual quality to cut. I suppose they could have switched to wireframes to save on the Z-ordering, but that's about it.
If you think 24fps is smooth you haven't watched the beginning of Lord of the Rings in a cinema. I'll never forget that slideshow.
there's a reason most locomotives are hybrids these days (and rail frieght takes a tiny fraction of the energy-per-ton of road frieght).
Locomotives aren't hybrids to improve efficiency. They are hybrids because you basically can't make a gearbox which will provide sufficient torque to start a loaded freight train -- at least not if you want it to last for more than a few days. The hybrid drivetrain on most diesel locomotives is a horrible waste of energy. Heck, they even have regenerative brakes but they don't actually store the energy. The electricity is burned in huge resistor arrays.
Diesel on trains is just a bad idea.
It's square, unlike typical 17" screens with an aspect ratio of 16:3.
I could do with a simpler phone which didn't do voice calls. However it's a simple enough function to throw in once you have built a basic PDA with 3g/4g connectivity anyway that it doesn't make much sense to cut it out.
If I actually needed voice calls I would definitely go with a dedicated device; "smartphones" are notoriously crappy at that.
Being small does not help. If you split the US into tiny bits, average speed will still be the same. Population density helps, but Lithuania is at 47 km^-2 and the US is at 32 km^-2, so that does not really explain the difference.
In Russia the belief in the secret ballot is so strong that not even the voter gets to see the ballot before it goes in the box.
Start/stop is inefficient and should be avoided. E.g "Energiforbrug i kølehuset" which is admittedly in Danish but claims 20% improvements in efficiency when using a frequency controlled compressor in the air conditioning rather than a traditional thermostat start/stop control.
I'm fairly sure that fridges rated A+++ use variable speed compressors in order to achieve sufficient efficiency for that rating. Panasonic makes some.
DC, when it shocks you, does not let go!
On the other hand DC also doesn't make your heart fibrillate.
Why would you use power distribution panels and screws? Plain old power cables and connectors work fine for AC, they'll work fine for DC too. Polarized connectors can be an advantage, but for this purpose it isn't even necessary, you can make a power supply which will work for reversed current. C13 and similar are polarized anyway, so they would be a good start, although you would obviously have to make the connectors incompatible with standard AC connectors.
For transport, high voltage AC is the best choice.
For transport, high voltage DC is the best choice. No impedance worries, no phase to keep in sync over thousands of km. AC is legacy.
There's no particular reason that 380 VDC distribution should help efficiency. You still need about two more levels of switching power supply before power reaches the ICs.
It is easier to step down DC than AC. You don't have to contend with keeping current up during the parts of the wave where AC supplies close to zero power. Instead you just chop at a sufficiently high frequency that your ripple current gets sufficiently low.
When I think of the things in our house that *must* run on AC, it's only our fridge, freezer, and HVAC
If your fridge, freezer, and HVAC are halfway decent, they convert to variable-frequency AC. Fixed-frequency AC motors are inefficient unless the load is constant (and load isn't constant in those applications).
From the specifications: Width (maximum) 2.760mm (70.10 in)
I may be wrong about it being a world first of course, some of the first hard drives were enormous.
Thank you.
Citation, please.
nschubach has it right with the mirrors etc. There is obviously a limit to how many stories you could do, but 3 or 4 should be easy in the subtropics. "Easy" in comparison to shipping billions of people into space, that is.
No, I have been postulating that in order for mankind to survive we will need to move off the surface of the planet so it can be used almost exclusively to grow food as our population increases to beyond what we can currently sustain.
Wouldn't it be significantly easier to move the food production off the surface of the planet? Although easier still, just do food production in multiple stories. For much of the Earth, the current limit to food production isn't light but water, and if you have the energy to move a significant proportion of the population off-planet, you surely have enough energy for desalination.
No, that is wrong. A decrease in natural resources leads to a decrease in supply. Decrease in supply equals an increase in demand. Prices rise due to supply and demand in that case, not inflation.
I have no idea where you get this from. Common usage is on my side. See also the references listed under 1) in the Wikipedia entry for inflation.
Inflation means any general increase in prices, no matter what the cause is. This is also why you can speak of different measures of inflation, e.g. "core inflation" and "headline inflation". If inflation only measured money supply, there would only be one kind of inflation.
128MB RAM machines would have been around at the launch of Windows 95.
One of the marketing points of Windows 95 over OS/2 was that Windows 95 would run with 4MB of memory.