I'm doing some science as a "hobby" here at my shop (Think Farnsworth fusor and related things). I often need more information than I have to get something right on one of the early tries. When I look for an article, perhaps one I have a name for, or just something I find on Google, I inevitab ly get a useless abstract and the offer to sell it to me for something on the order of $20/page -- this for the pdf, not dead tree.
This even in cases where the research as government funded and done say, in 1935 -- author long dead, unknown copyright status and so on, but the society or publisher feels entitled to get this fee. I'd go bankrupt in no time buying lots of articles that I can't tell contain the information I need from the abstract. This is ridiculous, does not advance science (as many of these societies and publishers state in their mottos) and is surely a major profit center for someone. I cannot afford to subscribe to all these journals and so on, I need some money left over for equipment! I suppose larger outfits do subscribe for the benefit of their employees, but this is yet another case of big vs small with small getting the shaft.
Have fun at http://www.coultersmithing.com/
Back in the day, I worked for DEC as a tech, and did a lot of disk work. Back then spin ups and downs were a major problem, as there was no such thing as a winchester sealed drive to keep dust out, and the heads (more so in this day) fly very low to the disk. When the disk is stopped or slowed, the heads rub. Even if they are parked outside the data area, there's a chance to kick up some stuff from the disk surface that will then get between the head and the disk on the data area and cause failures.
Having said that, and having maintained a network of about 10 machines for the last decade or so (we write software here), we find that plain old time is about as good an indicator of failure as there is, along with the odd bad batch. In other words, computers infrequently powered up still had about the same disk lifetimes on a calendar given a certain brand and lot. We start getting nervous at a few years out. By then, most times the mobo has been upgraded etc anyway, so it's no big deal to put in a new drive while at it. As computers are how we eat, we feel the hardware costs of ensuring reliable ones is trivial compared to missing a few big paychecks.
We got bitten by the IBM deskstars, and it's the only time we'd ever lost any actual data, about a day's work. We were using machines to cross backup one another and in a spell of hot weather these things dropped like flies, faster than we thought we had to recover them, oops. That was surely a mess. We also have a ton of Seagate 2gb drives from when that was big, and none have failed, ever! They are rarely used now of course.
For some reason, we have some brand loyalty now, and always get drives a little down from the peak available, the ones that have been around longer and have a little more margin in the technology than the biggest/fastest ones around. This seems to be working out. Cross backups machine-machine on our network works pretty well if you do it enough! Of course it is much easier to backup and restore a linux box...as the disk organization is far cleaner -- no need or point in backing up most of the drive, just the user-changed parts. For windows boxen we image a drive and keep it in the machine, but unplugged. This saves a re-install of the system and all those apps, but you have to remember to do it often enough.
My Solarex solar panels that power my house, shop, and business came from a company that's owned by big oil. It's changed hands a few times but always owned by some oil company or other. They don't want to be left without a chair when the music stops, and have indeed put a lot of money into alternative energy in the sense of making it practical and rugged.
They know cheap oil is going away...no matter what they say, look at what they are doing, follow the money.
I've been off the grid entirely since 1982, and solar works fine, thanks. This BS of "we need billions more in research" is to keep people from just going with what there is, which works. I don't care how many billions are spent, there is never going to be a magic box you clip to the antenna of your Toyota that makes it burn freely available (hah!) hydrogen, but most people seem to vaguely hold this thought again, as an excuse to not invest in what works already, which of course would make it work better.
Go get out your science books, and as Bussard said, some of the right ones that handle this sort of particle motion will be pretty old. Used bookstore. Then make yourself rich some way, and do it yourself. It's what I'm doing, I'm not being facetious here. I got "lucky" in the educational and financial "lottery" and I'm doing something about it.
I don't want other people's money, as I don't want to take the responsibility of them expecting a payback if it doesn't work out, and I don't want to waste time I could spend doing science on blabbing with a zillion potential givers...Most of the people who do that are fakes anyway and very much do not deserve your bucks.
This stuff doesn't cost all that much if you're an acomplished scrounger, I have virtually all I need now from a life of knowing what to pull out of the dumpster etc. There are only a couple of things I can't simply make in the shop I built to support the project. It's just not that bad unless done the old inefficient government lab way.
I have personally operated one of the devices he mentions, a Farnsworth fusor, at a friend's house in Richmond VA. They're not hard to make at all, this friend made it himself, and they don't cost much. He was on rev 3 completely self funded, and getting quite high neutron outputs using deuterium. I saw the neutron counter count, and the fusion itself through a window. We didn't run it long, as we didn't want to make the whole lab radioactive, and as Bussard says, the grid melts. The friend (who may not want his name out there) normally observes via cheap CC tv.
Now I have no way to judge if this Bussard guy is rational. His idea sounds fairly good, but I did notice the arm-waving at certain critical points in the presentation (we don't have time...to tell you how this actually works...with math). Question is, does it matter? Do you have to be rational to be onto something good? Where did that scaling of seventh power come from, thin air? Can't answer without making one and trying it, which would in truth cost very little.
I DO have the physics background and training to understand this, being something of an old guy myself. It could work, the devil, as always, is in the details which that video didn't provide (perhaps on purpose, there's a telling instruction at the beginning to not ask "classified" questions during the Q&A period).
One thing he is for sure dead right about is the problems with trying to do fusion with Maxwellian distributions -- random thermal motions. That'll only fly with gravity confinement and very large mass (eg, the sun). On earth, magnetic confinement of plasma is about the hardest thing to do there is, and the whole time the pesky electrons are giving off photons, wasting your input energy. And if you have too much density of any particular charge, say just positive nuclei, they won't come together. So tokamaks are expensive boondoggles that may indeed do good science sometimes, but as he said, most of the advances in plasma confinement there turned out to be purely empirical lucky guesses, not truly science.
I laughed when he talked about the problems of computational modeling in front of programmers with access to what has to be the largest computer network on the planet, along with some of the smartest programmers. Deliberate challenge?
The Farnsworth principle is clever, but is not the only non-maxwellian way there is. Consider a crystal of for example B11 oxide (or whatever) that you fire protons at. You only bother to accelerate ones that are going to hit a nuclei to fairly high degree of confidence. By firing single protons, you can find several nuclei, and once you know where three are in a crystal, you know where they all are. Due to having a crystal out there as a target, this defines a "grid" of locations you want to hit, and much more area where shooting protons in there is just a waste. One could focus an image of another Farnsworth invention (I think) eg the shadow mask used in color CRT's or it's moral equivalent. The holes would be a lot smaller and farther apart, that's all. Using the same type of charged particle optics that were used in electron microscopes, only backwards, the image could be reduced to atomic dimensions. This solves all the problems of loss by radiation, confining a plasma, maxwellian waste and so forth.
The only trouble is that it cannot scale large, like the power companies want. Once you shoot the crystal, it's hot now, and the atoms are jiggling around too much to reliably hit again. You'd have to have something like a monomolecular layer of crystal on something like cassette tape and step and repeat. Doing the math on this gives you an upper limit of 10 or 20 kw per unit -- you can only move the "tape" so fast, and find out how the crystal is aligned this time so fast. You can't use a huge crystal because of random thermal motions at any practical temperature, so knowing where some of the nuclei are doesn't really tell you with enough precision where all of them are.
I am building the above apparatus, and some of th
All this debunking of solar power is kind of depressing to me, who has been living with it for several decades. It's all bull, propagated by competing power companies.
Yes, it takes energy to make panels. On my system I can ARC WELD ALL DAY LONG, which is more energy than it took to make them most likely, in one day. Yes, it takes nasty chemicals to make them (just like any semiconductor), but they are expensive too, and very unlikely to be wasted or to get back into the enviornment.
Most of the energy and "chemicals" used to make panels are for the GLASS and for the ALUMINUM frame. As a society, we use these things in buildings anyway, so what's the big deal here?
I don't know the mtbf of solar panels. In 26+ years with them the only failures were from an admitted bad batch, which Solarex replaced free, no questions asked, 20 years after I bought them. The rest are like new, still put out full power and I can't tell the ones I bought 5 years ago from the ones I bought 26 years ago except by minor connection details and serial numbers. See www.coultersmithing.com for some pix of one of my systems. This stuff works, it's a great deal, and as a result of being off the grid, my property taxes are highly reduced, which paid for the system in only a few years all by itself.
I know some guys making really big rockets, and they are using ammonium nitrate and aluminum with a binder, mixed in a blender. Doubt this would ever detonate by accident, AN takes a really big hit (more than a blasting cap) to go in this combination. It might be getting harder to get, though.
Yes, the background check is a pain (and in some cases I think you pay for it) but that requirement for a "magazine" is pretty stiff. It can't be in your house anyway, no worries there about being searched (the background check is worse anyway sometimes), but in a non-rural setting you're going to have a hard time finding a place "far enough away from people" to put one, and that is a requirement. I do some of this stuff here, in fairly small quantities, and had occaision to talk to the local BATFE guys about it. When they saw what I was doing they had no problem with it, is all I can say. Doesn't matter what the laws are if the cops are alright. Of course, you'd better have a nice big place to shoot nice big rockets anyway.
Heck, it's legal to have quite a quantity of smokeless powder for reloading, and that is darn powerful stuff, and can be detonated at least in small quantities. This is just one of those silly things about ignorant lawmakers (some of whom are unelected) trying to CoverTheirAxx.
I was a windows programmer for many years at all levels from drivers to end user apps. There are so many designed-in "features" that are actually security problems it isn't funny. Some of them actually are features, don't get me wrong, but they also open doors that shouldn't be opened. Just in windows messages alone...any app can broadcast any message to all top level windows (which are there for every app whether they show or not) such as, for example ALT+F4. WM_CopyData, which is what all OLE and Com are based on is totally a disaster from a security standpoint, and crosses most permission borders if the programmer is moderately slick. Paul DiLascia had a nice article in MSDN about how to use that message for cross-app and cross-permision tricks for debugging...easy to crash the system too by overflowing the declared buffer... I could go on of course. Unsigned drivers, which are nice for hackers doing their own hardware (includes me), are also a lot of what made the win9x series so flakey. It was just harder enough to do the NT class stuff that fewer losers were able to get anything installed, much less malware.
But the creeping featurism is the disease. They just couldn't (wouldn't) think that there'd be a problem with adding say, scripting to a word processor or being able to embed com controls, music and other pointless junk in a word document. I think that whole class of stuff is just to way stupid for words. Sure there might be a case in 100,000 where it'd be nice to be able to add some script processing to a document (it has errors or came in a messed up format) but in that case I'd just save as text and write a standalone script (probably perl) to do whatever, then go back to "pretty format" if needed. I'm a published author (computer mags and books) and have never needed 1/10 of the junk in word, and in fact the publishers tell you not to use it as it messes up their layout stuff, which is usually on a Mac anyway.
You have to know the API for this new junk was already there -- they are just documenting it now. As it is so easy to run some variation of softice or a VM and find all the opsys calls, security by obscurity wouldn't have worked anyway. Heck, the full MSDN subscripton used to come with symbols for the system DLLs anyway, effectively giving you the source code. I always laughed when someone "leaked the crown jewels" because they already gave them to any developer with the wit to install the stuff in devstudio! Along with dox on the supposedly secret "ole storage" that is the word document format.
Yes, they are, and they are looking at a very short term for how long most of them will be viable.
I didn't see anyone wanting to invest in my 250 mpg car, for example, there's one with legs.
You can see it at www.coultersmithing.com/kart.html. (don't all visit at once, I don't think
my site will withstand a slashdotting, so I didn't make the link clickable)
This is real, it works, and is "too much fun" to drive. Don't really need money per se, but need to set up manuf and dealerships.
I'm already getting orders from local people who have driven the thing.
My product development company has used javascript for various things, like little boxes that are on your LAN that have too little smarts to really do it all, so push some work to the client. In this case, there's no possibility of a hack or exploit (memory not writable), and why would anyone want to break their own medical gear, for example?
BUT -- client based validation is utterly stupid from any security standpoint. That's harsh, but still very true. Please post us some url's where you do this for ecommmerce so we can all order negative numbers of things and get our cards credited. It's so easy to capture source, edit, rerun and post back to a site that depends on this it is far from funny and is the subject of some older books on security (older because just about everyone knows this by now and it's not a relevant topic anymore).
D'oh!
I'm also one such. We've been darned lucky, it seems, as we've not had this sort of problem, or not much. Our longest running customer for whom we developed quite a number of products allowed us to train and affect hiring practice, in effect making us unnecessary, but still desirable == we still get calls for fiddly maintenance jobs to customize this or that for some big customer of his. Having written the code in question, we can just do it cleaner and faster than his guys, even with the training. Other customers (and some of the names would surprise you) just took the design and said "thanks, see ya" and that was that -- they needed no more. Maybe our worst customer (a nice people, however) had a government grant to develop something he had no clue about, so hired us. We thought the thing was a good thing, so we took the job. It was a visio tactile aid for deaf infants. But the customer gave us NO feedback, it seemed everything we did was perfect (even though we knew better). It might sound heavenly to get nothing but unspecific praise, but we wanted more help on specs than we got. He was just burning the grant money and taking a cut, so the more he spent on us, the bigger his cut was. When the grant ran out, he of course dumped us, not saving enough to put this nice thing into anyone's actual hands though we built circa 30 prototypes for him. BTW my consulting firm never does fixed price or contract work, period. If you can't trust the guy, what good is a contract? No fixed price job is ever bid accurately, so someone is getting ripped, and we don't want the karma from that either way. And there ARE legitimate spec changes once a project becomes better understood. That long running customer had all his engineers in complete fear, as he would let them almost finish a job, then come in and stir the pot, forcing a redesign. Dumb like a fox, this guy, as we all know Rev2 of anything is the first good one.
We only work directly for CEOs and owners, maybe down the line some chief of engineering handles the day to day communications and spec writing. That way there's no doubt when it comes to check writing and so on, no BS, or what the real vision for a product was. We've also gotten praise for showing someone a product they had in mind was a waste of time, and getting it cancelled. There's always something else to do, so this is no biggie. Often the worker bees at the place are afraid to do things like this, but we get to point out stupid stuff without getting fired. Saving a customer a few million dollars on something bound to fail is considered a favor by anyone we'd want to work with anyway.
Nitroglycerin is a liquid explosive, and nearly the most powerful one there is in terms of KJ/gram of it. The plastiques are more "brisant" which means a faster risetime of the shockwave, better at breaking rocks without tamping and so forth, but only about half the calorie output. To knock out a plane, simple overpressure would seem enough, since you're in a containment vessel, no special need for brisance. In this case, it seems the plotters were planning to use acetone peroxide, an easy to make, brisant (if you don't mind a lot of risk) explosive made from liquids, but which is actually a solid in use. It's less powerful than nitro, more sensitive, and the teeny bombers who inhabit the explosives boards often lose body parts trying to make it. One normally does this at the lowest possible temperatures to prevent premature detonation during manufacture. Maybe at room temperature it just goes off, maybe even before the synthesis is complete. I don't plan to try it here. Not averse to some danger, but gheesh. I know of a *careful* person who got hurt trying it the "right way". On the AP front, one of the components is acetone, which I'd think even a brain dead security person would whiff easily. You'd pass out quick if you drank any amount, and stink. High strength peroxide would release O2 really fast if ingested, and make quite a show. So they're not totally full of it on the drink it test.
Interestingly, the "scanners" used to detect explosives won't see quite a number of unconventional ones, existing scanners are looking for a certain density, one at which the normal terrorist explosives (stolen military stuff) work the best. 'Nuff said. And yes, I've informed the DHS about this.
Wow. I'd seen another attempt at this kind of thing in the past. It used a constant blower and a butterfly valve. When the valve was in "neutral" air just recirculated between the blower's input and output, but shifting the valve to either side caused air to move in and out of two other pipes, the far ends of which were to be spaced out on either side of a stadium stage. Same physics, more or less. I might try to make one of these...
You're just dead wrong on this. See www.coultersmithing.com (my site) for some pics of a system that has been running for two decades already (it was mounted on posts before the building in the picture was built), has paid for itself over and over by any measure, and has never had a failed panel. Even the one stripped off the roof by the wind still works. I have another system on another house that's even older. It had 4 panels fail, 20 years out, and the company, Solarex, paid for shipping them back and replaced them for free. They knew they had made a bad batch, and observed the 25 year warranty at any rate. Yes, the systems are expensive. So is grid power, even paying only their bill, not the hidden costs. Wind doesn't work here, as it's not very windy, and there is an important threshold at about 7mph below which no turbine works (wind power is proportional to the 3rd power of wind speed). And they attract lighting really well...
Polycrystaline panels do pretty well in diffuse light, as we often have in winter. No AC loads then, and the freezer is in an unheated space, so the demand actually goes down just fine, thanks. Best time of year is spring, when the hours get long before things heat up and drive freezer and AC drains, worst is in fall as it's still warm, but the hours are getting shorter.
The above commenter obviously hasn't actually tried this. Or is like the power company employees who used to take down my adverts for solar systems.
It'd be nice if this were true, but sadly it's not. First, the EU can't just go arrest Bill Gates or anyone else not a citizen in the EU. Even if MS refuses to pay the fine, the court's options are quite limited. Can they really mandate that everyone in the EU wipe all MS products off their machines and change over right now? Can they prevent people from continuing to (stupidly) buy MS products -- no. There'll always be a black market in things a lot of people want even if the government makes them illegal. Look at guns in the EU (In England, only criminals have guns now, and gun violence has been on the rise ever since), cocaine/crack/meth here in the US, or any other widespread prohibition. Criminalizing anything just makes more criminals, it's naive to think it actually stops much of anything. Show me even a single historical example that applies. In the DOJ action, MS more or less said "we'll see just who is the government here" and we know how that turned out, don't we?
Because they put the nice cold fuel in there already, right? Now, in the humidity, all that water can condense and freeze, making any foam that falls off much more of a weapon to the rest of the craft. They shouldn't fuel until they know they're gonna go for sure. I'm sure there's some reason they think they can or must do it this way, but since I don't know it, I'll assume I'm as good an engineer as any other.
To tell the truth, most of the trampling became public AFTER there was a chance to vote these buggers out -- and many of us who voted them in would certainly have done so had we known more. Sadly, our system doesn't give us the ability to vote in enough detail on the issues -- it's one unacceptable complex package/agenda or another, it seems. It's a racket that lets the government have its way no matter what the citizens want. I agree that the 2nd ammendment is "the most important" only in theory. In actuality, the people are such sheep that it doesn't matter if they are armed or not, or we'd have already tossed this totalitarian crowd out. And to think I voted for them because the Dems were saying things that indicated a federal power grab, and the Repubs weren't at the time. The second ammendment is already junk anyway. When written it meant citizens could have anything the government did.
Anybody out there have a privately owned A-10 for (a small) example, or think that their little wacko militia in a barbed wire compound is anything but a trivial target for same?
I am a card carrying NRA member and gunsmith, by the way, and reload my own target shooting ammo to the tune of several thousand rounds a year. Having done lots of gun work, I'll never want this sort of reliability-reducing addition to one, even if I could reload for it. I don't shoot living things, just paper, which is a good enemy for a geek to have. Sure, I could defend myself if required, but hope fervently never to have to.
Re:Dapper is good, but it's not there yet./codecs
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Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
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They cannot provide the codecs. The reason Microsoft can is that they do pay licensing fees for them (a pittance, due to volume, so it doesn't affect the 96% profit margin too much). This is made clear in many of the howtos etc -- you might be breaking the laws in your country when you get the codecs and use them. Some enterprising person might find a way to sell you a legal package fairly cheap, but for now, that part comes from fly-by-night sources that tend to appear and disappear from the web, to pop up under another name and isp later on. Sad, but true.
Seems you can't do chemistry anymore. We were the target of "profiling" and had a large team of machine (and other) gun toting guys come and bash the place up. After all, I have money (I run a successful consulting firm from here), am skinny and wired (genetics) and have a chemistry lashup -- must be making Meth, right?
Luckily they made so many mistakes that the little weed they did find here was sort of forgotten about -- only cost me a few grand in legal fees to make them see how stupid they'd look on TV, which is evidently where they "learned" their trade.
www.coultersmithing.com
I'll have the story up there later on. We've become friends with our new masters...DHS has lots of money and sometimes needs consulting help. We ARE on the same side of the street most times. Even BATFE didn't mind our experiments with small amounts of HE once they found out we were OK -- we had the opposite of the Ruby Ridge experience with them. When DEA didn't find the meth lab they expected, we ASKED for the BATFE to make sure we were not doing anything they'd be worried about, and indeed they came a couple of days later for a pleasant chat. It was DEA with the jackboots.
The whole time the local cops were shaking their heads -- small town and they knew us already as good guys.
I agree fully. As a conservative, I am sick of being identified with the republocrat party -- either branch. What's wrong with "look before you leap" or "a deal's a deal", or, "the law is the law" and is there as much to protect people from the government as each other? Well the government is people too, but they're allowed to shoot you, take you to gitmo (not under law, but who's stopping them?), profile you and so on. I DID vote republican, as the dems were saying "we know what's best for you" and that gave me pause -- which *you* were they talking about? Wall street stockbroker, the homeless bum he walks by every day, an honest programmer like myself, a logger in the woods, who? Centralization of power and information seems to tempt to corruption too easily for my tastes.
Yes, NDA's can be a problem. Typically, the most performance is wrung from a video display chipset via a number of tecniques, some of which are patentable, some of which are merely trade secrets (see sources like www.groklaw.net to discern what I'm talking about around IP and how the current laws stink). Some of these are on-chip, some are in the driver, and this varies by manufacturer. If one could combine, say, Nvidia's chips with ATI's trade secret rendering tricks (or vice versa), one might have something better than either...And they will both fight to the death to keep some little marketing advantadge in these areas. Seeing the driver code in human readable form would instantly inform one (at least me) which was where, and allow things like this. Althought a good gpu has passed the general purpose X86 in pure mips, there are still conditions where the smarts need to be in the driver for best results, for example, in the case of (always) limited throughput to the chip, or heavy conditional stuff where the X86 shines but the vector processor does not.
Why would any company give this sort of thing away? Trade secrets are "fair game" once revealed -- so one company might benefit by having its chip and the other's nifty driver tricks, whilst the one that had the nice driver gets nada out of it. Yes, it stinks. But there it is.
Why would any manufacturer give this kind of thing away? They have what they have in chip form (some patentable, some not, but fairly well protected practically speaking) and other things that are best done in the host cpu given the total systems design, most of which are fair game once revealed. It stinks, but there it is.
I run an embedded software writing firm, and have had the good fortune to work with several Russians and others from that general part of the world. One said he'd do the first job free so I could see how good he was, and did something that would have taken my guys maybe a couple weeks in only a couple of days. Since this was both gui and presets related for a ton of little things that all had different gui and preset requirements and all the gui modifications were in good taste and true to the original style, I was VERY impressed. Know what? I went ahead and sent him a good chunk of change. Go Vladimir R!
Check out www.groklaw.net, which has been covering this and the M$ fud about it, as well as the SCO stuff. Basically, ODF is an open standard produced by a consortium of companies and released for public use with no patents, license fees or other encumberances. M$ could add support for it in a heartbeat (though it may not support all their bu...features) but is refusing to do so as that would place them in competition with the various other office suites that do support it -- and they might not win that one. After all, several of the suites that do support it are free as in free beer, as well as in free speech. M$ is responding that we should use their "open" (but not really) new xml format that they don't even support yet, and which has various legal problems for implementors. Peter Quinn, the CIO who used to have the job, quit because of an M$ funded witchhunt that got him a lot of bad publicity and negative attention. Of course, he was later found to be guiltless, but that little retraction only made it to page four, rather than page one where the accusations were made...
See groklaw for more detail.
Here at my place (Floyd, VA, USA), I run 2 small businesses (embedded programming and machine shop) and two homes completely off the grid, except for the occasional use of some gasoline for a backup generator -- for some reason my employees expect to come to work and get paid even in dark weather, else I'd never need the gasoline. It is cost effective, but you have to put the money out up front, which is painful in most people's financial models. There are two solar systems here which serve to back one another up. The systems are not zero maintenance, if you are your own power company, you do have a job to do now and then, if only to scrape the snow off the panels. I probably have on the order of $20k invested in panels, batteries, inverters and so forth over both systems. One of the systems has paid for itself by ANY measure and is still working fine over 20 years after installing it. The other is only 8 years old, still using the original lead acid batteries (I use some special engineering tricks to make them last longer) and has probably paid for itself, but I don't count anymore.
One overlooked fact about being off the grid, especially if you start with raw land and build yourself in some rural place, is the tax and building code situation. Essentially, the power company has been empowered (perhaps the name power company has more than one meaning?) by the state to enforce the codes. No power company, no building permit required, and all your buildings, no matter how nice, are taxed as barns or sheds. This alone makes solar power competitive and the payback time is VERY short when considering this factor. The 1k square foot building I'm in right now has 16 120 watt Solarex polycrystaline panels on top, cost about $20k to build, add about $12-15k for the solar system, and it contains about another $20k of chinese machine tools and electroplating gear. I pay tax on $2k for it. Work it out -- were this listed as a residence I'd be paying taxes on over $100k instead -- something over 3 grand a year.
Anybody who wants to go to solar can do so now, period -- I started 25 years ago and its worked the whole time, more reliable than the power company by far. It works pretty well, but does require some lifestyle changes for a reasonable cost system to work well. If it's a dark day, you might not decide to arc weld all day that day, for example, and you might use gas to cook with instead of the microwave when the weather's bad. Same with any other power hogs -- you use them when the sun is out and the batteries already charged -- in that case you're in a use it or lose it situation anyway. We even have air conditioning here that we can use some days. Of course, we use efficient lighting, the smallest most efficient freezer there is and so on, so those might be considered added costs.
I have two solar powered businesses here (a computer consultancy, and a machine/plating shop), and two homes which run off the same systems. Square feet definitely matter, as I am nearly out of useful roof space now. The 1000 sq foot building that has the machine tools is covered, and could use twice what I have now (although with a 2kw array, it could also be worse - 8-10 kWh a day ain't bad). I've got room for one more rack of 4 panels (about 500w more in full sun). A 500 sq foot building has its roof completely covered as well, and usually I have to pump power from the larger system over there to back it up when things aren't ideal. Any well designed solar system has the problem of, well, February...The Solarex polycrystalline panels I have on both places (2 of the four buildings that aren't always in shade) do the best in "non full sun" or gray days of all the types and brands I've tried, and this MATTERS in real life, bigtime. Getting half or even a quarter of the full sun output is far better than nothing, for example, and there are times when one either lives on this or burns petroleum in a generator, which is very expensive. But employees expect to work and get paid no matter the weather, so one copes. Remember that lead acid batteries have lousy efficiency, down to 40%, so the generator or panels lose a lot there if you're not using the energy as it comes in. There is simply not enough room on the average building around here (SW VA) to handle the bad weather months. This is a system that can run air conditioning and BIG multi HP power tools on good days...and barely limps by on nightlights if we have a week of near darkness, which happens often enough.
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This even in cases where the research as government funded and done say, in 1935 -- author long dead, unknown copyright status and so on, but the society or publisher feels entitled to get this fee. I'd go bankrupt in no time buying lots of articles that I can't tell contain the information I need from the abstract. This is ridiculous, does not advance science (as many of these societies and publishers state in their mottos) and is surely a major profit center for someone. I cannot afford to subscribe to all these journals and so on, I need some money left over for equipment! I suppose larger outfits do subscribe for the benefit of their employees, but this is yet another case of big vs small with small getting the shaft. Have fun at http://www.coultersmithing.com/
Having said that, and having maintained a network of about 10 machines for the last decade or so (we write software here), we find that plain old time is about as good an indicator of failure as there is, along with the odd bad batch. In other words, computers infrequently powered up still had about the same disk lifetimes on a calendar given a certain brand and lot. We start getting nervous at a few years out. By then, most times the mobo has been upgraded etc anyway, so it's no big deal to put in a new drive while at it. As computers are how we eat, we feel the hardware costs of ensuring reliable ones is trivial compared to missing a few big paychecks.
We got bitten by the IBM deskstars, and it's the only time we'd ever lost any actual data, about a day's work. We were using machines to cross backup one another and in a spell of hot weather these things dropped like flies, faster than we thought we had to recover them, oops. That was surely a mess. We also have a ton of Seagate 2gb drives from when that was big, and none have failed, ever! They are rarely used now of course.
For some reason, we have some brand loyalty now, and always get drives a little down from the peak available, the ones that have been around longer and have a little more margin in the technology than the biggest/fastest ones around. This seems to be working out. Cross backups machine-machine on our network works pretty well if you do it enough! Of course it is much easier to backup and restore a linux box...as the disk organization is far cleaner -- no need or point in backing up most of the drive, just the user-changed parts. For windows boxen we image a drive and keep it in the machine, but unplugged. This saves a re-install of the system and all those apps, but you have to remember to do it often enough.
They know cheap oil is going away...no matter what they say, look at what they are doing, follow the money.
I've been off the grid entirely since 1982, and solar works fine, thanks. This BS of "we need billions more in research" is to keep people from just going with what there is, which works. I don't care how many billions are spent, there is never going to be a magic box you clip to the antenna of your Toyota that makes it burn freely available (hah!) hydrogen, but most people seem to vaguely hold this thought again, as an excuse to not invest in what works already, which of course would make it work better.
I don't want other people's money, as I don't want to take the responsibility of them expecting a payback if it doesn't work out, and I don't want to waste time I could spend doing science on blabbing with a zillion potential givers...Most of the people who do that are fakes anyway and very much do not deserve your bucks.
This stuff doesn't cost all that much if you're an acomplished scrounger, I have virtually all I need now from a life of knowing what to pull out of the dumpster etc. There are only a couple of things I can't simply make in the shop I built to support the project. It's just not that bad unless done the old inefficient government lab way.
I have personally operated one of the devices he mentions, a Farnsworth fusor, at a friend's house in Richmond VA. They're not hard to make at all, this friend made it himself, and they don't cost much. He was on rev 3 completely self funded, and getting quite high neutron outputs using deuterium. I saw the neutron counter count, and the fusion itself through a window. We didn't run it long, as we didn't want to make the whole lab radioactive, and as Bussard says, the grid melts. The friend (who may not want his name out there) normally observes via cheap CC tv. Now I have no way to judge if this Bussard guy is rational. His idea sounds fairly good, but I did notice the arm-waving at certain critical points in the presentation (we don't have time...to tell you how this actually works...with math). Question is, does it matter? Do you have to be rational to be onto something good? Where did that scaling of seventh power come from, thin air? Can't answer without making one and trying it, which would in truth cost very little. I DO have the physics background and training to understand this, being something of an old guy myself. It could work, the devil, as always, is in the details which that video didn't provide (perhaps on purpose, there's a telling instruction at the beginning to not ask "classified" questions during the Q&A period). One thing he is for sure dead right about is the problems with trying to do fusion with Maxwellian distributions -- random thermal motions. That'll only fly with gravity confinement and very large mass (eg, the sun). On earth, magnetic confinement of plasma is about the hardest thing to do there is, and the whole time the pesky electrons are giving off photons, wasting your input energy. And if you have too much density of any particular charge, say just positive nuclei, they won't come together. So tokamaks are expensive boondoggles that may indeed do good science sometimes, but as he said, most of the advances in plasma confinement there turned out to be purely empirical lucky guesses, not truly science. I laughed when he talked about the problems of computational modeling in front of programmers with access to what has to be the largest computer network on the planet, along with some of the smartest programmers. Deliberate challenge? The Farnsworth principle is clever, but is not the only non-maxwellian way there is. Consider a crystal of for example B11 oxide (or whatever) that you fire protons at. You only bother to accelerate ones that are going to hit a nuclei to fairly high degree of confidence. By firing single protons, you can find several nuclei, and once you know where three are in a crystal, you know where they all are. Due to having a crystal out there as a target, this defines a "grid" of locations you want to hit, and much more area where shooting protons in there is just a waste. One could focus an image of another Farnsworth invention (I think) eg the shadow mask used in color CRT's or it's moral equivalent. The holes would be a lot smaller and farther apart, that's all. Using the same type of charged particle optics that were used in electron microscopes, only backwards, the image could be reduced to atomic dimensions. This solves all the problems of loss by radiation, confining a plasma, maxwellian waste and so forth. The only trouble is that it cannot scale large, like the power companies want. Once you shoot the crystal, it's hot now, and the atoms are jiggling around too much to reliably hit again. You'd have to have something like a monomolecular layer of crystal on something like cassette tape and step and repeat. Doing the math on this gives you an upper limit of 10 or 20 kw per unit -- you can only move the "tape" so fast, and find out how the crystal is aligned this time so fast. You can't use a huge crystal because of random thermal motions at any practical temperature, so knowing where some of the nuclei are doesn't really tell you with enough precision where all of them are. I am building the above apparatus, and some of th
All this debunking of solar power is kind of depressing to me, who has been living with it for several decades.
It's all bull, propagated by competing power companies.
Yes, it takes energy to make panels. On my system I can ARC WELD ALL DAY LONG, which is more energy than it
took to make them most likely, in one day. Yes, it takes nasty chemicals to make them (just like any semiconductor), but they
are expensive too, and very unlikely to be wasted or to get back into the enviornment.
Most of the energy and "chemicals" used to make panels are for the GLASS and for the ALUMINUM frame.
As a society, we use these things in buildings anyway, so what's the big deal here?
I don't know the mtbf of solar panels. In 26+ years with them the only failures were from an admitted bad batch, which
Solarex replaced free, no questions asked, 20 years after I bought them. The rest are like new, still put out full power
and I can't tell the ones I bought 5 years ago from the ones I bought 26 years ago except by minor connection details
and serial numbers. See www.coultersmithing.com for some pix of one of my systems. This stuff works, it's a great deal,
and as a result of being off the grid, my property taxes are highly reduced, which paid for the system in only a few
years all by itself.
I know some guys making really big rockets, and they are using ammonium nitrate and aluminum with a binder, mixed in a blender. Doubt this would ever detonate by accident, AN takes a really big hit (more than a blasting cap) to go in this combination. It might be getting harder to get, though.
Yes, the background check is a pain (and in some cases I think you pay for it) but that requirement for a "magazine" is pretty stiff. It can't be in your house anyway, no worries there about being searched (the background check is worse anyway sometimes), but in a non-rural setting you're going to have a hard time finding a place "far enough away from people" to put one, and that is a requirement. I do some of this stuff here, in fairly small quantities, and had occaision to talk to the local BATFE guys about it. When they saw what I was doing they had no problem with it, is all I can say. Doesn't matter what the laws are if the cops are alright. Of course, you'd better have a nice big place to shoot nice big rockets anyway.
Heck, it's legal to have quite a quantity of smokeless powder for reloading, and that is darn powerful stuff, and can be detonated at least in small quantities. This is just one of those silly things about ignorant lawmakers (some of whom are unelected) trying to CoverTheirAxx.
I was a windows programmer for many years at all levels from drivers to end user apps. There are so many designed-in "features" that are actually security problems it isn't funny. Some of them actually are features, don't get me wrong, but they also open doors that shouldn't be opened. Just in windows messages alone...any app can broadcast any message to all top level windows (which are there for every app whether they show or not) such as, for example ALT+F4. WM_CopyData, which is what all OLE and Com are based on is totally a disaster from a security standpoint, and crosses most permission borders if the programmer is moderately slick. Paul DiLascia had a nice article in MSDN about how to use that message for cross-app and cross-permision tricks for debugging...easy to crash the system too by overflowing the declared buffer... I could go on of course. Unsigned drivers, which are nice for hackers doing their own hardware (includes me), are also a lot of what made the win9x series so flakey. It was just harder enough to do the NT class stuff that fewer losers were able to get anything installed, much less malware. But the creeping featurism is the disease. They just couldn't (wouldn't) think that there'd be a problem with adding say, scripting to a word processor or being able to embed com controls, music and other pointless junk in a word document. I think that whole class of stuff is just to way stupid for words. Sure there might be a case in 100,000 where it'd be nice to be able to add some script processing to a document (it has errors or came in a messed up format) but in that case I'd just save as text and write a standalone script (probably perl) to do whatever, then go back to "pretty format" if needed. I'm a published author (computer mags and books) and have never needed 1/10 of the junk in word, and in fact the publishers tell you not to use it as it messes up their layout stuff, which is usually on a Mac anyway. You have to know the API for this new junk was already there -- they are just documenting it now. As it is so easy to run some variation of softice or a VM and find all the opsys calls, security by obscurity wouldn't have worked anyway. Heck, the full MSDN subscripton used to come with symbols for the system DLLs anyway, effectively giving you the source code. I always laughed when someone "leaked the crown jewels" because they already gave them to any developer with the wit to install the stuff in devstudio! Along with dox on the supposedly secret "ole storage" that is the word document format.
Yes, they are, and they are looking at a very short term for how long most of them will be viable. I didn't see anyone wanting to invest in my 250 mpg car, for example, there's one with legs. You can see it at www.coultersmithing.com/kart.html. (don't all visit at once, I don't think my site will withstand a slashdotting, so I didn't make the link clickable) This is real, it works, and is "too much fun" to drive. Don't really need money per se, but need to set up manuf and dealerships. I'm already getting orders from local people who have driven the thing.
My product development company has used javascript for various things, like little boxes that are on your LAN that have too little smarts to really do it all, so push some work to the client. In this case, there's no possibility of a hack or exploit (memory not writable), and why would anyone want to break their own medical gear, for example? BUT -- client based validation is utterly stupid from any security standpoint. That's harsh, but still very true. Please post us some url's where you do this for ecommmerce so we can all order negative numbers of things and get our cards credited. It's so easy to capture source, edit, rerun and post back to a site that depends on this it is far from funny and is the subject of some older books on security (older because just about everyone knows this by now and it's not a relevant topic anymore). D'oh!
I'm also one such. We've been darned lucky, it seems, as we've not had this sort of problem, or not much. Our longest running customer for whom we developed quite a number of products allowed us to train and affect hiring practice, in effect making us unnecessary, but still desirable == we still get calls for fiddly maintenance jobs to customize this or that for some big customer of his. Having written the code in question, we can just do it cleaner and faster than his guys, even with the training. Other customers (and some of the names would surprise you) just took the design and said "thanks, see ya" and that was that -- they needed no more. Maybe our worst customer (a nice people, however) had a government grant to develop something he had no clue about, so hired us. We thought the thing was a good thing, so we took the job. It was a visio tactile aid for deaf infants. But the customer gave us NO feedback, it seemed everything we did was perfect (even though we knew better). It might sound heavenly to get nothing but unspecific praise, but we wanted more help on specs than we got. He was just burning the grant money and taking a cut, so the more he spent on us, the bigger his cut was. When the grant ran out, he of course dumped us, not saving enough to put this nice thing into anyone's actual hands though we built circa 30 prototypes for him. BTW my consulting firm never does fixed price or contract work, period. If you can't trust the guy, what good is a contract? No fixed price job is ever bid accurately, so someone is getting ripped, and we don't want the karma from that either way. And there ARE legitimate spec changes once a project becomes better understood. That long running customer had all his engineers in complete fear, as he would let them almost finish a job, then come in and stir the pot, forcing a redesign. Dumb like a fox, this guy, as we all know Rev2 of anything is the first good one. We only work directly for CEOs and owners, maybe down the line some chief of engineering handles the day to day communications and spec writing. That way there's no doubt when it comes to check writing and so on, no BS, or what the real vision for a product was. We've also gotten praise for showing someone a product they had in mind was a waste of time, and getting it cancelled. There's always something else to do, so this is no biggie. Often the worker bees at the place are afraid to do things like this, but we get to point out stupid stuff without getting fired. Saving a customer a few million dollars on something bound to fail is considered a favor by anyone we'd want to work with anyway.
Nitroglycerin is a liquid explosive, and nearly the most powerful one there is in terms of KJ/gram of it. The plastiques are more "brisant" which means a faster risetime of the shockwave, better at breaking rocks without tamping and so forth, but only about half the calorie output. To knock out a plane, simple overpressure would seem enough, since you're in a containment vessel, no special need for brisance. In this case, it seems the plotters were planning to use acetone peroxide, an easy to make, brisant (if you don't mind a lot of risk) explosive made from liquids, but which is actually a solid in use. It's less powerful than nitro, more sensitive, and the teeny bombers who inhabit the explosives boards often lose body parts trying to make it. One normally does this at the lowest possible temperatures to prevent premature detonation during manufacture. Maybe at room temperature it just goes off, maybe even before the synthesis is complete. I don't plan to try it here. Not averse to some danger, but gheesh. I know of a *careful* person who got hurt trying it the "right way". On the AP front, one of the components is acetone, which I'd think even a brain dead security person would whiff easily. You'd pass out quick if you drank any amount, and stink. High strength peroxide would release O2 really fast if ingested, and make quite a show. So they're not totally full of it on the drink it test. Interestingly, the "scanners" used to detect explosives won't see quite a number of unconventional ones, existing scanners are looking for a certain density, one at which the normal terrorist explosives (stolen military stuff) work the best. 'Nuff said. And yes, I've informed the DHS about this.
Wow. I'd seen another attempt at this kind of thing in the past. It used a constant blower and a butterfly valve. When the valve was in "neutral" air just recirculated between the blower's input and output, but shifting the valve to either side caused air to move in and out of two other pipes, the far ends of which were to be spaced out on either side of a stadium stage. Same physics, more or less. I might try to make one of these...
You're just dead wrong on this. See www.coultersmithing.com (my site) for some pics of a system that has been running for two decades already (it was mounted on posts before the building in the picture was built), has paid for itself over and over by any measure, and has never had a failed panel. Even the one stripped off the roof by the wind still works. I have another system on another house that's even older. It had 4 panels fail, 20 years out, and the company, Solarex, paid for shipping them back and replaced them for free. They knew they had made a bad batch, and observed the 25 year warranty at any rate. Yes, the systems are expensive. So is grid power, even paying only their bill, not the hidden costs. Wind doesn't work here, as it's not very windy, and there is an important threshold at about 7mph below which no turbine works (wind power is proportional to the 3rd power of wind speed). And they attract lighting really well... Polycrystaline panels do pretty well in diffuse light, as we often have in winter. No AC loads then, and the freezer is in an unheated space, so the demand actually goes down just fine, thanks. Best time of year is spring, when the hours get long before things heat up and drive freezer and AC drains, worst is in fall as it's still warm, but the hours are getting shorter. The above commenter obviously hasn't actually tried this. Or is like the power company employees who used to take down my adverts for solar systems.
It'd be nice if this were true, but sadly it's not. First, the EU can't just go arrest Bill Gates or anyone else not a citizen in the EU. Even if MS refuses to pay the fine, the court's options are quite limited. Can they really mandate that everyone in the EU wipe all MS products off their machines and change over right now? Can they prevent people from continuing to (stupidly) buy MS products -- no. There'll always be a black market in things a lot of people want even if the government makes them illegal. Look at guns in the EU (In England, only criminals have guns now, and gun violence has been on the rise ever since), cocaine/crack/meth here in the US, or any other widespread prohibition. Criminalizing anything just makes more criminals, it's naive to think it actually stops much of anything. Show me even a single historical example that applies. In the DOJ action, MS more or less said "we'll see just who is the government here" and we know how that turned out, don't we?
Because they put the nice cold fuel in there already, right? Now, in the humidity, all that water can condense and freeze, making any foam that falls off much more of a weapon to the rest of the craft. They shouldn't fuel until they know they're gonna go for sure. I'm sure there's some reason they think they can or must do it this way, but since I don't know it, I'll assume I'm as good an engineer as any other.
To tell the truth, most of the trampling became public AFTER there was a chance to vote these buggers out -- and many of us who voted them in would certainly have done so had we known more. Sadly, our system doesn't give us the ability to vote in enough detail on the issues -- it's one unacceptable complex package/agenda or another, it seems. It's a racket that lets the government have its way no matter what the citizens want. I agree that the 2nd ammendment is "the most important" only in theory. In actuality, the people are such sheep that it doesn't matter if they are armed or not, or we'd have already tossed this totalitarian crowd out. And to think I voted for them because the Dems were saying things that indicated a federal power grab, and the Repubs weren't at the time. The second ammendment is already junk anyway. When written it meant citizens could have anything the government did. Anybody out there have a privately owned A-10 for (a small) example, or think that their little wacko militia in a barbed wire compound is anything but a trivial target for same? I am a card carrying NRA member and gunsmith, by the way, and reload my own target shooting ammo to the tune of several thousand rounds a year. Having done lots of gun work, I'll never want this sort of reliability-reducing addition to one, even if I could reload for it. I don't shoot living things, just paper, which is a good enemy for a geek to have. Sure, I could defend myself if required, but hope fervently never to have to.
They cannot provide the codecs. The reason Microsoft can is that they do pay licensing fees for them (a pittance, due to volume, so it doesn't affect the 96% profit margin too much). This is made clear in many of the howtos etc -- you might be breaking the laws in your country when you get the codecs and use them. Some enterprising person might find a way to sell you a legal package fairly cheap, but for now, that part comes from fly-by-night sources that tend to appear and disappear from the web, to pop up under another name and isp later on. Sad, but true.
Seems you can't do chemistry anymore. We were the target of "profiling" and had a large team of machine (and other) gun toting guys come and bash the place up. After all, I have money (I run a successful consulting firm from here), am skinny and wired (genetics) and have a chemistry lashup -- must be making Meth, right? Luckily they made so many mistakes that the little weed they did find here was sort of forgotten about -- only cost me a few grand in legal fees to make them see how stupid they'd look on TV, which is evidently where they "learned" their trade. www.coultersmithing.com I'll have the story up there later on. We've become friends with our new masters...DHS has lots of money and sometimes needs consulting help. We ARE on the same side of the street most times. Even BATFE didn't mind our experiments with small amounts of HE once they found out we were OK -- we had the opposite of the Ruby Ridge experience with them. When DEA didn't find the meth lab they expected, we ASKED for the BATFE to make sure we were not doing anything they'd be worried about, and indeed they came a couple of days later for a pleasant chat. It was DEA with the jackboots. The whole time the local cops were shaking their heads -- small town and they knew us already as good guys.
I agree fully. As a conservative, I am sick of being identified with the republocrat party -- either branch. What's wrong with "look before you leap" or "a deal's a deal", or, "the law is the law" and is there as much to protect people from the government as each other? Well the government is people too, but they're allowed to shoot you, take you to gitmo (not under law, but who's stopping them?), profile you and so on. I DID vote republican, as the dems were saying "we know what's best for you" and that gave me pause -- which *you* were they talking about? Wall street stockbroker, the homeless bum he walks by every day, an honest programmer like myself, a logger in the woods, who? Centralization of power and information seems to tempt to corruption too easily for my tastes.
Yes, NDA's can be a problem. Typically, the most performance is wrung from a video display chipset via a number of tecniques, some of which are patentable, some of which are merely trade secrets (see sources like www.groklaw.net to discern what I'm talking about around IP and how the current laws stink). Some of these are on-chip, some are in the driver, and this varies by manufacturer. If one could combine, say, Nvidia's chips with ATI's trade secret rendering tricks (or vice versa), one might have something better than either...And they will both fight to the death to keep some little marketing advantadge in these areas. Seeing the driver code in human readable form would instantly inform one (at least me) which was where, and allow things like this. Althought a good gpu has passed the general purpose X86 in pure mips, there are still conditions where the smarts need to be in the driver for best results, for example, in the case of (always) limited throughput to the chip, or heavy conditional stuff where the X86 shines but the vector processor does not. Why would any company give this sort of thing away? Trade secrets are "fair game" once revealed -- so one company might benefit by having its chip and the other's nifty driver tricks, whilst the one that had the nice driver gets nada out of it. Yes, it stinks. But there it is. Why would any manufacturer give this kind of thing away? They have what they have in chip form (some patentable, some not, but fairly well protected practically speaking) and other things that are best done in the host cpu given the total systems design, most of which are fair game once revealed. It stinks, but there it is.
I run an embedded software writing firm, and have had the good fortune to work with several Russians and others from that general part of the world. One said he'd do the first job free so I could see how good he was, and did something that would have taken my guys maybe a couple weeks in only a couple of days. Since this was both gui and presets related for a ton of little things that all had different gui and preset requirements and all the gui modifications were in good taste and true to the original style, I was VERY impressed. Know what? I went ahead and sent him a good chunk of change. Go Vladimir R!
Check out www.groklaw.net, which has been covering this and the M$ fud about it, as well as the SCO stuff. Basically, ODF is an open standard produced by a consortium of companies and released for public use with no patents, license fees or other encumberances. M$ could add support for it in a heartbeat (though it may not support all their bu...features) but is refusing to do so as that would place them in competition with the various other office suites that do support it -- and they might not win that one. After all, several of the suites that do support it are free as in free beer, as well as in free speech. M$ is responding that we should use their "open" (but not really) new xml format that they don't even support yet, and which has various legal problems for implementors. Peter Quinn, the CIO who used to have the job, quit because of an M$ funded witchhunt that got him a lot of bad publicity and negative attention. Of course, he was later found to be guiltless, but that little retraction only made it to page four, rather than page one where the accusations were made... See groklaw for more detail.
Here at my place (Floyd, VA, USA), I run 2 small businesses (embedded programming and machine shop) and two homes completely off the grid, except for the occasional use of some gasoline for a backup generator -- for some reason my employees expect to come to work and get paid even in dark weather, else I'd never need the gasoline. It is cost effective, but you have to put the money out up front, which is painful in most people's financial models. There are two solar systems here which serve to back one another up. The systems are not zero maintenance, if you are your own power company, you do have a job to do now and then, if only to scrape the snow off the panels. I probably have on the order of $20k invested in panels, batteries, inverters and so forth over both systems. One of the systems has paid for itself by ANY measure and is still working fine over 20 years after installing it. The other is only 8 years old, still using the original lead acid batteries (I use some special engineering tricks to make them last longer) and has probably paid for itself, but I don't count anymore. One overlooked fact about being off the grid, especially if you start with raw land and build yourself in some rural place, is the tax and building code situation. Essentially, the power company has been empowered (perhaps the name power company has more than one meaning?) by the state to enforce the codes. No power company, no building permit required, and all your buildings, no matter how nice, are taxed as barns or sheds. This alone makes solar power competitive and the payback time is VERY short when considering this factor. The 1k square foot building I'm in right now has 16 120 watt Solarex polycrystaline panels on top, cost about $20k to build, add about $12-15k for the solar system, and it contains about another $20k of chinese machine tools and electroplating gear. I pay tax on $2k for it. Work it out -- were this listed as a residence I'd be paying taxes on over $100k instead -- something over 3 grand a year. Anybody who wants to go to solar can do so now, period -- I started 25 years ago and its worked the whole time, more reliable than the power company by far. It works pretty well, but does require some lifestyle changes for a reasonable cost system to work well. If it's a dark day, you might not decide to arc weld all day that day, for example, and you might use gas to cook with instead of the microwave when the weather's bad. Same with any other power hogs -- you use them when the sun is out and the batteries already charged -- in that case you're in a use it or lose it situation anyway. We even have air conditioning here that we can use some days. Of course, we use efficient lighting, the smallest most efficient freezer there is and so on, so those might be considered added costs.
I have two solar powered businesses here (a computer consultancy, and a machine/plating shop), and two homes which run off the same systems. Square feet definitely matter, as I am nearly out of useful roof space now. The 1000 sq foot building that has the machine tools is covered, and could use twice what I have now (although with a 2kw array, it could also be worse - 8-10 kWh a day ain't bad). I've got room for one more rack of 4 panels (about 500w more in full sun). A 500 sq foot building has its roof completely covered as well, and usually I have to pump power from the larger system over there to back it up when things aren't ideal. Any well designed solar system has the problem of, well, February...The Solarex polycrystalline panels I have on both places (2 of the four buildings that aren't always in shade) do the best in "non full sun" or gray days of all the types and brands I've tried, and this MATTERS in real life, bigtime. Getting half or even a quarter of the full sun output is far better than nothing, for example, and there are times when one either lives on this or burns petroleum in a generator, which is very expensive. But employees expect to work and get paid no matter the weather, so one copes. Remember that lead acid batteries have lousy efficiency, down to 40%, so the generator or panels lose a lot there if you're not using the energy as it comes in. There is simply not enough room on the average building around here (SW VA) to handle the bad weather months. This is a system that can run air conditioning and BIG multi HP power tools on good days...and barely limps by on nightlights if we have a week of near darkness, which happens often enough.