The machine costs $330K, and doesn't print sturdy electrical conductors - it will be awhile before something like this will beat the $5 washing machine part ordered from Amazon.
Color gamut coverage is harder with pigments than glowing emitters - at least if the paint matching pigment carousel at the hardware store is anything to go by.
No dust storms on Mars? or up to 24 minutes of communication lag?
Between the two, I'd call Mars a bigger challenge - not that the Moon is easy.
Personally, if I were running a program like this, I'd "land" a practice rover (or ten) somewhere like the summit of Mauna Kea and do remote operations with simulations of things like the lunar night, time lags, etc.
I applied and got an invite (at least to the point that I could see the $1500 price), I didn't get a clear read on provision of upgrades - though I've just been skimming the materials - I may have also clicked on a license acceptance that says I shall hold the specs and price in confidence.... if that's the case, I'm not leaking the $1500 price from my personal knowledge, I read it here on the message board posted by somebody else first.
I wouldn't mind the $1500 or reasons so much if the specs on the current model weren't so horrible that you know you'd have to upgrade when an upgrade comes out.
I did not see in the (/. summary) specs any listing regarding weight, comfort, or style. Not that Google Glass is great in these areas, but they can be quite important too.
What's really clever here is that they trust the automatons to make the corrections without human intervention, and the automatons haven't caused a horrible feedback loop meltdown of the system.
It's not quite rocket science, but those kinds of self-correcting systems have just as much potential to screw themselves up as they do to fix themselves.
It's all that desert, man, like, sucking the energy out of the glass fiber to feed the crystals in Taos, oh - and the sand - like, have you ever seen the white sands in New Mexico? And, then, you can go North to the mountains, where it's colder, but you can still get baked, legally.
So, yeah, like no surprise that density of the population is causing a problem with getting your data faster, ya know?
NYC, Chicago, LA, and other major metros have a long history of getting burned (literally) by utility providers. They enacted local city codes to try to stop the tragedies from repeating in their city again - maybe not always efficient or helpful to cutting edge tech, but given their histories, they're ready to let other cities "try things out" first.
They "lost it" during dot-com and starting engineer salaries spiked up roughly 100% in about a year. It's not just engineers, any profession suddenly put into short supply becomes incredibly valuable. The AMA knows this, which is why it's so arbitrarily hard to get into med school. It's why garbage strikes (airline pilots' strikes, etc.) work.
It's 23 years since I got my MSCE degree, at this point I state my salary needs and work for the first person who needs my skills and can handle the salary. We generally agree that I provide good value for the company. When times get tight, I often survive the layoffs, though there were two companies (run by recent graduates) who let me go because they could keep 3.5 fresh-hungry kids on staff for my salary - an understandable choice, though I try not to work for recent graduates anymore.
Provide value to your employer, it actually isn't that hard to demonstrate that an engineer creates millions in value over the course of a few years' project development. Engineers don't usually need to spell it out for their employers, if you're productive they'll understand it implicitly. However, (and I'm including a 60 year old CEO in this next statement) immature leaders who rush out and spend huge sums on "market development" without ever gaining any sales traction will often view the engineers who gave them the product they asked for as liability and un-needed expense. If you see that scenario developing, the smart thing to do is look for a better organization to work for - as an Engineer, I have not often felt capable to (or, more accurately: empowered to) fix sales and marketing failures.
Besides the obvious technical hurdles, I think this (little green men to do charades with) is what people are really interested in.
They certainly don't want to hear that Venus has vast oceans full of self-replicating life forms that could, if they got into the Earth's mantle, trigger a massive increase in super-volcano activity. That's just a downer and not worth funding at all. That one Russian lander that melted after a few minutes was plenty to prove that any people walking around on Venus won't be able to sit at a table and chat with us.
For all we know about Venus, it could be a soup of unfamiliar life... taking this new perspective on life and sending a scientific lander to Venus to search might be a worthwhile annual expenditure of $0.25 per capita for the next 5 years.
You should talk with a solar installer in your area if you want to find the full costs including a service contract to handle all maintenance if that's what you're looking for.
I am actually bucking the less land trend, my home is on a ~1 acre lot, but there's only about 2500 sq ft that doesn't get tree shade more than 30% of the day, and I use that for a different kind of solar power collection: gardening.
By the time you include a (real) service contract that covers all maintenance and cleaning of the panels, and I've always wondered about underlying roof-leak problems and the additional labor of repairing those... I think your (no-tax-incentive) ROI period is approaching the lifetime of the system.
I agree, by the numbers quoted by the people selling the systems, we have reached cost-parity, and with tax incentives it's like free money in the long term. If I lived in Arizona, I would have done it years ago.
As for snow in Wisconsin, those panels are hiked up at a 45 degree angle, so the snow should mostly slide off.
Nice calculations - I wonder if they account for clouds or snow - certainly they are not expecting any tree shade. 1100 sq ft of roof space, DC is 39 degrees North, so the actual size of the panel is likely 1415 sq ft.
As others have pointed out, incentives are temporary, so the system costs $68K and generates $114K worth of power in 25 years, for a ROI period of roughly 15 years. During those 15 years, what's the labor cost of keeping the panels clean, connections maintained, etc? Also, what's the efficiency degradation of the panels throughout that 25 year lifespan? You likely need more like 2000 sq. ft of panel to continue to power your lifestyle throughout the period, especially if your personal go-fer drone(s) and other future power users will charge from your home - that pushes out to $95K for system installation, giving you more power in return, but you likely won't be able to sell it for what it costs to buy (real costs of transmission & storage, not to mention administrative overhead.)
We may actually be at the economic break-even point for solar, for people who don't have tree-shade. I've always had way too many trees shading my home to even think about a serious solar system.
I telecommute, and strangely, I don't drive any less for my non-commute activities - perhaps just a little bit more to take the convertible out of the garage a few times a month...
Hope you like your pizza freeze-dried, rehydrated (possibly with oil) and microwaved on arrival, carrying all that weight is too taxing for the drone copters.
There's another trend in modern life, toward zero land ownership.
Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?
Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?
For the next 30 years, 2014 to 2044, you should know: basic health and hygiene, home maintenance and construction, cooking, gardening, maybe farming and animal husbandry if you are going to own some land.
It doesn't hurt to understand finance, a little bit about the legal / political system.
If you don't want to be held hostage every time your car breaks down, learning some mechanical skills is good too.
Oh, yeah, and these computer things - that's a good way to earn money, use your brain in the manner of the oldest profession: become whatever people are paying for, and be ready to change and adapt as the market changes. Look back to 1984, predict from that point what skills you should have learned for 2014, the next 30 years are going to be just as volatile on the tech front, but those other skills have been valuable assets for hundreds of years (70ish for the cars), and will continue to be valuable into the future.
Something I thought was pretty hilarious on our '99 Dodge Ram was the "base model" analog speedometer. In 1999, digital dash was selling for a couple hundred $$$ premium, but, in reality, the Analog dash cost more to make - the analog needle is actually driven by a digital signal on the bus, and it increments in whole mile per hour steps, so you can be doing 69.49 MPH, and when you edge up to 69.51 MPH the needle jumps from 69 to 70 - then when you slow back down to 69.49, it will jump back to 69.
Same kind of thing as "touch tone dialing" in the 1980s - it cost more to deliver rotary service to the home, but touch tone brought about $36/year in "premium" fees. Back at the phone company offices, they had to maintain special rotary to touch tone conversion hardware to support their rotary using customers.
It will be cheaper for the auto manufacturers to make one model that everybody buys, but to keep those market segments covered, they can enable / disable upsell features in software. 30 or so years from now, they'll probably grow weary of everyone thinking they're a bunch of greedy jerks and just let you enable the features for free, without having to search the internet for "banned by the DMCA" unlocking apps.
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The machine costs $330K, and doesn't print sturdy electrical conductors - it will be awhile before something like this will beat the $5 washing machine part ordered from Amazon.
Color gamut coverage is harder with pigments than glowing emitters - at least if the paint matching pigment carousel at the hardware store is anything to go by.
For $330K, they can write it however they like.
No dust storms on Mars? or up to 24 minutes of communication lag?
Between the two, I'd call Mars a bigger challenge - not that the Moon is easy.
Personally, if I were running a program like this, I'd "land" a practice rover (or ten) somewhere like the summit of Mauna Kea and do remote operations with simulations of things like the lunar night, time lags, etc.
In the realm of interplanetary probes, I'd say using RTG is just a design decision - not cheating.
I applied and got an invite (at least to the point that I could see the $1500 price), I didn't get a clear read on provision of upgrades - though I've just been skimming the materials - I may have also clicked on a license acceptance that says I shall hold the specs and price in confidence.... if that's the case, I'm not leaking the $1500 price from my personal knowledge, I read it here on the message board posted by somebody else first.
Some Universities in Florida have been doing this (sub computer language for foreign) since I was in High School, 30 years ago.
I know /. doesn't carry the newest news, but please.... just because Kentucky is considering it now?
I wouldn't mind the $1500 or reasons so much if the specs on the current model weren't so horrible that you know you'd have to upgrade when an upgrade comes out.
I did not see in the (/. summary) specs any listing regarding weight, comfort, or style. Not that Google Glass is great in these areas, but they can be quite important too.
What's really clever here is that they trust the automatons to make the corrections without human intervention, and the automatons haven't caused a horrible feedback loop meltdown of the system.
It's not quite rocket science, but those kinds of self-correcting systems have just as much potential to screw themselves up as they do to fix themselves.
It's all that desert, man, like, sucking the energy out of the glass fiber to feed the crystals in Taos, oh - and the sand - like, have you ever seen the white sands in New Mexico? And, then, you can go North to the mountains, where it's colder, but you can still get baked, legally.
So, yeah, like no surprise that density of the population is causing a problem with getting your data faster, ya know?
NYC, Chicago, LA, and other major metros have a long history of getting burned (literally) by utility providers. They enacted local city codes to try to stop the tragedies from repeating in their city again - maybe not always efficient or helpful to cutting edge tech, but given their histories, they're ready to let other cities "try things out" first.
They "lost it" during dot-com and starting engineer salaries spiked up roughly 100% in about a year. It's not just engineers, any profession suddenly put into short supply becomes incredibly valuable. The AMA knows this, which is why it's so arbitrarily hard to get into med school. It's why garbage strikes (airline pilots' strikes, etc.) work.
It's 23 years since I got my MSCE degree, at this point I state my salary needs and work for the first person who needs my skills and can handle the salary. We generally agree that I provide good value for the company. When times get tight, I often survive the layoffs, though there were two companies (run by recent graduates) who let me go because they could keep 3.5 fresh-hungry kids on staff for my salary - an understandable choice, though I try not to work for recent graduates anymore.
Provide value to your employer, it actually isn't that hard to demonstrate that an engineer creates millions in value over the course of a few years' project development. Engineers don't usually need to spell it out for their employers, if you're productive they'll understand it implicitly. However, (and I'm including a 60 year old CEO in this next statement) immature leaders who rush out and spend huge sums on "market development" without ever gaining any sales traction will often view the engineers who gave them the product they asked for as liability and un-needed expense. If you see that scenario developing, the smart thing to do is look for a better organization to work for - as an Engineer, I have not often felt capable to (or, more accurately: empowered to) fix sales and marketing failures.
Besides the obvious technical hurdles, I think this (little green men to do charades with) is what people are really interested in.
They certainly don't want to hear that Venus has vast oceans full of self-replicating life forms that could, if they got into the Earth's mantle, trigger a massive increase in super-volcano activity. That's just a downer and not worth funding at all. That one Russian lander that melted after a few minutes was plenty to prove that any people walking around on Venus won't be able to sit at a table and chat with us.
For all we know about Venus, it could be a soup of unfamiliar life... taking this new perspective on life and sending a scientific lander to Venus to search might be a worthwhile annual expenditure of $0.25 per capita for the next 5 years.
Like an advancing glacier...
Heck, just beam the power up from the ground using microwaves - what could go wrong?
You should talk with a solar installer in your area if you want to find the full costs including a service contract to handle all maintenance if that's what you're looking for.
I am actually bucking the less land trend, my home is on a ~1 acre lot, but there's only about 2500 sq ft that doesn't get tree shade more than 30% of the day, and I use that for a different kind of solar power collection: gardening.
By the time you include a (real) service contract that covers all maintenance and cleaning of the panels, and I've always wondered about underlying roof-leak problems and the additional labor of repairing those... I think your (no-tax-incentive) ROI period is approaching the lifetime of the system.
I agree, by the numbers quoted by the people selling the systems, we have reached cost-parity, and with tax incentives it's like free money in the long term. If I lived in Arizona, I would have done it years ago.
As for snow in Wisconsin, those panels are hiked up at a 45 degree angle, so the snow should mostly slide off.
Nice calculations - I wonder if they account for clouds or snow - certainly they are not expecting any tree shade. 1100 sq ft of roof space, DC is 39 degrees North, so the actual size of the panel is likely 1415 sq ft.
As others have pointed out, incentives are temporary, so the system costs $68K and generates $114K worth of power in 25 years, for a ROI period of roughly 15 years. During those 15 years, what's the labor cost of keeping the panels clean, connections maintained, etc? Also, what's the efficiency degradation of the panels throughout that 25 year lifespan? You likely need more like 2000 sq. ft of panel to continue to power your lifestyle throughout the period, especially if your personal go-fer drone(s) and other future power users will charge from your home - that pushes out to $95K for system installation, giving you more power in return, but you likely won't be able to sell it for what it costs to buy (real costs of transmission & storage, not to mention administrative overhead.)
We may actually be at the economic break-even point for solar, for people who don't have tree-shade. I've always had way too many trees shading my home to even think about a serious solar system.
I telecommute, and strangely, I don't drive any less for my non-commute activities - perhaps just a little bit more to take the convertible out of the garage a few times a month...
Hope you like your pizza freeze-dried, rehydrated (possibly with oil) and microwaved on arrival, carrying all that weight is too taxing for the drone copters.
Yep - until solar passes >50% incident power conversion and pairs with an efficient storage system, this guy is as high as a Jetson-mobile.
There's another trend in modern life, toward zero land ownership.
Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?
Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?
Only 12 Million years ago, and the Galaxy is relatively close.
I wonder how many star systems got sterilized by the blast.
For the next 30 years, 2014 to 2044, you should know: basic health and hygiene, home maintenance and construction, cooking, gardening, maybe farming and animal husbandry if you are going to own some land.
It doesn't hurt to understand finance, a little bit about the legal / political system.
If you don't want to be held hostage every time your car breaks down, learning some mechanical skills is good too.
Oh, yeah, and these computer things - that's a good way to earn money, use your brain in the manner of the oldest profession: become whatever people are paying for, and be ready to change and adapt as the market changes. Look back to 1984, predict from that point what skills you should have learned for 2014, the next 30 years are going to be just as volatile on the tech front, but those other skills have been valuable assets for hundreds of years (70ish for the cars), and will continue to be valuable into the future.
Something I thought was pretty hilarious on our '99 Dodge Ram was the "base model" analog speedometer. In 1999, digital dash was selling for a couple hundred $$$ premium, but, in reality, the Analog dash cost more to make - the analog needle is actually driven by a digital signal on the bus, and it increments in whole mile per hour steps, so you can be doing 69.49 MPH, and when you edge up to 69.51 MPH the needle jumps from 69 to 70 - then when you slow back down to 69.49, it will jump back to 69.
Same kind of thing as "touch tone dialing" in the 1980s - it cost more to deliver rotary service to the home, but touch tone brought about $36/year in "premium" fees. Back at the phone company offices, they had to maintain special rotary to touch tone conversion hardware to support their rotary using customers.
It will be cheaper for the auto manufacturers to make one model that everybody buys, but to keep those market segments covered, they can enable / disable upsell features in software. 30 or so years from now, they'll probably grow weary of everyone thinking they're a bunch of greedy jerks and just let you enable the features for free, without having to search the internet for "banned by the DMCA" unlocking apps.