The problem is not the device - there's a lot of chatter in this thread about the pros and cons of such portable devices, but the core issue is employers who have no regard for employees' personal time and who routinely break wage and hour laws.
Improper handling of "exempt" employee status is probably the most frequently screwed up HR liability in the corporate world because half of managers "heard somewhere" at one point that if you're on salary you're exempt. Wrong. The same people fabricated "flex time" which has no basis in law in the state of California (maybe in other places).
The level of ignorance in upper management with regard to employees rights is mind-numbing.
Oh! Someone above mentioned War of the Worlds. In that same vein, a few classic stories that knocked my socks off as a kid:
* Journey to the Center of the Earth - get it before the new movie comes out to compare notes!
* 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - A little heavy on science talk, but might be inspirational for your reader.
* Lord of the Flies - like whoah.
Also a couple deeper, but delightful stories I've found in the last 5-10 years:
* Mipam (journey of a Tibetan monk)
* Siddhartha (similar, less descriptive, more folk tale like)
* Bridge of Birds (a light folk tale set in China, modeled after Chinese folk tales)
* Life of Pi (survival story of an Indian boy is lost at sea after a cargo vessel sinks and he alone survives with some wild animals that were on the ship now stuck in a life raft with him)
Okay, sorry - I think I'm done now, though I'm sure there are more that will come to me:)
I second Alan Dean Foster - I loved his books in high school, though some of the material might go right over the head of a pre-teen. Alien was rather exciting, and Sentenced to Prism was really weird and imaginative.
Also Terry Brooks' whole Shannara series - that ought to take a year or two to power through. Good adventures, simple but descriptive writing style that paints vivid imagery which is nice for a Fantasy.
For super-lightweight adventure with a bit of comedy infused, Robert Asprin had some good ones like his Myth series and Piers Anthony had numerous clever and fun adventures.
There is some really great material in classic though too - how about Fahrenheit 451? It's short and sweet and would give you an idea if your young reader has any interest in those sort of futuristic dystopia stories.
Wow - my post was rife with type-o's... was in a hurry (one more vote for post edit support here on/.!). Yeah I saw that Audeo thing when it was posted here, but when I watched the video it looked like the guy was actually moving muscles in his throat and neck. The version in the story sounds more like pure thought reception well ahead of muscle signals; the Audeo thing IS a way cool step forward though!
I'm in the middle of a novel by David Brin titled Earth. In it he describes a futuristic version of a human-machine interface called a "sub-vocal" which reacts to nervous impulses for speech before they turn into physical movement. He imagines that such a think only works for someone with a very clear mind and sharp focus because drifting thoughts may cause bad signals. In the story, this manifests as obscure commands to the interface and sometimes verbalizing thoughts that normally would have qualifies as "inner monologue".
While it is only a story, the author is a real sharp cookie, and it seems quite plausible to me that hyper-sensitive electronics could go wonky if the operator were not 100% focused on them - and when are we really 100% focused on anything? I do not have total focus on driving if I'm conversing with someone, listening to music, or thinking about my day. Could obscure thoughts wreck my ming controlled car?
It's sub-surface as in -just- below the surface. That's where the surface waves are; it also happens to be where the boats are. The 40-100M water depth was a reference to the targeted water depth which affects surface swell conditions.
This whole thing is not a new concept, it's been discussed for many years - I guess the news here is that these guys found a way to make it economical, still doesn't sound very practical on any appreciable scale though. And made entirely of rubber? Surely they jest. I'm skeptical that this will ever take off - there are better ways to spend money and make renewable power I think.
With all due respect, while you didn't come looking for advice and I'm sorry to read that you were so impacted by what's going on, but...
you need to take responsibility for your own failures and stop blaming others (eBay). Your story is no different than that of any other business who failed because they wed themselves to a single vendor who let them down.
In the future, take care not to paint yourself into a corner; the welfare of you and your family is not the responsibility eBay or anyone else but you.
Unless you know something I don't (please share if so) tidal power does not use poles. It uses vast bodies of water sectioned off from the open sea requiring massive barriers, natural or man-made. Moreover, only certain places on the face of the planet are even reasonably ideal due to their large daily tidal swings - several miles out to sea generally is not one of them.
As for wave power - maybe, possible for a small percentage increase, but again, wave energy is best harnessed in the shallows along the coast line where the power of the wave is naturally shaped for collection - collecting wave energy in open water would be a bit like a concert hall that uses cellphones for speakers: the energy is far too dissipated for realistic use (sorry, best analogy for diluted energy I could think of at the moment.)
Perhaps the greatest potential from combining methods on a single site like this lies with wind + solar thermal since both require a tower. Each tower could have a surrounding heliostat array that focuses the sun's energy onto a heat receiver midway up the tower. Then above that, the wind turbine runs well above and without interference with the solar heat operation below.
If they were smart, #2 would be some sort of HTTP proxy that eliminates the need for replicating the content and functions; they could just be a man-in-the-middle and insert ads rather inconspicuously and even rewrite URLS for media assets to go to the original site to control bandwidth costs. I've done similar things as part of a CDN migration process for a set of sites pushing over 700Mb/s and it seems to work well enough.
Agreed - also, sorry but $90K is not chump change. "engineers" maybe convincing themselves of an over-inflated sense of self-worth just because of what's happening at another company. The fact is that Google cannot and will not hire 100% of engineers, thus the reality of being "able" to make better money at Google is tempered by the fact that the opportunity needs to actually present itself.
To me, that's a bit like a store with a low price guarantee on a product - if you show them a competitor's ad that has a lower price, they call and find out if the product is actually in stock and the shopper can head over right that moment and buy it. If so, then the opportunity has actually presented itself and so they honor the price.
If you take a poll of competitive salaries for similar positions at Google to your employer and demand a match, the might be inclined to determine whether any of those positions are actually opportunities for you, or if you're just trying to give them the squeeze.
Not saying that you will never get what you want, but:
a) Consider how important the difference is to you , versus...;
b) Consider the risk of losing your job over such a high differential demand with no backup plan.
For what it's worth, companies DO (sometimes) review employee compensation to ensure that they are keeping the ones they want and trimming the ones they don't, and in time Apple may end up doing the same. Any corporation worth its salt knows that its greatest asset is its workforce talent.
Yeah - and down with stupid people. And people who smoke and eat meat and think impure thoughts. Fuck all people who disagree with you on any idealistic notion because they are the blight of humanity and they all deserve to die. You should start a dictatorship, you'd be awesome at it.
Precisely what Honda did with the Insight model, and one of the reasons why the Insight is still unchallenged for top fuel efficiency among production vehicles - too bad they discontinued it.
"Students are generally not going to get smarter..."
Under the banner of "generally" you may be right if for nothing other than trend analysis. Maybe it's a little hokey, but in the last year or so I caught the movie "Stand and Deliver" on cable telling the story of Jamie Escalante, a pre-calculus instructor in an extremely disadvantaged East Los Angeles high school. It raised in me at least the hope that there are exceptional teachers to be had, and if properly reached, the potential for elevation of student smarts where least expected.
But that was more than 25 years ago - did we learn nothing from Escalante and his methods that could be put into regular practice? Garfield High School is reportedly still doing well with pre-calculus students, but could this model not be applied elsewhere?
In addition to erector sets and Heathkit labs and other such that I enjoyed as a kid, one of the things I loved to do was to take apart the store-bought toys, see how they work, and then reassemble them. My dad exploited this by bringing home surplus electronics, printers, fax & copy machines and all kinds of gizmo's rescued from the dumpster at work that I could disassemble.
Turns out that sort of industrial waste is a gold mine of miscellaneous sensors, servo's, motors, gear sets, mirrors, lenses, lasers, actuators, relays, electronic components, shafts, beams, frames - a lot of the stuff that is still useful to me as a well-organized collection of robotics resources. And they were all fun to take apart!
Agreed - waiting for the price to come down is something consumers do. Driving the price down is something competitors do. Waiting around for it to happen on the part of the mfr. is silly.
...not *necessarily* what sites they are visiting.
They will see the sites being visited as referring domain in the HTTP request headers - they would be foolish NOT to capture this data. It would make them a pretty sweet little database of website, browser, and GeoIP-based popularity statistics.
...you can't do any custom modifications to the components.
True especially of bug fixes that the authors are unresponsive to. We're in the middle of that now with a project.
All the same, probably the majority of the time that code is used by newb's cutting & pasting application snippets for pretty image galleries or other quaint bolt-on features for their site though; they wouldn't have the faintest clue as to debugging or customizing that code. I think that is the target market for these hosted scripts; if you know what you're doing, make your own copy.
When I first started hearing from the project lead, there was talk of $300-500. At that range it was shaky, but doable for a committed developer to pick up an OGP board that may have little to no value one day. $1500 is a 3x-5x joke - this project veered into the gutter.
I was more interested in CNET's Review of the machine than in the news story. What struck me was how critical the reviewer was of the various properties (poor video quality, poor title availability, lack of surround sound, and poor on-screen controls), and yet... it still scored a 7.7/10 - why, because he's giddy about the concept? I think the rating is far too kind and does little to encourage NetFlix to push for improvements in this thing.
Actually the most compelling thing about this to me is that NetFlix has secured licensing rights to stream movies from various movie studios. Even if it's not all the most recent, hot titles, it seems like a great starting point towards a future of on-demand cooperation from movie studios. I also think NetFlix stands to potentially improve their margins by completely switching over to streaming service - of course some overhead is transferred to networking/hosting/storage/delivery infrastructure, but if they play their cards right, once established it should cost less to operate than a mail room and physical inventory process.
This is precisely why I have migrated away from any off-the-shelf CMS. I had been using Mambo for years and switched to Joomla when they split apart (made sense to follow the original developers). After building dozens of components and modules to extend the framework's wrapper around custom interfaces, I have numerous gripes about the planning, revision history, maintenance, and general short-sightedness of Mambo/Joomla in many respects. But it all pales in comparison to the threat of security breaches that could compromise the core assets of a business who relies heavily on the custom application.
I could have hacked custom fixes and features into the CMS code tree to fix specific problems as they arose, but then a critical security fix or update to the CMS would wipe out all those changes. I could have tip-toed around the needs of the CMS and just patched it each time something new came out, but then I'd have to watch closely yet another piece of software for critical updates - and given the speed with which I've seen massive exploit automation roll out, it is not worth the risk to the company that I might be too slow to do this by hand.
So, as much as I enjoyed the friendly interface and ease of getting started for Joomla, I begrudgingly began abstracting my customizations to minimize the hooks into Joomla/Mambo. Finally when all the prep work was done, one day I built a custom framework around the custom portions of the app as a substitute for the CMS and at last it just "went away" - it doesn't take that much to build basic session management, a database class, a simple admin panel and an extension engine. What I have now is more robust and has far less security exposure than Joomla, at the expense of the bulk of the CMS features that Joomla is so widely acclaimed for. For most of my projects, it wasn't so much the CMS that was of interest as the framework for session-based application building.
I am 200% more confident now that I will not come to work in the morning and find the site replaced with an inappropriate message and all our data gone. If you're sitting on Joomla or ANY readily available framework - I don't care if it's Drupal or Zend or whatever - weigh the risk versus the small amount of effort that it would take to build just what you need from scratch so that there are no predictable/scriptable points of entry.
Just a guess from what I read, but for one, I would think that where the memory cells of current storage devices require several inter-operating bits and pieces, a memory cell of the future using this technique might pack multiple times the storage capacity into the same chip due to extremely reduced complexity.
I also wonder if something like this could be used, say, in the manufacture of LED displays where each pixel has dedicated state information. Then we could send packetized bursts of change information to the display to update pixels and have the display natively retain the image even without a constant, scanning signal. How about attaching a monitor to any low power, portable device with wireless USB4.0 capability rather than requiring a demanding signal generator? (Perhaps this is already a potential with current technology?)
Anyway, as the artice mentions, state-retaining RAM, where DRAM is considerably faster than Flash, could get you instant-on computing without booting. Ever. CF isn't fast enough to operate as system memory - that's why it's not used that way now.
... 10 cents per kilowatt hour? So $40,580 will buy 405,800 kwh of electricity. (...) Let's say a house'll use twice that, or about 1000kwh per month. It'll take 405 months (33 years) for the system to pay for itself...
This doesn't add up; given your sample house at 1000KWh per month usage rate and that a 30-day month has 720 hours in it, generating 10KW over 720 hours yields 7,200KWh for the month - that's seven houses, not one. You weren't planning on just throwing away that extra 6,200KWh for the month, were you? On a communal model where costs (and thereby payoff time) are adjusted seven-fold, your 33 years becomes ~4.7 years. (Disclaimer: an unlikely, best case scenario with that puppy churning out 10KWh 24/7)
If I were setting up something like this, I'd determine a fixed rate for all the participants assuming the 1000KWh per month average at 10 cents per and call it $100/month. That's $700/month revenue to keep it running which is 58 months payoff time or, again, 4.8 years. Even at half the billing rate, or half the duty cycle, it is still under 10 years which, to me, would be worth the investment for the grid independence.
Hmm - they don't think these guys are going to have a problem with this? Netbooks.com is not wildly popular yet because it's just getting off the ground, but it's got decent backing with the founder of QuickBooks behind it... *shrug*
Slashdot Mirror
You vent it to the atmosphere. I hear it's good for animals and stuff.
The problem is not the device - there's a lot of chatter in this thread about the pros and cons of such portable devices, but the core issue is employers who have no regard for employees' personal time and who routinely break wage and hour laws.
Improper handling of "exempt" employee status is probably the most frequently screwed up HR liability in the corporate world because half of managers "heard somewhere" at one point that if you're on salary you're exempt. Wrong. The same people fabricated "flex time" which has no basis in law in the state of California (maybe in other places).
The level of ignorance in upper management with regard to employees rights is mind-numbing.
Oh! Someone above mentioned War of the Worlds. In that same vein, a few classic stories that knocked my socks off as a kid:
:)
* Journey to the Center of the Earth - get it before the new movie comes out to compare notes!
* 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - A little heavy on science talk, but might be inspirational for your reader.
* Lord of the Flies - like whoah.
Also a couple deeper, but delightful stories I've found in the last 5-10 years:
* Mipam (journey of a Tibetan monk)
* Siddhartha (similar, less descriptive, more folk tale like)
* Bridge of Birds (a light folk tale set in China, modeled after Chinese folk tales)
* Life of Pi (survival story of an Indian boy is lost at sea after a cargo vessel sinks and he alone survives with some wild animals that were on the ship now stuck in a life raft with him)
Okay, sorry - I think I'm done now, though I'm sure there are more that will come to me
I second Alan Dean Foster - I loved his books in high school, though some of the material might go right over the head of a pre-teen. Alien was rather exciting, and Sentenced to Prism was really weird and imaginative.
Also Terry Brooks' whole Shannara series - that ought to take a year or two to power through. Good adventures, simple but descriptive writing style that paints vivid imagery which is nice for a Fantasy.
For super-lightweight adventure with a bit of comedy infused, Robert Asprin had some good ones like his Myth series and Piers Anthony had numerous clever and fun adventures.
There is some really great material in classic though too - how about Fahrenheit 451? It's short and sweet and would give you an idea if your young reader has any interest in those sort of futuristic dystopia stories.
Wow - my post was rife with type-o's... was in a hurry (one more vote for post edit support here on /.!). Yeah I saw that Audeo thing when it was posted here, but when I watched the video it looked like the guy was actually moving muscles in his throat and neck. The version in the story sounds more like pure thought reception well ahead of muscle signals; the Audeo thing IS a way cool step forward though!
I'm in the middle of a novel by David Brin titled Earth. In it he describes a futuristic version of a human-machine interface called a "sub-vocal" which reacts to nervous impulses for speech before they turn into physical movement. He imagines that such a think only works for someone with a very clear mind and sharp focus because drifting thoughts may cause bad signals. In the story, this manifests as obscure commands to the interface and sometimes verbalizing thoughts that normally would have qualifies as "inner monologue".
While it is only a story, the author is a real sharp cookie, and it seems quite plausible to me that hyper-sensitive electronics could go wonky if the operator were not 100% focused on them - and when are we really 100% focused on anything? I do not have total focus on driving if I'm conversing with someone, listening to music, or thinking about my day. Could obscure thoughts wreck my ming controlled car?
It's sub-surface as in -just- below the surface. That's where the surface waves are; it also happens to be where the boats are. The 40-100M water depth was a reference to the targeted water depth which affects surface swell conditions.
This whole thing is not a new concept, it's been discussed for many years - I guess the news here is that these guys found a way to make it economical, still doesn't sound very practical on any appreciable scale though. And made entirely of rubber? Surely they jest. I'm skeptical that this will ever take off - there are better ways to spend money and make renewable power I think.
Marty,
With all due respect, while you didn't come looking for advice and I'm sorry to read that you were so impacted by what's going on, but...
you need to take responsibility for your own failures and stop blaming others (eBay). Your story is no different than that of any other business who failed because they wed themselves to a single vendor who let them down.
In the future, take care not to paint yourself into a corner; the welfare of you and your family is not the responsibility eBay or anyone else but you.
Unless you know something I don't (please share if so) tidal power does not use poles. It uses vast bodies of water sectioned off from the open sea requiring massive barriers, natural or man-made. Moreover, only certain places on the face of the planet are even reasonably ideal due to their large daily tidal swings - several miles out to sea generally is not one of them.
As for wave power - maybe, possible for a small percentage increase, but again, wave energy is best harnessed in the shallows along the coast line where the power of the wave is naturally shaped for collection - collecting wave energy in open water would be a bit like a concert hall that uses cellphones for speakers: the energy is far too dissipated for realistic use (sorry, best analogy for diluted energy I could think of at the moment.)
Perhaps the greatest potential from combining methods on a single site like this lies with wind + solar thermal since both require a tower. Each tower could have a surrounding heliostat array that focuses the sun's energy onto a heat receiver midway up the tower. Then above that, the wind turbine runs well above and without interference with the solar heat operation below.
If they were smart, #2 would be some sort of HTTP proxy that eliminates the need for replicating the content and functions; they could just be a man-in-the-middle and insert ads rather inconspicuously and even rewrite URLS for media assets to go to the original site to control bandwidth costs. I've done similar things as part of a CDN migration process for a set of sites pushing over 700Mb/s and it seems to work well enough.
Aww now you tell me. There goes all my personal banking information that I normally keep safe and sound on the REAL wikipedia site. :(
Agreed - also, sorry but $90K is not chump change. "engineers" maybe convincing themselves of an over-inflated sense of self-worth just because of what's happening at another company. The fact is that Google cannot and will not hire 100% of engineers, thus the reality of being "able" to make better money at Google is tempered by the fact that the opportunity needs to actually present itself.
To me, that's a bit like a store with a low price guarantee on a product - if you show them a competitor's ad that has a lower price, they call and find out if the product is actually in stock and the shopper can head over right that moment and buy it. If so, then the opportunity has actually presented itself and so they honor the price.
If you take a poll of competitive salaries for similar positions at Google to your employer and demand a match, the might be inclined to determine whether any of those positions are actually opportunities for you, or if you're just trying to give them the squeeze.
Not saying that you will never get what you want, but:
a) Consider how important the difference is to you , versus...;
b) Consider the risk of losing your job over such a high differential demand with no backup plan.
For what it's worth, companies DO (sometimes) review employee compensation to ensure that they are keeping the ones they want and trimming the ones they don't, and in time Apple may end up doing the same. Any corporation worth its salt knows that its greatest asset is its workforce talent.
Yeah - and down with stupid people. And people who smoke and eat meat and think impure thoughts. Fuck all people who disagree with you on any idealistic notion because they are the blight of humanity and they all deserve to die. You should start a dictatorship, you'd be awesome at it.
Precisely what Honda did with the Insight model, and one of the reasons why the Insight is still unchallenged for top fuel efficiency among production vehicles - too bad they discontinued it.
"Students are generally not going to get smarter..."
Under the banner of "generally" you may be right if for nothing other than trend analysis. Maybe it's a little hokey, but in the last year or so I caught the movie "Stand and Deliver" on cable telling the story of Jamie Escalante, a pre-calculus instructor in an extremely disadvantaged East Los Angeles high school. It raised in me at least the hope that there are exceptional teachers to be had, and if properly reached, the potential for elevation of student smarts where least expected.
But that was more than 25 years ago - did we learn nothing from Escalante and his methods that could be put into regular practice? Garfield High School is reportedly still doing well with pre-calculus students, but could this model not be applied elsewhere?
In addition to erector sets and Heathkit labs and other such that I enjoyed as a kid, one of the things I loved to do was to take apart the store-bought toys, see how they work, and then reassemble them. My dad exploited this by bringing home surplus electronics, printers, fax & copy machines and all kinds of gizmo's rescued from the dumpster at work that I could disassemble.
Turns out that sort of industrial waste is a gold mine of miscellaneous sensors, servo's, motors, gear sets, mirrors, lenses, lasers, actuators, relays, electronic components, shafts, beams, frames - a lot of the stuff that is still useful to me as a well-organized collection of robotics resources. And they were all fun to take apart!
Agreed - waiting for the price to come down is something consumers do. Driving the price down is something competitors do. Waiting around for it to happen on the part of the mfr. is silly.
...not *necessarily* what sites they are visiting.
They will see the sites being visited as referring domain in the HTTP request headers - they would be foolish NOT to capture this data. It would make them a pretty sweet little database of website, browser, and GeoIP-based popularity statistics.
...you can't do any custom modifications to the components.
True especially of bug fixes that the authors are unresponsive to. We're in the middle of that now with a project.
All the same, probably the majority of the time that code is used by newb's cutting & pasting application snippets for pretty image galleries or other quaint bolt-on features for their site though; they wouldn't have the faintest clue as to debugging or customizing that code. I think that is the target market for these hosted scripts; if you know what you're doing, make your own copy.
When I first started hearing from the project lead, there was talk of $300-500. At that range it was shaky, but doable for a committed developer to pick up an OGP board that may have little to no value one day. $1500 is a 3x-5x joke - this project veered into the gutter.
I was more interested in CNET's Review of the machine than in the news story. What struck me was how critical the reviewer was of the various properties (poor video quality, poor title availability, lack of surround sound, and poor on-screen controls), and yet... it still scored a 7.7 /10 - why, because he's giddy about the concept? I think the rating is far too kind and does little to encourage NetFlix to push for improvements in this thing.
Actually the most compelling thing about this to me is that NetFlix has secured licensing rights to stream movies from various movie studios. Even if it's not all the most recent, hot titles, it seems like a great starting point towards a future of on-demand cooperation from movie studios. I also think NetFlix stands to potentially improve their margins by completely switching over to streaming service - of course some overhead is transferred to networking/hosting/storage/delivery infrastructure, but if they play their cards right, once established it should cost less to operate than a mail room and physical inventory process.
This is precisely why I have migrated away from any off-the-shelf CMS. I had been using Mambo for years and switched to Joomla when they split apart (made sense to follow the original developers). After building dozens of components and modules to extend the framework's wrapper around custom interfaces, I have numerous gripes about the planning, revision history, maintenance, and general short-sightedness of Mambo/Joomla in many respects. But it all pales in comparison to the threat of security breaches that could compromise the core assets of a business who relies heavily on the custom application.
I could have hacked custom fixes and features into the CMS code tree to fix specific problems as they arose, but then a critical security fix or update to the CMS would wipe out all those changes. I could have tip-toed around the needs of the CMS and just patched it each time something new came out, but then I'd have to watch closely yet another piece of software for critical updates - and given the speed with which I've seen massive exploit automation roll out, it is not worth the risk to the company that I might be too slow to do this by hand.
So, as much as I enjoyed the friendly interface and ease of getting started for Joomla, I begrudgingly began abstracting my customizations to minimize the hooks into Joomla/Mambo. Finally when all the prep work was done, one day I built a custom framework around the custom portions of the app as a substitute for the CMS and at last it just "went away" - it doesn't take that much to build basic session management, a database class, a simple admin panel and an extension engine. What I have now is more robust and has far less security exposure than Joomla, at the expense of the bulk of the CMS features that Joomla is so widely acclaimed for. For most of my projects, it wasn't so much the CMS that was of interest as the framework for session-based application building.
I am 200% more confident now that I will not come to work in the morning and find the site replaced with an inappropriate message and all our data gone. If you're sitting on Joomla or ANY readily available framework - I don't care if it's Drupal or Zend or whatever - weigh the risk versus the small amount of effort that it would take to build just what you need from scratch so that there are no predictable/scriptable points of entry.
Just a guess from what I read, but for one, I would think that where the memory cells of current storage devices require several inter-operating bits and pieces, a memory cell of the future using this technique might pack multiple times the storage capacity into the same chip due to extremely reduced complexity.
I also wonder if something like this could be used, say, in the manufacture of LED displays where each pixel has dedicated state information. Then we could send packetized bursts of change information to the display to update pixels and have the display natively retain the image even without a constant, scanning signal. How about attaching a monitor to any low power, portable device with wireless USB4.0 capability rather than requiring a demanding signal generator? (Perhaps this is already a potential with current technology?)
Anyway, as the artice mentions, state-retaining RAM, where DRAM is considerably faster than Flash, could get you instant-on computing without booting. Ever. CF isn't fast enough to operate as system memory - that's why it's not used that way now.
... 10 cents per kilowatt hour? So $40,580 will buy 405,800 kwh of electricity. (...) Let's say a house'll use twice that, or about 1000kwh per month. It'll take 405 months (33 years) for the system to pay for itself...
This doesn't add up; given your sample house at 1000KWh per month usage rate and that a 30-day month has 720 hours in it, generating 10KW over 720 hours yields 7,200KWh for the month - that's seven houses, not one. You weren't planning on just throwing away that extra 6,200KWh for the month, were you? On a communal model where costs (and thereby payoff time) are adjusted seven-fold, your 33 years becomes ~4.7 years. (Disclaimer: an unlikely, best case scenario with that puppy churning out 10KWh 24/7)
If I were setting up something like this, I'd determine a fixed rate for all the participants assuming the 1000KWh per month average at 10 cents per and call it $100/month. That's $700/month revenue to keep it running which is 58 months payoff time or, again, 4.8 years. Even at half the billing rate, or half the duty cycle, it is still under 10 years which, to me, would be worth the investment for the grid independence.
Hmm - they don't think these guys are going to have a problem with this? Netbooks.com is not wildly popular yet because it's just getting off the ground, but it's got decent backing with the founder of QuickBooks behind it... *shrug*