Posts like this provide tons of leeway b/c there are so many unanswered questions. Most people have just thrown around their opinion, but let's face it, w/o a lot of Q&A, it's all pretty pointless. So here's the stuff I'd want to know.
How close are you to "retirement"? Do you even plan to "retire"? What do you plan to do in "retirement"? How much money do you have in the bank? How much do you need for your current lifestyle? Are you willing to change lifestyles? move counties, move states, move countries, move continents?
Do you want to go school? Do you have another passion? If you have enough money, then the "other" passion may not need to bring in very much. If you switch countries and have money saved, you may already be able to "retire". If you've been working for 20 years, you're qualified to teach at a college, does that interest you? Would you like to write a book? Would you like to try teaching part-time?
How "boring" and/or "demanding" is your current job? Are you working 50+ hrs/week like lots of IT people? Maybe your life would be better by just working 40:) Are you willing to or able to take a cut in pay and just work less each week? (i.e.: can you work 3 days / week and make 60% of your salary?) Don't write this option off, it's definitely an option. And with an aging workforce that doesn't have enough to retire, you're going to see a lot of this happening. Maybe you can move off to another par of the same company for a while. If you're in IT, you likely have a lot of experience with operations and operations management. Good IT people are not just useful for their IT knowledge, knowledge of business process is essential and portable.
So yeah it pretty much bears down to same questions.
What else do you want to do??
What other tools do you have ('cause you don't just "know IT")
How much money do you have/need
Writing down answers to 1 & 2 will help you figure out what you want. And then you can figure out the right answer to #3 and make it all jive.
Does anyone know of any program (anywhere) that is pushing to increase the % of males graduating from nursing? Are they using the same methodology? Because the last time that I checked, nursing was absolutely dominated by women. Given that these fields (cs / nursing) are approximately equivalent in pay (more for nurses, where I am) and prestige and training required, shouldn't we be working just as hard to increase the number of males enrolled in nursing?
Maybe I'm just on the wrong boards, but I have never heard of any push to increase male enrollment in Nursing. Seems only fair to me.
It's good to hear a "baby steps" advocate. All of these cries of "off the grid" and "CO2 is killing us all" panicky counter-productive. The basic fact is that we cannot take everyone off the grid today, or tomorrow, or this year, or even this decade. Nor would we really want to.
The whole goal is to be more energy efficient and less polluting in 2010 than we are now. And to do this we'll move to CFLs and buy better showerheads and toilets and furnaces and appliances. But we won't do this overnight, we'll upgrade the stuff when it breaks. It's a slow march, we can't just rebuild our homes from scratch.
So all of this "off the grid" crap is just way too far ahead. Step 1 is to build rechargeable "batteries" into home basements. This could be a stack of fuel cells, a pile of 24Vs or whatever works, but once we have "batteries" then we can start installing Solar panels and windmills and whatever cool new tech there is. But right now, basically nobody has batteries. We don't have the gear, we don't have houses wired to do this! This cheap solar cell thing is like console video games. We're all happy that video games may be getting cheaper, but it doesn't matter 'cause nobody has any consoles.
There's an inertial effect here. I don't care if solar panel prices drop 500%, I've got no easy use for them. Let's break the inertia by giving me a battery and some gear so that I can buy and add solar panels to my setup.
Some posters have posited the "what if every car were an AI car" scenario. But the transformations all talk about changing our current cars into AI cars.
But I'd like to propose a different slant. If every car is an AI car, then how will this differ significantly from a distributed form of public transportation? If you break it down, the daily commute is filled with SUVs and a lone driver, with the SUV remaining parked (taking up space) for the whole day. So what about "transportion as a service" here (AKA: public transit and taxis)?
I mean, if I need to get to work and the wife needs to go shopping with the new-born, in many cases we need two cars. But if my car can drive itself home, then the wife can just wait the extra time and have her car back. Point is, we can optimize roadway usage, but we can also optimize car usage time. Communities could own car pools and "rent" them out. With communities co-ordinating their own commutes, but also with cars that can do intelligent pick-ups, you can get by with less cars and with less "big cars".
Assembly and C are the fundamental languages for OSes. This isn't magically going to change, even Microsoft's C#-based Singularity is still running Assembly and C code for the basic DLLs. We will continue to need programmers for this stuff.
The vast majority of business programming (for which we're pumping out grads like mad), is done in Declarative programming languages. Well, Assembly and C are the simplest and most performant declarative languages. Understanding complex performance issues eventually requires that you have some knowledge of "what's going on" at base levels. You may never need to write assembly after school, but that's not to say that the knowledge is irrelevant.
I'm late to the party, but I'll throw in my two cents here. Visit the MS site!
The truth is, you know how to program, you want to learn details. Well MS wants you to learn those details too. So go to www.msdn.com and check out what they have. You should be able to download a free copy of VS 2005 Express Edition that will let you play around.
If you really want to dig in, take an Microsoft Certification course. That means, buy a Self-paced training kit from MS and work your way from front to back (takes 50-100 hours). When you are done you will have a shiny certificate that says that you know some major aspect of C# (and you will).
Now, when it comes up in an interview, you can confidently state that "yes I know.NET" and you can provide a document to prove it. Employers put different weightings on the value of certifications, but if you're up against other new grads, you have more proof than they do about your knowledge. Plus you'll have demonstrated your "dedication to lifelong learning" in a concrete fashion (rather than "I just read a book and got some of it").
Just a "me too". I have several teachers in my extended family, and the general consensus is about in-line with your numbers. The typical teacher works (here in Canada) for about 50 hours / week over about 9 months of the year (including extra time for x-mas and spring break). So basically 50 hours * 40 weeks = 2000 hours/yr, which is really close to an average work year (with two weeks vacation).
Things like extra education may be annoying, but they are not that far out for general knowledge workers. Some teachers actually receive a certain amount of holidays during the year (often known as sick days), but around here they receive more of these days than average.
All in all, teaching pays like most post-secondary educated jobs with funky hours (and ornery clients... er kids). In my area it pays on par with nursing and better than things like IT, physics, chem or even Engineering. So really, the only issue (as raised) is simply that good teachers can't really "climb the ladder" by being good at what they do, unless they ship themselves off to a private school. (and of course, many people don't want to deal with unruly kids, but hey what's new:)
So you got one reply with a cute story. Mine's not cute. I worked for a small consulting firm for two years (left on my two-year). I knew what they were billing, I knew what I was making, and what my co-workers (both on-site and off-site) were making. So when they gave me a $500 recruitment bonus for bringing on a new guy (in an industry where our competitors pay 2k), I knew that I was getting the short end of the stick (especially when he came in at the same salary with less credentials and less experience/time with the company). With no profit-sharing in place, that guy saved them a few thousand dollars in job ads and generated tens of thousands of dollars in the first year alone and my cut was a sub-2% bonus, once. Heck that was less than 1 day of billing for him.
I was the first one to receive "the award", I put on a company smile (whilst I steamed inside), and I guess they mis-read me, b/c it became company policy. They announced it by internal e-mail and received no internal replies (wonder why). They followed that up with a newspaper job posting (for multiple positions) and received less than a dozen unqualified replies. The newspaper ad cost at least 3k and we know this. When 3k gets you zero qualified applicants, you'd like to think that one qualified one would be worth $500:)
Obviously, I left, and everyone in my ex-company will be getting significant pay raises this year or there likely won't be a company next year. I know, I've spoken with everyone, they know the financial reality. When we got a $500 x-mas gift from the company, we know how much that really cost them and how much they were holding back.
My point is simple though, assume that employees know exactly what everyone else is making. B/c we talk. I did, others knew what I made, and others shared back. If managers foolishly think they can hide the truth and they can "play the wage game" then somebody is just going to oust the pay structure. There are exceptions (Sales), but in IT where everyone acts in teams, you have to assume that people talk and do drinks and share.
If you can't post your salaries on the wall for everyone to see, isn't that really just a sign that you're ashamed of your pay decisions?
Some have mentioned a VM, but I've seen one step further. My father's (120-user) engineering firm has started replacing their engineer desktops with Macs running Parallels. Some are using Mac laptops with windows on a second monitor, others have the desktop with quick keys set up to switch.
Either options costs about the same as the equivalent Vista machine, but the users I've spoken with preferred their new Macs to a new Vista box. Despite a learning curve, they're excited to move everything over. Right now, they're just using Office apps and Safari/Firefox, but stuff is slowly moving.
As mentioned by another poster though, many apps in the Enterprise environment already have some form of Citrix Portal or Web distribution. My most recent Enterprise client (I consult) was using Citrix/AD/Crystal Enterprise for deployment of all of their business apps. Basically everything fired from the Citrix Portal (and CE is done via browser), so Mac or Vista, all they really need to do is make Citrix work and the rest is details.
I don't expect anyone to jump in with both feet, but it wouldn't surprise me to see more companies start to make the "slow shift".
HUH? OK, you provided tons of opinions (with some poor math) and then did nothing to defend your original comments. You just railed off a bunch of opinions that completely contradict your original comment that
Monthly payments are a means for the wealthy to keep the poor poor
.
Now, to top this all off, you went tangential to my questions. I didn't ask if it was worth "paying extra money for a better school", I asked if was worth taking out a loan (i.e.: monthly payment) to fund an education. And mortgages don't carry tax benefits here in Canada how much does that change things?
What you're fundamentally missing here is the nature of each of the items I listed.
An education is an investment (in yourself).
A car is an expense (not an investment) that helps provide a transportation service.
A house is an investment with a varying return (but they're not necessarily great) that also provides the service of housing.
A PS3 is just an expense, it provides an entertainment service, but it's really nowhere near as important as transport and housing.
So if I rent a car, I still get the transportation service, but I'm not throwing extra money to try and own the car. If I rent an apartment I get the housing service without the overhead of maintaining a house. If I take out a loan and purchase a car, I'm slowly accumulating some equity in the car, but I'm also paying for the car as a service and I'm lining the banks pockets to pay for the car that I couldn't afford in cash.
Now to the issue at hand: Hardware/Software.
Hardware, right now, is self-obsoleting. It's just the way it is. If I spend $1,000 on computer hardware, that computer will be worth $100 dollars in about 3 years. Now if I'm running a company and I could buy the hardware for $50/month or lease it for $33/month, which should I be doing? Well, if my workers continue to need up-to-date hardware (graphic designers, engineers, developers, etc.) Then I should really be leasing. Given that the hardware is depreciating by 30%/year, it doesn't really seem like a good idea to "invest in it". Computer hardware isn't like a good shovel, it doesn't work until it breaks, it becomes irrelevant long before it breaks.
Now software is the exact same thing. You say:
Monthly payment for services is completely different than monthly payments for a tangible item. You don't have any expectation of equity in a service.
Well software is not a tangible item, software is a service. Software continues to work only so long as its developer decides to keep it working. Software is self-obsoleting.
Look at a program like QuickTax for an easy example. It comes in a box, you pay money for it, it has an install CD and a manual and all these cool tangible things, but it's just a service. It's like a tax-guy in a box. If you kept the thing on your shelf for 12 months, it wouldn't be worth anything. Well, Quicken is the same way, I've been running Quicken since '98, but I have XG 2003 installed. I just received an e-mail that support for XG 2003 is up. There will be no more updates, no more fixes, no more support, the app is dead it's time to upgrade. The service is basically dead.
So I paid $100 for it, and I'll have to drop another $100 (so it's dropped in price), but wouldn't it just have been easier to pay $25/year for it? I mean, I pay the same amount, Intuit gets a regular cash influx (rather than yelling at me every four years), and Intuit can use that regular income to fund continuing improvement.
As to this comment:
By far the worst idea, though, is leasing a car.
Your whole argument rests on the concept that leasing a car is "slightly" cheaper than purchasing a car outright, but it's not. You're also assuming that the extra money you spend on owning the car will actually show up in equity at some point. Four years ago interes
Monthly payments are a means for the wealthy to keep the poor poor.
OK, I'll bite, are you for or against the rental of software? You've just given a bunch of good reasons for renting hardware and then you quote this stuff about "monthly payments" followed by another contradictory sentence: "The wise do not live beyond their means.".
The problem with both of these statements lie in a definition of terms. The "wisdom" of your first sentence would imply that people receiving regular (say monthly) paycheques are inherently "not wealthy". I mean, I'm sure that Ted Turner receives monthly cheques from his clients but I don't see how that makes him or clients "not wealthy".
You second statement seems to evidence the problem in the first. If the wise live beneath their means, then shouldn't the wise be renting quite regularly? If I need a car and can't afford to spend $600/month to buy one, should I lease one for $400 instead? I mean, I've just shaved $200/month off of my expenses, so I've found a way to live beneath my means via rental. Or are you implying that I simply shouldn't own the car until I can pay for it outright in cash? (i.e.: all software should be purchased in full?) Does the same concept apply for a house, a PS3 and an education? Would "the wise" ever take out student loans b/c they couldn't afford tuition?
Are you saying that leasing hardware is OK, but that renting software is bad? B/c it seems to me that unsupported software is less useful than unsupported hardware, but your whole last paragraph is just a jumble.
And businesses? Do you really think they'd be stupid enough to pay an ongoing subscription fee when they can just pay it up front and amortize it over the same time period? Uh... no.
Ummm... that's exactly what they do. Many businesses (big and small) lease their computer hardware. It's easy on the accounting side and it helps with cash flow. Many businesses also lease their computer software in one way or another. They buy site licenses (or somesuch) for Office and Windows and Crystal Enterprise and Oracle, etc.
In fact, when an enterprise-class client of mine was looking into the price of moving from Crystal Enterprise 10 to XI, the price was quoted as zero. They were paying an annual support fee for the product over a certain number of procs. If the client wanted to move to XI, Crystal was just going to send them the disks, b/c they want the rolling support fees.
Now in this case, $15/month is simply too much (especially in Brazil), however, the concept of pay-as-you-go software is both sound and useful. Clients receive ever-improving software and software companies receive consistent revenue streams on the basis that they continue to improve the software. And really, it's a self-correcting system. If I don't like the product, I'll look for a competing product with a better price.
Sure there are monopoly problems, but competitors worried about drawing in new customers will be building data converters to help keep on top. In fact, that's what's happening right now, all of the new free online utilities have converters for Office docs. People are sick of the Office upgrade cycle and Google wants to capitalize (ironically, Office finally has a version worthy of calling an upgrade).
The reality is that for low-tech software like word processors and spreadsheets, the market is saturated and has been for a while. No silly schemes like software rental are going to change that.
I'll agree with your first statement, but not your conclusions. I believe that the rental model will in fact revolutionize the way software sales are done, especially in the low-tech markets. I mean, imagine that someone shows me a new spreadsheet app that I really like, but I can't afford it and I'm already paying the MS tax for Excel. Well under the rental model, this is no longer the case. I can rent the new software for a few months and try it out (most likely on a trial). If that software is more suited to me (cheaper, more functional, etc.), then I cancel one subscription, export my data and pick up the other subscription. Now I'm not out anything but a little time. I haven't killed my cash flow, I just get my new product.
This sounds like another reason we should hop on the Open Source file formats. With this ruling, you can't even pay the man for licensing, lest there be another "submarine license" for more money. Man, who wants to make MP3 encoders now?
No, you definitely need a newspaper for more than one day. My local Saturday paper is the one with all of the Job and Rental ads, the big Obits and announcements (plus the Sunday comics one day early). The local 7-Eleven actually keeps these papers available until Sunday night b/c people (myself included) come in on Sunday looking for Saturday's paper.
This paper is read, written on and stored for most of the week as it may take a few days to apply to all of the jobs or rental requests. People will clip out Obits for funerals later on in the week or even grab the flyers to bring to stores with them during the week ("Hello, I'm looking for one of these...")
In the same vein, we like to store vanity or important clippings. If there was an article about me or my friends/family, I'd like to keep it. Obituaries are saveable, in fact people actually pay for extra copies just to have extra clippings (had this request when I was a delivery boy).
The newspaper thing "seems neat" but it's really not a good idea.
Um, the "Loser pays" system in Canada does not apply to small claims court. Nor is the "Loser Pays" system automatic, it's just more commonly used here.
The deal is, you have the documentation to back you up. If it has been less than 6 months, then you're likely still in range. The entire process will take approximately 1-2 days (8 to 16 hours) and you have $2,500 on the line (so that's worth two days isn't it?).
All you have to do is go to small claims court and fill out a few forms. There are no lawyers, just you, the defendant, the judge and your papers. What's more, if someone from VISA doesn't show up, it's an automatic victory and VISA owes you the $2,500, so now VISA (who screwed you) has to spend a bunch of their time just to keep their money. In a case like this, there is simply no way that VISA can demand double damages from you.
Think of it this way. You can put in 16 hours of work (or less) and get 2,500, that's like $156/hour. Seems worth it.
Couldn't the programs inherit the benefits of a multi-core system if the APIs they call are written to distribute the work to the cores? I know this probably isn't optimal but there must be some benefits from this.
Yeah, this we have. Run a Virus Scan on a Dual-Core proc and you can continue to work normally.
I could take an old library (QuickDraw for example) and totally rewrite it to take advantage of a new architecture as long as it accepts the old calls and returns the expected results.
Rewriting old libraries is not trivial and "taking advantage of the new architecture" first requires that this is even possible. If I'm running a business app that retrieves data from a database putting 5 DB calls on 5 "different cores" isn't necessarily going to make anything run faster. It might help if I'm talking to 5 different servers and if the 5 DB calls are independent. But even then, I can solve that problem by making the calls asynchronously and waiting for the results.
Really, at the moment, the top home uses for multiple cores are: video and audio processing, and gaming (e.g.: AI on a different core). Skype can suck up proc time, ripping and recording movies/songs can be intensive, transcoding files for DVDs can grind the comp to halt. And games can always find a use for another ounce of power here or there, but they do have to be programmed with multiple cores in mind.
All in all, this article is really talking about the Hard Problems, like a market analysis computer or a protein folder that needs to perform billions of parallel calculations per second. But these are so far from Home/Office use that they're really "out of scope" for the typical user (even the typical Slashdotter).
Here's a nod of support. I'm working at a government site at the moment and windows licenses are pretty much irrelevant. I don't even know if they pay a "per-computer fee" as much as just a "we're approximately this size fee".
And once you hit "that size", even things like CALs are nearly irrelevant. I mean seriously, if you have 20,000 employees, how do you even count the numbers of users and computers? At that size, you will be adding/deleting several users/day.
Ironically, she doesn't know if she wants the MS Degree or the Mrs Degree. The latter is probably out, b/c she's stubbornly independent and frankly I don't want to pay all of the bills. But right now, she's just so happy she's finishing. She'll make it through with zero student debt(!), but she'll likely want to work some before she starts pursuing the next phase.
My gf is in her 4th year of Classical Studies and it is simply recognized that Wikipedia is not a citable source. Just like you shouldn't cite encyclopedias.
The department should not need to put a ban on Wikipedia citing. That's almost like recognizing that it may, in some way, be acceptable, but that this University won't allow it. Really, it's already recognized that citing primary sources is important and that citing an encyclopedia is unacceptable.
Now, if the Uni has a published ban on using certain reference types. Then I agree that they can add Wikipedia. However, if such a ban does not exist, then there's not point in creating one. Just tell students that Wikipedia is an unacceptable source along with many others.
So we'll just end up with 40% of people stealing music before the studios just give in. After which we'll be flooded with 5 years of low-quality movies until people start anteing up again.
And that would be different from today, how?
Well for starters 40% of people are not stealing movies:)
Now people have always complained about the quality, but let's be realistic here, even a bad movie like The Marine receives a $15 million budget. Imagine how bad The Marine would have been with half the budget. Not only would you have bad car chases, they'd also be done with bad cars:) I know that money != quality, but money opens doors for quality, money in the industry lets you do things like A Scanner Darkly. There will always be more crappy movies than good ones, but that's not the point really. The point is that Hollywood, with a lack of money (or perceived lack) will just cut stuff.
Less movies == less good movies (at least to start). Good movies are hard to make and run the risk of small audiences. So unless we and our friends and our friends' friends, all start packing up the art house movies, then we're just going to get more John Cena movies. And if Hollywood becomes scared, they're not going to release less John Cena movies, they'll release more. (again for a time, until someone breaks the mold and everyone else sees $$$ again)
18% sounds like a good start, I'd expect this number to increase to about 35-40% before the studios finally release non-DRMed versions for downloads (at lower than DVD prices).
This board (Slashdot) is filled with a virtual panoply of views on this subject. As is usual though, I think the truth of the matter lies in the nebulous neutral zone.
Let's face it, neither side has really taken the high road on this. People download and distribute movies like they were free commodities and the MPAA bullies people unreasonably and tries to make us all thieves.
I have to sit in theatre with my $12 ticket and watch the stunt double talk about his belief that stealing movies is wrong (I just paid $12 for this, talk about preaching to the choir). And then I blow 20+ minutes watching advertisements for other movies (AKA: previews). When I take a movie home, I have to watch the trailers (they lock out the buttons) for movies I may already have seen or in fact may already own. And then I can't complain and return the video b/c it's already open.
However, the vast load of downloaders are some mix of vigilantes and free-loaders, collectors and connoisseurs. So every solution proposed by the MPAA (i.e.: DRM) effectively blocks the good downloaders as well as the free-loaders.
In the end really, both sides are too stuck up to take the high road and fix the problem. So we'll just end up with 40% of people stealing music before the studios just give in. After which we'll be flooded with 5 years of low-quality movies until people start anteing up again.
Why not just skip the whole process, stop bad-mouthing everyone and figure out something that works. If I want to buy newly-released Italian movies for my family and I can't find them, then who can I lean on to get them out here? If I can't stand previews, then how can I organize around them? Can I show up late with a dozen friends and walk in near the estimated end of the previews? Can I take cell phone calls during the previews, I mean, it's not really the movie is it? You know the stunt double guy? I just stopped going to the theatre that showed him. Maybe I should start asking sales clerks about return policies on DVDs, or refusing to buy DVDs that are "not quite DVDs".
I'm a basketball fan, but I don't have cable. Once they start posting my Raptors games to the Net, then I will start buying them (so that I can watch them on the bus to work). But until then, I just don't watch them. I don't download them illegally out of some self-righteous belief that I can, I'm taking the high road and waiting for them to catch up.
What I want to see is somebody come on the air and actually explain what these 3 different OSes really are. Someone who can actually explain that the three OSes are somewhat comparable, but that they are different tools. Maybe someone can pull out an automotive example.
Windows Vista:2005 Grand Caravan (available in Sports/Ultimate Edition:)
YMMV on these analogies, they're not perfect, but you get the point.
Now take a look at the pictures and the specs and the options. I mean, they all go from point A to point B and they all support CD players and they can all carry some type of load. However they are completely different vehicles with completely different purposes.
I don't know about your non-computer-literate friends, but given this type of example, my friends/family can understand that "comparing" the three is very apples/oranges and relatively pointless.
So there's really no point in starting a shouting match. DINKs don't argue with their friends about buying a van to shuttle their kids around; and the family of 6 doesn't argue about the DINKs driving their viper (with no extra passenger space!).
We inherently understand these differences, so let's learn to be equally accepting of our computer differences.
Clearly the balloonful is just a posing shot. You are however correct that TFA states "store the gas". The sentence is: "...an electrolyzer that uses the solar power to generate hydrogen from water, and a number of hydrogen tanks that store the gas until it is needed by the fuel cell."
Now given the dual nature of the word "gas" and typical journalistic practices. I will concede that you're probably correct, but the source material leaves some doubt. I mean, if the compression hardware is actually available, the stuff still comes out in a gaseous states before being liquified. So maybe the reporter just saw the gas and didn't see the compressors.
Thank you Slashdot, I'm sharing this article with my girlfriend. I've been dreaming of this for a two years now, but now I know it's possible.
I think that the key landmark from this home is the fuel cell stack. The whole thread has talked about cost efficiency and redundancy and even overall environmental friendliness. But I think that the fuel cell stack is the right place to address many of those issues.
A powered up stack can help increase redundancy, without precluding the thing from being connected. Now, a power outage isn't fatal, just inconvenient. Now you can also increase equipment utilization. People need power intermittently and some power sources (solar, wind) only generate intermittently. These two "intermittences" are not always the same, so the stack helps mitigate the problem.
Moreover, some sources can generate power consistently (hydro-electric dams), but they don't. With a good distributed battery system, the dam can just keep running. The dam can "charge your batteries" overnight and then you can supplement the dam energy at peaks by using the "battery".
From an environmental perspective, the "stack" provides us with increased awareness of energy use. Much talk has been made of "the little things", but really, we're not very good at watching these. It's not like we really know what these numbers are anyways. Even on Slashdot, who knows how many kWh you consume on an annual basis? What about monthly or weekly numbers?
Where I live, you get billed for "Hydro" every third month. That's not really a great feedback mechanism. If we want others to learn about "energy efficiency" they need feedback on their energy use. They need to be able to look at a "month-end" number that says "You used X". I think that "the stack" can help this by doubling as an energy monitor. Once you can know your numbers, you can see the cost of your AC for the day or notice what it means to turn off the lights or run a toaster oven for small meals.
And once you have "the stack", you can start supplementing your energy use. You can now add "just a few" solar panels to an existing system and you can actually see the difference.
Seems to me like this "fuel cell in my basement" is actually the beginning of a solution to many possible problems. We get redundant power, the ability to store power from inconsistent power supplies and the ability to "just keep running" consistent power supplies. And we get the ability to "add our own" supplies to the grid while also receiving feedback about our usage.
Adding a stack in the basement seems like a great jump point for making a "greener" us.
Slashdot Mirror
Posts like this provide tons of leeway b/c there are so many unanswered questions. Most people have just thrown around their opinion, but let's face it, w/o a lot of Q&A, it's all pretty pointless. So here's the stuff I'd want to know.
How close are you to "retirement"? Do you even plan to "retire"? What do you plan to do in "retirement"? How much money do you have in the bank? How much do you need for your current lifestyle? Are you willing to change lifestyles? move counties, move states, move countries, move continents?
Do you want to go school? Do you have another passion? If you have enough money, then the "other" passion may not need to bring in very much. If you switch countries and have money saved, you may already be able to "retire". If you've been working for 20 years, you're qualified to teach at a college, does that interest you? Would you like to write a book? Would you like to try teaching part-time?
How "boring" and/or "demanding" is your current job? Are you working 50+ hrs/week like lots of IT people? Maybe your life would be better by just working 40 :) Are you willing to or able to take a cut in pay and just work less each week? (i.e.: can you work 3 days / week and make 60% of your salary?) Don't write this option off, it's definitely an option. And with an aging workforce that doesn't have enough to retire, you're going to see a lot of this happening. Maybe you can move off to another par of the same company for a while. If you're in IT, you likely have a lot of experience with operations and operations management. Good IT people are not just useful for their IT knowledge, knowledge of business process is essential and portable.
So yeah it pretty much bears down to same questions.
Writing down answers to 1 & 2 will help you figure out what you want. And then you can figure out the right answer to #3 and make it all jive.
Does anyone know of any program (anywhere) that is pushing to increase the % of males graduating from nursing? Are they using the same methodology? Because the last time that I checked, nursing was absolutely dominated by women. Given that these fields (cs / nursing) are approximately equivalent in pay (more for nurses, where I am) and prestige and training required, shouldn't we be working just as hard to increase the number of males enrolled in nursing?
Maybe I'm just on the wrong boards, but I have never heard of any push to increase male enrollment in Nursing. Seems only fair to me.
It's good to hear a "baby steps" advocate. All of these cries of "off the grid" and "CO2 is killing us all" panicky counter-productive. The basic fact is that we cannot take everyone off the grid today, or tomorrow, or this year, or even this decade. Nor would we really want to.
The whole goal is to be more energy efficient and less polluting in 2010 than we are now. And to do this we'll move to CFLs and buy better showerheads and toilets and furnaces and appliances. But we won't do this overnight, we'll upgrade the stuff when it breaks. It's a slow march, we can't just rebuild our homes from scratch.
So all of this "off the grid" crap is just way too far ahead. Step 1 is to build rechargeable "batteries" into home basements. This could be a stack of fuel cells, a pile of 24Vs or whatever works, but once we have "batteries" then we can start installing Solar panels and windmills and whatever cool new tech there is. But right now, basically nobody has batteries. We don't have the gear, we don't have houses wired to do this! This cheap solar cell thing is like console video games. We're all happy that video games may be getting cheaper, but it doesn't matter 'cause nobody has any consoles.
There's an inertial effect here. I don't care if solar panel prices drop 500%, I've got no easy use for them. Let's break the inertia by giving me a battery and some gear so that I can buy and add solar panels to my setup.
Some posters have posited the "what if every car were an AI car" scenario. But the transformations all talk about changing our current cars into AI cars.
But I'd like to propose a different slant. If every car is an AI car, then how will this differ significantly from a distributed form of public transportation? If you break it down, the daily commute is filled with SUVs and a lone driver, with the SUV remaining parked (taking up space) for the whole day. So what about "transportion as a service" here (AKA: public transit and taxis)?
I mean, if I need to get to work and the wife needs to go shopping with the new-born, in many cases we need two cars. But if my car can drive itself home, then the wife can just wait the extra time and have her car back. Point is, we can optimize roadway usage, but we can also optimize car usage time. Communities could own car pools and "rent" them out. With communities co-ordinating their own commutes, but also with cars that can do intelligent pick-ups, you can get by with less cars and with less "big cars".
There are two simple reasons.
I'm late to the party, but I'll throw in my two cents here. Visit the MS site!
The truth is, you know how to program, you want to learn details. Well MS wants you to learn those details too. So go to www.msdn.com and check out what they have. You should be able to download a free copy of VS 2005 Express Edition that will let you play around.
If you really want to dig in, take an Microsoft Certification course. That means, buy a Self-paced training kit from MS and work your way from front to back (takes 50-100 hours). When you are done you will have a shiny certificate that says that you know some major aspect of C# (and you will).
Now, when it comes up in an interview, you can confidently state that "yes I know .NET" and you can provide a document to prove it. Employers put different weightings on the value of certifications, but if you're up against other new grads, you have more proof than they do about your knowledge. Plus you'll have demonstrated your "dedication to lifelong learning" in a concrete fashion (rather than "I just read a book and got some of it").
Just a "me too". I have several teachers in my extended family, and the general consensus is about in-line with your numbers. The typical teacher works (here in Canada) for about 50 hours / week over about 9 months of the year (including extra time for x-mas and spring break). So basically 50 hours * 40 weeks = 2000 hours/yr, which is really close to an average work year (with two weeks vacation).
Things like extra education may be annoying, but they are not that far out for general knowledge workers. Some teachers actually receive a certain amount of holidays during the year (often known as sick days), but around here they receive more of these days than average.
All in all, teaching pays like most post-secondary educated jobs with funky hours (and ornery clients... er kids). In my area it pays on par with nursing and better than things like IT, physics, chem or even Engineering. So really, the only issue (as raised) is simply that good teachers can't really "climb the ladder" by being good at what they do, unless they ship themselves off to a private school. (and of course, many people don't want to deal with unruly kids, but hey what's new :)
So you got one reply with a cute story. Mine's not cute. I worked for a small consulting firm for two years (left on my two-year). I knew what they were billing, I knew what I was making, and what my co-workers (both on-site and off-site) were making. So when they gave me a $500 recruitment bonus for bringing on a new guy (in an industry where our competitors pay 2k), I knew that I was getting the short end of the stick (especially when he came in at the same salary with less credentials and less experience/time with the company). With no profit-sharing in place, that guy saved them a few thousand dollars in job ads and generated tens of thousands of dollars in the first year alone and my cut was a sub-2% bonus, once. Heck that was less than 1 day of billing for him.
I was the first one to receive "the award", I put on a company smile (whilst I steamed inside), and I guess they mis-read me, b/c it became company policy. They announced it by internal e-mail and received no internal replies (wonder why). They followed that up with a newspaper job posting (for multiple positions) and received less than a dozen unqualified replies. The newspaper ad cost at least 3k and we know this. When 3k gets you zero qualified applicants, you'd like to think that one qualified one would be worth $500 :)
Obviously, I left, and everyone in my ex-company will be getting significant pay raises this year or there likely won't be a company next year. I know, I've spoken with everyone, they know the financial reality. When we got a $500 x-mas gift from the company, we know how much that really cost them and how much they were holding back.
My point is simple though, assume that employees know exactly what everyone else is making. B/c we talk. I did, others knew what I made, and others shared back. If managers foolishly think they can hide the truth and they can "play the wage game" then somebody is just going to oust the pay structure. There are exceptions (Sales), but in IT where everyone acts in teams, you have to assume that people talk and do drinks and share.
If you can't post your salaries on the wall for everyone to see, isn't that really just a sign that you're ashamed of your pay decisions?
Some have mentioned a VM, but I've seen one step further. My father's (120-user) engineering firm has started replacing their engineer desktops with Macs running Parallels. Some are using Mac laptops with windows on a second monitor, others have the desktop with quick keys set up to switch.
Either options costs about the same as the equivalent Vista machine, but the users I've spoken with preferred their new Macs to a new Vista box. Despite a learning curve, they're excited to move everything over. Right now, they're just using Office apps and Safari/Firefox, but stuff is slowly moving.
As mentioned by another poster though, many apps in the Enterprise environment already have some form of Citrix Portal or Web distribution. My most recent Enterprise client (I consult) was using Citrix/AD/Crystal Enterprise for deployment of all of their business apps. Basically everything fired from the Citrix Portal (and CE is done via browser), so Mac or Vista, all they really need to do is make Citrix work and the rest is details.
I don't expect anyone to jump in with both feet, but it wouldn't surprise me to see more companies start to make the "slow shift".
HUH? OK, you provided tons of opinions (with some poor math) and then did nothing to defend your original comments. You just railed off a bunch of opinions that completely contradict your original comment that
.
Now, to top this all off, you went tangential to my questions. I didn't ask if it was worth "paying extra money for a better school", I asked if was worth taking out a loan (i.e.: monthly payment) to fund an education. And mortgages don't carry tax benefits here in Canada how much does that change things?
What you're fundamentally missing here is the nature of each of the items I listed.
So if I rent a car, I still get the transportation service, but I'm not throwing extra money to try and own the car. If I rent an apartment I get the housing service without the overhead of maintaining a house. If I take out a loan and purchase a car, I'm slowly accumulating some equity in the car, but I'm also paying for the car as a service and I'm lining the banks pockets to pay for the car that I couldn't afford in cash.
Now to the issue at hand: Hardware/Software.
Hardware, right now, is self-obsoleting. It's just the way it is. If I spend $1,000 on computer hardware, that computer will be worth $100 dollars in about 3 years. Now if I'm running a company and I could buy the hardware for $50/month or lease it for $33/month, which should I be doing? Well, if my workers continue to need up-to-date hardware (graphic designers, engineers, developers, etc.) Then I should really be leasing. Given that the hardware is depreciating by 30%/year, it doesn't really seem like a good idea to "invest in it". Computer hardware isn't like a good shovel, it doesn't work until it breaks, it becomes irrelevant long before it breaks.
Now software is the exact same thing. You say:
Well software is not a tangible item, software is a service. Software continues to work only so long as its developer decides to keep it working. Software is self-obsoleting.
Look at a program like QuickTax for an easy example. It comes in a box, you pay money for it, it has an install CD and a manual and all these cool tangible things, but it's just a service. It's like a tax-guy in a box. If you kept the thing on your shelf for 12 months, it wouldn't be worth anything. Well, Quicken is the same way, I've been running Quicken since '98, but I have XG 2003 installed. I just received an e-mail that support for XG 2003 is up. There will be no more updates, no more fixes, no more support, the app is dead it's time to upgrade. The service is basically dead.
So I paid $100 for it, and I'll have to drop another $100 (so it's dropped in price), but wouldn't it just have been easier to pay $25/year for it? I mean, I pay the same amount, Intuit gets a regular cash influx (rather than yelling at me every four years), and Intuit can use that regular income to fund continuing improvement.
As to this comment:
Your whole argument rests on the concept that leasing a car is "slightly" cheaper than purchasing a car outright, but it's not. You're also assuming that the extra money you spend on owning the car will actually show up in equity at some point. Four years ago interes
Monthly payments are a means for the wealthy to keep the poor poor.
OK, I'll bite, are you for or against the rental of software? You've just given a bunch of good reasons for renting hardware and then you quote this stuff about "monthly payments" followed by another contradictory sentence: "The wise do not live beyond their means.".
The problem with both of these statements lie in a definition of terms. The "wisdom" of your first sentence would imply that people receiving regular (say monthly) paycheques are inherently "not wealthy". I mean, I'm sure that Ted Turner receives monthly cheques from his clients but I don't see how that makes him or clients "not wealthy".
You second statement seems to evidence the problem in the first. If the wise live beneath their means, then shouldn't the wise be renting quite regularly? If I need a car and can't afford to spend $600/month to buy one, should I lease one for $400 instead? I mean, I've just shaved $200/month off of my expenses, so I've found a way to live beneath my means via rental. Or are you implying that I simply shouldn't own the car until I can pay for it outright in cash? (i.e.: all software should be purchased in full?) Does the same concept apply for a house, a PS3 and an education? Would "the wise" ever take out student loans b/c they couldn't afford tuition?
Are you saying that leasing hardware is OK, but that renting software is bad? B/c it seems to me that unsupported software is less useful than unsupported hardware, but your whole last paragraph is just a jumble.
And businesses? Do you really think they'd be stupid enough to pay an ongoing subscription fee when they can just pay it up front and amortize it over the same time period? Uh... no.
Ummm... that's exactly what they do. Many businesses (big and small) lease their computer hardware. It's easy on the accounting side and it helps with cash flow. Many businesses also lease their computer software in one way or another. They buy site licenses (or somesuch) for Office and Windows and Crystal Enterprise and Oracle, etc.
In fact, when an enterprise-class client of mine was looking into the price of moving from Crystal Enterprise 10 to XI, the price was quoted as zero. They were paying an annual support fee for the product over a certain number of procs. If the client wanted to move to XI, Crystal was just going to send them the disks, b/c they want the rolling support fees.
Now in this case, $15/month is simply too much (especially in Brazil), however, the concept of pay-as-you-go software is both sound and useful. Clients receive ever-improving software and software companies receive consistent revenue streams on the basis that they continue to improve the software. And really, it's a self-correcting system. If I don't like the product, I'll look for a competing product with a better price.
Sure there are monopoly problems, but competitors worried about drawing in new customers will be building data converters to help keep on top. In fact, that's what's happening right now, all of the new free online utilities have converters for Office docs. People are sick of the Office upgrade cycle and Google wants to capitalize (ironically, Office finally has a version worthy of calling an upgrade).
The reality is that for low-tech software like word processors and spreadsheets, the market is saturated and has been for a while. No silly schemes like software rental are going to change that.
I'll agree with your first statement, but not your conclusions. I believe that the rental model will in fact revolutionize the way software sales are done, especially in the low-tech markets. I mean, imagine that someone shows me a new spreadsheet app that I really like, but I can't afford it and I'm already paying the MS tax for Excel. Well under the rental model, this is no longer the case. I can rent the new software for a few months and try it out (most likely on a trial). If that software is more suited to me (cheaper, more functional, etc.), then I cancel one subscription, export my data and pick up the other subscription. Now I'm not out anything but a little time. I haven't killed my cash flow, I just get my new product.
This sounds like another reason we should hop on the Open Source file formats. With this ruling, you can't even pay the man for licensing, lest there be another "submarine license" for more money. Man, who wants to make MP3 encoders now?
Man, only on Slashdot... thanks, you've made my day with this one.
No, you definitely need a newspaper for more than one day. My local Saturday paper is the one with all of the Job and Rental ads, the big Obits and announcements (plus the Sunday comics one day early). The local 7-Eleven actually keeps these papers available until Sunday night b/c people (myself included) come in on Sunday looking for Saturday's paper.
This paper is read, written on and stored for most of the week as it may take a few days to apply to all of the jobs or rental requests. People will clip out Obits for funerals later on in the week or even grab the flyers to bring to stores with them during the week ("Hello, I'm looking for one of these...")
In the same vein, we like to store vanity or important clippings. If there was an article about me or my friends/family, I'd like to keep it. Obituaries are saveable, in fact people actually pay for extra copies just to have extra clippings (had this request when I was a delivery boy).
The newspaper thing "seems neat" but it's really not a good idea.
Um, the "Loser pays" system in Canada does not apply to small claims court. Nor is the "Loser Pays" system automatic, it's just more commonly used here.
The deal is, you have the documentation to back you up. If it has been less than 6 months, then you're likely still in range. The entire process will take approximately 1-2 days (8 to 16 hours) and you have $2,500 on the line (so that's worth two days isn't it?).
All you have to do is go to small claims court and fill out a few forms. There are no lawyers, just you, the defendant, the judge and your papers. What's more, if someone from VISA doesn't show up, it's an automatic victory and VISA owes you the $2,500, so now VISA (who screwed you) has to spend a bunch of their time just to keep their money. In a case like this, there is simply no way that VISA can demand double damages from you.
Think of it this way. You can put in 16 hours of work (or less) and get 2,500, that's like $156/hour. Seems worth it.
Couldn't the programs inherit the benefits of a multi-core system if the APIs they call are written to distribute the work to the cores? I know this probably isn't optimal but there must be some benefits from this.
Yeah, this we have. Run a Virus Scan on a Dual-Core proc and you can continue to work normally.
I could take an old library (QuickDraw for example) and totally rewrite it to take advantage of a new architecture as long as it accepts the old calls and returns the expected results.
Rewriting old libraries is not trivial and "taking advantage of the new architecture" first requires that this is even possible. If I'm running a business app that retrieves data from a database putting 5 DB calls on 5 "different cores" isn't necessarily going to make anything run faster. It might help if I'm talking to 5 different servers and if the 5 DB calls are independent. But even then, I can solve that problem by making the calls asynchronously and waiting for the results.
Really, at the moment, the top home uses for multiple cores are: video and audio processing, and gaming (e.g.: AI on a different core). Skype can suck up proc time, ripping and recording movies/songs can be intensive, transcoding files for DVDs can grind the comp to halt. And games can always find a use for another ounce of power here or there, but they do have to be programmed with multiple cores in mind.
All in all, this article is really talking about the Hard Problems, like a market analysis computer or a protein folder that needs to perform billions of parallel calculations per second. But these are so far from Home/Office use that they're really "out of scope" for the typical user (even the typical Slashdotter).
Here's a nod of support. I'm working at a government site at the moment and windows licenses are pretty much irrelevant. I don't even know if they pay a "per-computer fee" as much as just a "we're approximately this size fee".
And once you hit "that size", even things like CALs are nearly irrelevant. I mean seriously, if you have 20,000 employees, how do you even count the numbers of users and computers? At that size, you will be adding/deleting several users/day.
Ironically, she doesn't know if she wants the MS Degree or the Mrs Degree. The latter is probably out, b/c she's stubbornly independent and frankly I don't want to pay all of the bills. But right now, she's just so happy she's finishing. She'll make it through with zero student debt(!), but she'll likely want to work some before she starts pursuing the next phase.
My gf is in her 4th year of Classical Studies and it is simply recognized that Wikipedia is not a citable source. Just like you shouldn't cite encyclopedias.
The department should not need to put a ban on Wikipedia citing. That's almost like recognizing that it may, in some way, be acceptable, but that this University won't allow it. Really, it's already recognized that citing primary sources is important and that citing an encyclopedia is unacceptable.
Now, if the Uni has a published ban on using certain reference types. Then I agree that they can add Wikipedia. However, if such a ban does not exist, then there's not point in creating one. Just tell students that Wikipedia is an unacceptable source along with many others.
So we'll just end up with 40% of people stealing music before the studios just give in. After which we'll be flooded with 5 years of low-quality movies until people start anteing up again.
And that would be different from today, how?
Well for starters 40% of people are not stealing movies :)
Now people have always complained about the quality, but let's be realistic here, even a bad movie like The Marine receives a $15 million budget. Imagine how bad The Marine would have been with half the budget. Not only would you have bad car chases, they'd also be done with bad cars :) I know that money != quality, but money opens doors for quality, money in the industry lets you do things like A Scanner Darkly. There will always be more crappy movies than good ones, but that's not the point really. The point is that Hollywood, with a lack of money (or perceived lack) will just cut stuff.
Less movies == less good movies (at least to start). Good movies are hard to make and run the risk of small audiences. So unless we and our friends and our friends' friends, all start packing up the art house movies, then we're just going to get more John Cena movies. And if Hollywood becomes scared, they're not going to release less John Cena movies, they'll release more. (again for a time, until someone breaks the mold and everyone else sees $$$ again)
18% sounds like a good start, I'd expect this number to increase to about 35-40% before the studios finally release non-DRMed versions for downloads (at lower than DVD prices).
This board (Slashdot) is filled with a virtual panoply of views on this subject. As is usual though, I think the truth of the matter lies in the nebulous neutral zone.
Let's face it, neither side has really taken the high road on this. People download and distribute movies like they were free commodities and the MPAA bullies people unreasonably and tries to make us all thieves.
I have to sit in theatre with my $12 ticket and watch the stunt double talk about his belief that stealing movies is wrong (I just paid $12 for this, talk about preaching to the choir). And then I blow 20+ minutes watching advertisements for other movies (AKA: previews). When I take a movie home, I have to watch the trailers (they lock out the buttons) for movies I may already have seen or in fact may already own. And then I can't complain and return the video b/c it's already open.
However, the vast load of downloaders are some mix of vigilantes and free-loaders, collectors and connoisseurs. So every solution proposed by the MPAA (i.e.: DRM) effectively blocks the good downloaders as well as the free-loaders.
In the end really, both sides are too stuck up to take the high road and fix the problem. So we'll just end up with 40% of people stealing music before the studios just give in. After which we'll be flooded with 5 years of low-quality movies until people start anteing up again.
Why not just skip the whole process, stop bad-mouthing everyone and figure out something that works. If I want to buy newly-released Italian movies for my family and I can't find them, then who can I lean on to get them out here? If I can't stand previews, then how can I organize around them? Can I show up late with a dozen friends and walk in near the estimated end of the previews? Can I take cell phone calls during the previews, I mean, it's not really the movie is it? You know the stunt double guy? I just stopped going to the theatre that showed him. Maybe I should start asking sales clerks about return policies on DVDs, or refusing to buy DVDs that are "not quite DVDs".
I'm a basketball fan, but I don't have cable. Once they start posting my Raptors games to the Net, then I will start buying them (so that I can watch them on the bus to work). But until then, I just don't watch them. I don't download them illegally out of some self-righteous belief that I can, I'm taking the high road and waiting for them to catch up.
What I want to see is somebody come on the air and actually explain what these 3 different OSes really are. Someone who can actually explain that the three OSes are somewhat comparable, but that they are different tools. Maybe someone can pull out an automotive example.
YMMV on these analogies, they're not perfect, but you get the point.
Now take a look at the pictures and the specs and the options. I mean, they all go from point A to point B and they all support CD players and they can all carry some type of load. However they are completely different vehicles with completely different purposes.
I don't know about your non-computer-literate friends, but given this type of example, my friends/family can understand that "comparing" the three is very apples/oranges and relatively pointless.
So there's really no point in starting a shouting match. DINKs don't argue with their friends about buying a van to shuttle their kids around; and the family of 6 doesn't argue about the DINKs driving their viper (with no extra passenger space!).
We inherently understand these differences, so let's learn to be equally accepting of our computer differences.
Clearly the balloonful is just a posing shot. You are however correct that TFA states "store the gas". The sentence is: "...an electrolyzer that uses the solar power to generate hydrogen from water, and a number of hydrogen tanks that store the gas until it is needed by the fuel cell."
Now given the dual nature of the word "gas" and typical journalistic practices. I will concede that you're probably correct, but the source material leaves some doubt. I mean, if the compression hardware is actually available, the stuff still comes out in a gaseous states before being liquified. So maybe the reporter just saw the gas and didn't see the compressors.
Thank you Slashdot, I'm sharing this article with my girlfriend. I've been dreaming of this for a two years now, but now I know it's possible.
I think that the key landmark from this home is the fuel cell stack. The whole thread has talked about cost efficiency and redundancy and even overall environmental friendliness. But I think that the fuel cell stack is the right place to address many of those issues.
A powered up stack can help increase redundancy, without precluding the thing from being connected. Now, a power outage isn't fatal, just inconvenient. Now you can also increase equipment utilization. People need power intermittently and some power sources (solar, wind) only generate intermittently. These two "intermittences" are not always the same, so the stack helps mitigate the problem.
Moreover, some sources can generate power consistently (hydro-electric dams), but they don't. With a good distributed battery system, the dam can just keep running. The dam can "charge your batteries" overnight and then you can supplement the dam energy at peaks by using the "battery".
From an environmental perspective, the "stack" provides us with increased awareness of energy use. Much talk has been made of "the little things", but really, we're not very good at watching these. It's not like we really know what these numbers are anyways. Even on Slashdot, who knows how many kWh you consume on an annual basis? What about monthly or weekly numbers?
Where I live, you get billed for "Hydro" every third month. That's not really a great feedback mechanism. If we want others to learn about "energy efficiency" they need feedback on their energy use. They need to be able to look at a "month-end" number that says "You used X". I think that "the stack" can help this by doubling as an energy monitor. Once you can know your numbers, you can see the cost of your AC for the day or notice what it means to turn off the lights or run a toaster oven for small meals.
And once you have "the stack", you can start supplementing your energy use. You can now add "just a few" solar panels to an existing system and you can actually see the difference.
Seems to me like this "fuel cell in my basement" is actually the beginning of a solution to many possible problems. We get redundant power, the ability to store power from inconsistent power supplies and the ability to "just keep running" consistent power supplies. And we get the ability to "add our own" supplies to the grid while also receiving feedback about our usage.
Adding a stack in the basement seems like a great jump point for making a "greener" us.