Their numbers, not mine. I think 82 at night is uncomfortable, too uncomfortable. I handle 78 at night OK, but anything more and I'd be changing sheets daily from the sweat. Pillow top mattresses hold heat well, and even with a thin sheet and a ceiling fan running, I can't do much more.
I have to think that in a typical 3 bedroom house that an efficient air conditioner, running at night when it's not fighting the sun, could actually use less electricity than 3-4 ceiling fans running.
Of course, MOST parts of the country don't stay above 82 at night, except on rare nights. Simply opening the windows is fine by me in SC for all but about 6 weeks of the year. When I liven in CT we didn't have AC at all except in the kitchen and living room.
My info is right from the EPA. It's not MY decision of what is and isn't comfortable. Perhaps if you didn't keep your house at 64 all winter you'd be used to 78. Today while I've been out and about I took the chance to notice a few thermostat settings:
Starbucks, 79 degrees BestBuy, 78 degrees My bank's lobby, 78 degrees McCallister's Deli, 75 degrees (some older woman complained it was cold while we were there) My house is currently 78 degrees. If I was wearing a suit, or jeans and a thinck shirt, sure, I'de be uncomfortable, but I'm in a thin summer polo I wore to work and a pair of Khakis. Perfectly comfortable.
I have a few friends like you. They're all over 200 lbs (some closer to 275). One has been inspired by The Biggest looser, and he's lost over 80 lbs in the last 10 months. We used to call him "Yeti" he liked it so cold, now he's comfy at closer to 80, and won't let you near his thermostat to make it cooler.
Actually, in SC, power companies don't have to give you a SINGLE CENT. If you overproduce, your meter does NOT run backwards. You end up giving them power for free.
There are few states that require power companies to pay you for your power. Most power companies "pay" you simply because they use simple power meters, and generating power back into the grid, assuming it's phased properly and switched in a way they support, just runs the meter backwards. When they meter guy checks your meter, all that's important is today's reading and the last one. If you generated enough power to actually produce, NET, more than you use, your meter would actually read less today than it did last month. They are NOT required to pay you cash for that power, except I believe in NJ.
I know of NOWHERE where power companies are required to pay for MORE for electricity than they are billing you for it. Technically, when your meter is currently running backwards, what's happening is that power you "paid for" is being "bought back" from them. This is a temporary phenomenon, and the meter will run the other way again for most of the night. The $/KWh they're "paying" you is simple the metered rate. This is in comparrison the the "COST" of the power that they make themselves, or what they buy excess power from other power companies at. Yes, technically they're "paying" several times more for your power, but in reality, you're not selling your power to another consumer, you're simply "using less" yourself. The power company does not mark up the power they buy from you, it's provided to others at the exact same $/KWh that they get their own electricity for direct from the power cvompany.
What IS happening, is that the power company is billing you for fewer KWhs. The power you add to their grid during the day is sold to other people at $0 profit. But you can look at this from one side or the other, because the net energy vs billed meter hours is exactly the same profit for the power company, same cost to consumers, exact same economy as if you simply used 100% of your own power and used less of theirs. Buy allowing it to flow into their grid during the day, you're saving them from having to provide you someone else more by using auxiliarry power sources. Its actually saving you money, saving them money and logistics, and costing the other consumers the exact same amount....
The only possible way this could be abused would be if so many people were generating excess power that it actually started to effect the bottom line of the power company, simply because instead of producing 1 billion KWhs, they're only producing 900 million, meaning there's 10% fewer hours they could bill for. If a regional, unregulated power company (legal monopoly) decided to raise the cost of electricty to offset this loss of revenue, that's the only possible abuse. Of course, it's these local companies that refuse to let your meters run backwards.
I have 2 houses. 1 is about 3 hours from the other, both in the same state. At one house, if I produces excess electricity, I get NO refund or credit. in other words, the power company is getting power from me for free, then SELLING it to other people. They make 300% more profit off my power than their own... At the other house, I'm not legally allowed to connect my own power system to theirs at all, so excess power would just be given off as wasted heat.
Many water heaters are natural gas. Do you expect to keep yours as the price of fuel goes up? Most people I know are replacing their gas water heaters with electric since doing so has at this point about a 4 year return on investment just in the fact that they won't need the gas hookup (minimum $20 per month fee), let alone the actual gas costs.
I'm in an apartment complex here in SC. Of the 16 buildings here, only 1 had gas heaters at this point. It's the oldest building, and not only does the water heater make hot water for the house, but it's also the boiler for the heat system, so it's prohibitively expensive to replace (water heater, heat exchanger, ventalation return, and AC unit all at once).
Tankless systems save at best 15% energy vs today's good insulated tank heaters.
Problem: tankless heaters use beterrn 90 and 120 AMPS of power in real time. The average household is running hot water for 45 minutes of time between 6 and 8 AM, and another 30-60 minutes of time between 6PM and 10PM.
Making hot water on demand means using power on demand. Here's why this is an issue (completely made up, but I expect reasonable numbers)
A typical air conditioner runs, in the peak of heat of a day, for about 10 minutes per cycle about twice per hour (2 minutes per hour). Everyone in California has air conditioning. They use 20 Amps typically when running the compressor, and as much as 30 amps for about 20 seconds when spinning up. Based on the law of averages, it's possible about 35% of air conditioners could be running concurrently in a neighorhood of say 1000 homes, and about 2% of them could be spinning up at that time. That's a little over 7000Amps of power draw @ 220volts
At the same time, lets assume just 25% of those houses have on demand hot water. That's 250 homes out of the 1000 that between 6AM and 8AM "could" be using hot water on demand. Since they typically use it for 45 minutes, that means that about 40% of them will be using it at the same time, possibly more. At a typical 90 amps, that's 9000 amps of power. I'd also say that's "conservitive" to say that only 40% would be using it at the same time. I'de bet that about 7AM, 75% of them are likely taking showers, washing breakfast dishes, shaving, or in some way using hot water. We could be talking 25% of the population using TWICE the amount of electricity that air conditioners use. (in short sperts).
You see, over the course of 24 hours, an AC unit uses a LOT more electricity than a water heater. The water heater uses enough that in most places, power companies ask (and in some places require) you to add timer systems, so that your water tank is only on at certain times of non-peak electric generation. If your water heater needs to make 120 gallons of hot water a day, who cares if it looses 10% or even 20% of it's energy to store that water for later if we'd have to resort to methods of handling the peak loads of on-demand power to go tankless, methods which by themselves are usually less efficient than the amount you just lost by storing hot water.
Also, don't forget, when looking at a tankless system, you're not only looking at a $700-1200 unit, compared to a $400 water tank, you're also looking at about $200 in plumbing charges, and depending on your home design, up to $2500 to have an electrician install a 2nd power box, additional 90-120 amp 220 volt line from a pole, and home-run to your water heater closet, and some new circuit breakers. (A friend of mine bought a heater, installed it himself, then found out he needed 110 AMPs to run it, $2200 later the electrician and CP&L were done with him... He figures it will take 16 years to pay off the difference vs having simply replacede his talk with a top of the line efficient model, and the tankless heater only has a 10 year warranty...
Electric cars and plug in hybrids are going to be a plague. When everyone gets home from work and plugs in at once, we will REQUIRE a system to handle it. Unfortunately, we need a FLEXIBLE system. When you come home and plug in, you might have 25% battery free, but maybe you know you're headed out again after dinner to run errands or something. You need to be able to plug in and tell the system when you expect to leave again, so it knows how to prioritize your load.
More so, in hybrids, it needs to know the fuel economy of your vehicle and the average price of fuel, so it can determine, on its own, if say paying a higher price for electricity to get priority charge might actually cost more than running on gas, maybe it won't charge. Of course, it also needs to know your battery level, and amount of gas remaining in the tank.
This by no means is an impossible system to program (it's all of about 10 decisions, and a few numbers a simple chip can pull from freely available sources on the web and a few sensors in the car). What we need is a way to allow the human to prioritise it, and say "charge now" or "don't bother, I'm not leaving until morning..." It needs to know our schedule.
Most of us, ideally, should be charging at work, not at home... A parking garage, or streetside meter with a plug in adapter and credit card reader (or power company account card reader, to direct bill to your power bill at home) is the best place to charge. We havce aple sunlight to borrow for solar charging during the day, nothing at night. We can pump water up hill during the day and charge at night just the same, but at a loss of efficiency of about 40%.
By using wind, solar, and other 100 % renewable power sources, they can overproduce enough juice during the day to pump that water themselves. The wind, tidal, and geothermal systems provide a nice base load at night to supplement the other power sources. Also, the water's not running downhioll all the time, just what's needed to stem the overdemand for short periods.
We've been trying to get these things built in the USA for years, but places we can make them are too far from need points, so without building our superconducting redundant electric grid, we're a few decades off from reality here. They could power California easy enough from the rocky mountanis off that though...
Yea, I call BS on that too. My fridge uses a 120v AC on a 20 Amp circuit. My cable modem uses 12v DC at 1.5 Amps. I don't know the conversion, but I'd be willing to bet I can run the modem for close to a month on what the fridge uses running the compressor for 30 minutes.
The batter backup I have under my desk provides 1500VA. It will run my telephone base station (wireless phone dock), wi-fi router/firewall, cable modem, VoIP box, and cell phone charger plus it's own LCD display screen for about 8 hours without power from the wall. It would run my fridge for about 7 minutes...
Actually, scientists have been looking at creating VAST underwater resivoirs, combined with surface resivoirs, in a cyclic pumping solution. The idea is that water exists in it's natural state underground. During the day, when solar is being generated faster than it can be used, we pump water to the surface, or simply a higher level resivoir. At night, we let it flow back to it's subteranian home, and generate power. Since the flow of water from surface to underground can be tightly controlled, we can produce variable power at will, and "store" wind and solar energy.
The resivoirs are manmade, in mostly non-pourous rock, that are coated with a sealant. The underground portion would be hundreds of feet underground. The surface resivoir would fill and drain like a tide (and "sureface" doesn't necesarily mean open to air, it could just be one higher up in the rock bed)
Since the water is contantly cycled, it can also be easily filtered, so contamination is not an issue. As a bonus, in some places these can be built where rain runoff normally goes, and we can turn it into a great big water purification plant, and any water arriving by steam or river generates electricity. We don't need to dam it off, just funnel it into a hole in the ground, so there's no mass change to the environment (no new lakes 6 miles across to deal with). If we start by pumping seawater to the location, and fill the system from scratch, we also don't have to cannibalize existing ecosystems to get the water, and desalination and filtering would render it drinkable for future uses.
With all that water, we could build the nuclear plant down there, 500 feet underground, where it's safe from terorists, airplanes, and leaks.
Sure, it's gonna cost A LOT, but water power systems have VERY long lifespans, as do solar and wind generators. We'll need to replace the filters regularly, and the pumps occasionally, but a modular infrastructure would be part of the plan.
It's quite nearly sci-fi, but also quite possible.
Expanding the system for additional power generation is as simple as building another resivoir below the 2, giving another chamber to flood water into. We'd just need more solar and wind to pump it back to the surface.
Instant poewr, at instant notice, over superconducting lines to regional power grids anywhere in the USA we need it.
Actually, 74 "room tempurature" is considdered cool to most people, including my wife. 76 is a comfortable setting for most people. The standard settings that the EPA and your power company recomend it to keep the tempurature at 78 or higher in the summer and 68 or below in the Winter.
Actually, in the summer, you should wake at 78 degrees, it should rise to 85 when you're not home, return to 78 in the evening, and rise slightly to 82 at night. In the winter, you should wake at 70, it should drop to 62 when noone is home in the daytime, return to 70 in the evening, and settle at 66 when sleeping. A tolerance of +/- 2 degrees is permitted in the thermostat (if set to 78, it will rise to 80 before cooling to 76, then slowly rise back to 80, etc...)
This is the Energy Start setting you need to comply with in order to receive EnergyStar certification fro your home, and the accompanying discount on your power bill.. When you signed up for EnergyStar discounts, you AGREED to these settings. Failure to maintain them, should your power company be aware, could leave you lible to repay any back discounts you recieved. I've never heard of this, but EPA certified programable thermostats all use this default setting (and some can not be overridden if they're monitored by your power company, something Califiornia is about to pass into law).
I got $200 from the power company for allowing them, at their cost, to install a meter regulator for my electric water heater. I have run out of hot water once in 3 years, and we took 7 showers in 2 hours, combined with running a load of dishes and a load of laundry.
My water heater happens not only to be a well insulated newer model, but I added an insulating wrap to it, and turned the temp up to about 150.
If I run out of water during a metered time (which that wasn't, I simply exceeded it's capacity to keep up with us), all I'd have needed to do was flip- an override switch manually on the meter.
The water heater gets NO electricity for 15 hours of the day (in 2 shifts). At it's worst, it's about 5 degrees cooler than when powered.
One thing i'll keep you away from though: on-demand water heaters. Yes, they CAN save electricity, but keep in mind, heating water on the run takes a LOT of energy (90-120 AMPS depending on the heater, 4-6 times what your OVEN uses...). Yes, if your old heater is poorly insulated, switching to on-demand might sound like a good idea, but simply installing a highly efficient tank heater means you have hot water anytime, regardless of when it heated it. If everyone switches to on-demand water heaters, imaging the energy load at 6AM!!!!
One of my personal pet peaves is those damed plug-in scent warmers.
I had a few, and when going through my previous home a few years back (it was INCREDIBLY poortly insulated, and I did everything I could to save power and avoid $350 bills), i took a serious look at what those things were costing me.
On average, they only burn about 4 watts each. I had 4 of those for 18 total watts (a few diferent types that used different power loads), and one candle plate (thing you set jar candles on to melt, used 17 watts).
Over 30 watts, running 24/7/365 (and often with dried up cartidges we'd forget to replace). You know what? Not only did it waste a lot of power, they damned things actually don't smell as good, or last as long, as some scented oil in a diffuser (spherical bowl with some wooden wicks stuck in it). I have 4 of these in my house now. You can pick up a good diffuser at a nature shop, world market store, or other places, or make one yourself by hitting a craft shop. The oil itself is cheap in bulk, and I cut it 3:1 with perfume base (aka rubbing alcohol). It's about $5 worth of oil to fill one, but I only do that about 3 times a year... Same cost in plug-ins for that room? $4 every 45 days... more than twice the cost not counting the electricity saved!
warning: If you have small childred or michevous cats, you may want to 1) place your oil difuser out of reach/access or 2) use strong double sided tape and affic it permanantly in place (if you have a spot you can do that to). I have 2 of mine in wall mount sconces, one above the fridge, and 1 in my bedroom on top of the gentlemans chest (about 5 feet off the floor). Getting spilled oil out of a carpet, furniture, or other surface is not something I plan to ever have to do.... (again);D
Trust me on this. I am an IT provider to nearly 100 industrial sites as part of my commercial client base. NONE of them shut down their systems at night, NOT ONE. They may let a bunch of employees go home, and many don't run 3rd shifts, but most of the equipment stays on, even the lights in most cases.
It's a very rare industrial site that has not learned that the time and energy and logistics of stopping production and starting it again, with product left on the line partially assembled, is not only counter productive, but in many cases simply costs more.
It's easier to use fewer people, or slow the line down slightly, and run 24/7, than it is to stop/start daily.
Commerical (most of them), sure, they turn out the ligths at night, but not industial.
Unfortunately, it's not "at night" that's the issue anyway. It's the few hours at the peak of the morning, and at sunset that are the worst, especially in summer when AC runs on electricity only, where in the winter much heat is from other sources (coal, gas, oil, wood, etc).
AC units kick on and off frequently, every 15-45 minutes depending on the home, climate, and time of day. During the peak heat of the day, everyone is running one, businesses and homes alike. Although it "saves electricity" (assuming your house is well insulated) to use a timer based AC system (wamer when noone is home, cooler when thay are, automatically) the real truth is that now we not only have to deal millions of units turning on and off, but nearly ALL of them turn on about 4:15-4:30, and run continuously while they cool the house down to it's comfort temp from it's all-day noone-is-home temp. This is a MASSIVE load on the system.
By adding some inteligence to the grid, we can stagger the times AC units come on and off. By allowing some tollerances, and some minor schedule adjustments, we can 1) prevent every AC unit from running at the same time, 2) cool your house earlier one day, and later another, balancing your electric use with others, 3) keep your house withing 3 degrees of your target at all times, 4) charge you more for unaceptable "comfort" levels (if you like it colder in your house than 78 degrees in the summer, no problem, we'll just charge you more), 5) we can avoid a lot of "surge" use, avoiding lots of expensive supplement power, and lower to overall cost WITHOUT building more power plants.
We do need more power plants. As people bring home plug-in hybrids or full electric cars, we'll have to account for this. We can't have half of california plug their car in at 5:45PM and expect all of them to start charging at once...
The good news is (most) electronics are getting more efficient. As we switch light bulbs, get more inteligent and more efficient ACs, fridges, and other appliances, use lower power PCs and TVs, and start doing other things like eliminating "sleep creap" from devices, throwing out plug-in scent warmers, etc, we can offset a bunch of it, but not even close to all. I can only hope that all of our NEW power will come anything but fossil fuel.
Line conditioners can be added to an entire house for a few hundred bucks. These don't completely clean the line of all issues, but spikes are dropped to a ground line, and a lot of exterior noise is removed. It's a good start, but does not protect from brown out or sags in power.
In a newer home, with a modern breaker panel, you should not be getting flickering from voltage irregularity in your house, but most people live in homes or apartments built more than 20 years ago, and most systems older than that do not properly isolate one circuit from another.
Your PS may be rated for 100-240 volt (really 100-120 and then 200-240, assuming the position of the switch on the PS). But that's it's own operating limits, not the components attached. unless you have a high end PS with active conditioning (very few do), then slight variations in voltage going in to the PS do translate through the transformer. Your CPU clock runs at up to 1300MHz, but this assumes predictable 3v or 5v signals. When power fluctuates up and down at small intervals, the CPU clock timing can also fluctuate. This causes voltage iregularities in the board based on capacator timing, other onboard transformers, and circuit paths. It becomes possible using high performance electronics for timing in differnt parts of a board to conflict, and this is a primary cause of mainbord lock-ups.
CPUs are typically, on most mainboards, protected from onboard voltage regulators. This typically is limited to higher end systems, (and nearly all server and workstation grade equipment). Many modern PCs are also beginning to include these components on lower end products.
Your home theater howeverequipment, usually no.
Electronic parts fail for the folowing reasons: - environemt (temp, humidity, condensation, etc) - abuse (lack of cleaning, physical damage) - manufacturing defects (usually reveal themselves in 30-60 days) - Mechanical failure (does not apply to solid state electronics) - electrical damage (causing either complete part failure, or micro fractures in circuitry).
All outside factors removed the only real way for a computer device (excluding the HDD, CD, Floppy etc moving parts) to fail, something has to cause micro circuit damage. the only 2 causes of this are 1) improperly regulated power, and 2) EMP or other high intensity EMI. Since MI powerful enough to cause circuit damage is typically only associated with very close lightnight strikes, nuclear weapons, and other EMP causing events (all very rare) this leaves the bulk, over 97%, of all electronic component failures being left to bad power...
When a power supply is set to produce 3v 5v or 12v current, and the expected input is 110volt to do so, everything is happy. When power runs below 104 volt, the PS needs to adjust to accomodate a continual 3v current. Since power frequencies are at 60Hz, but mainboard frequencies are hundreds of times this, circuits can't be adjusted fast enough to account, and over time, these miniscule errors cause erosion of the substrate materials, and eventually lead to shorts in the microarchitecture. You can look around online and see before/after images of what a CPU looks like under high detail microscope after exposure to cleaned vs uncleaned power.
Although yes, you CAN get a UPS for as little as $40, it's simply no where near powerful enough to handle a 700watt stereo, big screen TV, game station, and more...
UPS units have very specific voltage limitations in terms of how much energy the battery can produce. The rating is in VAs (Volts time Amps).
Take the Amp requirement on all the pieces and parts of your home theatre system, multiple that bu 120 volts, and you'll quickly see than even a $300-400 UPS can't handle the load. even if it could, you're talking about placing a massive device somewhere near your entertainment center, with a battery weighing 50-70 pounds, and cooling fans that make quite a bit of noise.
Overloading a UPS battery can not only cause damage to your equipment, BUT IT IS A CLEAR FIRE HAZARD.
The Home Theatre units do not use batteries, they use electrical buffers. TVs are not designed to be powered when there's no electyricity, so a small buffer of about 10-15 seconds is all that is needed. When power dips, fluctuates, or has "static" in the line, it can be cleaned. These units range in size and cost, but are typically about $200 on the higher end for full home thatre filtering of up to 12-20 AMPS. There are higher end units costing over $1000 that fit in and look like your existing self audio equipment, and provide additional features to safely shut down your electronics using infrared signals before cutting power in an outage, and also small batteries to keep your TV fan running for a minute or two for projection TVs (the bulb may crack if the TV looses power suddenly and is not allowed to go through a cooling cycle. These bulbs are not covered under most waranties and cost up to $300 each. Want to know more? RTFM).
Equal performance is subject to debate. True, a simple increase in cable guage provides better signal, but filtering of external interference, Monster does that a bit better than their competitors. Is it worth it though? If you install properly sized cables and route them away from sources of interference, it's no big deal.
Now, that's really for analog signals... As for digital, it's not really a concern. A $15 HDMI or DVI cable is just as good as a $85 HDMI cable, assuming they're both rated for the same frequency response and distance (HDMI has several classifications, and it CAN make a difference).
As for fiber cables, light is light. A thicker, stronger shell simply helps protect you from over bending the cable and refracting the beam, but it adds no shielding or signal quality improvement of any kind, and in fact, the fiber core itself must be a very specific size in microns. Changing this size like you do in ordinary cables is not optional.
If you have a high end system, increasing cable thickness, adding better cable contacts, and improving shielding can be important, and can improve audio and video quality. On the other hand, unless you're running cables across power lines, very close to speakers, close to tube TVs, or over long distances, Monster offers no "discernable" differences vs their half priced competitors.
That said never use the cheap shit cables that actually come in the box. Allways buy quality replacements, and ensure the connectors are made from materials that don't corrode (i.e. not copper, silver, or aluminum) gold contacts are great, platinum is not worth the expense. In most cases you'll need new cables anyway just to make the distance between devices as 3' is almost never enough, but don't buy cheap unshielded cables ever. Allways look for decent stuff.
When buying a stereo or speakers, look to buy models that support screw on connections or tightening rings for the speaker wire. The cheap little clip style slots, like you typically find on the back of cheaper speakers and all-in-one stereo units do not provide a sufficient contact surface for 100 watt and higher outputs.
As for filtering, modern home theater equipment is more computer than TV or stereo, and this stuff is VERY sensitive to low quality poewr. A surge protector is WORTHLESS! You need power filtration with real time voltage regulation. Monster does a good job providing very high quality filtering systems for as little as $200-300. If you have high def, a suround sound stereo, a PS3 or xbox360, keep this in mind. 97% of all electronic failure is the result of low or inconsitent power. Surge protectors only stop massive oversurges (typically over 160 volts). Damage to computer electronics cn occur at voltage below 104 or above 116. Do your lights ever flicker in your house? Especially when your AC turns on or when your fridge kicks in? If so, GO BUY A POWER FILTER for every digital device in your house!!!
I'm even more worried about coordinated strikes. Our power grid has very little redundancy. there are about 20 sites in the USA that is more than a few were taken out at the same time, we'd be looking at nearly nationwide blackouts, and weeks to repair the grid.
Strap a whole bunch of C4 to a few super toewrs, bring em down, blow up a few regional transforming stations, etc, we'd by up shit creek...
Some of these are guarded, but they're are not enough guards to stop a large pack of determined terrorists... People who are willing to die don't fear rent-a-cops...
It's a miracle this hasn't happened yet.
Gaining control of the mainframe coul,d cause a lot more damage (forced oversurges, frying transformers, etc), and it's a BIG concern, but there certainly are other worries.
granted, water systems, even sewer systems, are nearly as vulnerable...
Apple is internally working on an open OSX solution, to be deployed on cusom built PCs. Details are scant, but we know they've been working with multiple hardware vendors behind closed doors for years, and have build drivers for a TON of products the Mac currently can;t be installed on.
Assuming Apple comes up with a 1) simple way of identifying compatible mac components, 2) intel releases some decent EFI mainboards, and 3) component manufacturers can actually work together, we will be seeing a full release of OS X in the future.
We expect that the Apple install process will cross check basic component support, access the Net via the network, and centrally download all the drivers it needs for the install process to work, and notify you before you install of unsupported devices it detects.
Of course, there will NOT be a $399 PC that will be certified to run it. You need dedicated graphics, and that alone is going to put you into $799 and higher PC solutions, but we expect Dell and others may start offering "Apple Compatible" PCs in the next 2 years or so, assuming Microsoft ever gets off it's ass, bows to intel and the resto of the works, and adds native EFI support to an upcoming XP patch and to Vista. If Microsof't doesn't, sooner rather than later, you won't be able to install Windows on PCs coming out with the latest chipsets...
Agreed. Linux may not support all of the devices microsoft does, but then again, how many DOES microsoft actually support? Take a look at their HCL on microsoft.com for either Vista or Windows. You'll not of course, Microsoft won't actually provide device or driver support for anything that's not on the initial windows CD distribution... anufacturers have chosen not to support Linux, but even still, with people hacking drivers into linux for devices, the OS is still rock solid, running on code that's barely beta tasted, and put together by people who work for free or for fun.
When a program hangs in Linux, BSD, OS X, etc, the OS doens't go down. The desktop doesn't reset, other applications don't fail. They're all running on the same hardware... Intel or AMD CPU, same RAM, same HDD, same chipsets, same drive controllers... Why is microsoft so much slower, so less stable, so difficult to troubleshoot, so resource intensive?...and it;s still uglier and harder to use than not just Apple, but other OS out there too?
If people could simply drop Windows and move to Linux, and maintain 100% of their data, programs, etc, they would have done so long ago.
With Office being an open standard, and every OS on earth almost being able to open and edit Office docs, work with images, video, music and more, there's little people can't move to a mac. Most home users have NOTHING that's not Mac compatible on their PCs, except maybe a few games. They're starting to catch on to this.... Apple and Linux are gainign market share fast.
If more people would pay attention to the fact that Macs, spec for spec, not only have lower TCO over 3-5 years than PCs, but they actually COST LESS THAN DELL SYSTEMS FROM DAY 1 (with the same specs), there wuold be more of them. too bad there are so many Apple haters out there that still spread FUD about what a Mac can do and what a Mac really costs.... the ONLY mac I can configure cheaper on Dell.com is the mini, and it's not very mini any more if I do that, it's only $80 cheaper, and won't run Aero.
And what part, other than the graphics card, inside your iMac can't you upgrade?
the HDD, RAM, even the CPU can all be replaced. It already has digital 7.1 surround support, firewire, camera, microphone, bl.uetooth, wireless, and more. What components would you like to change again??? Graphic processor? Even I'll tell you that except for a select few good games available on a Mac, you need a PC for gaming (or a PS3 and high def TV). Any good gaming PC is going to set you back over $2K anyway so at that point, if you need that much power, get a poewr mac and use boot camp to run Windows on it....
My father has owned macs since 1984 (even had a Lisa too!). The SHORTEST time he's ever used one was for 6 years. longest was 11 years. Yes, 11 years... He has 3 active Macs now. A g4 iMac, a Core 2 duo iMac, and a Powerbook 15" core 2. The most he ever put into one was more RAM or an external HDD.
He edits movies, thousands of pictures, and plays WoW on his $1800 Mac that only has 1GB of RAM and a single HDD.
The LONGEST I've ever gotten out of a PC, doing the same job I bought it for at the time, is 4.5 years. I've had to replace mainbords in as little as 2 years in order to keep up with video editing software. I have a vista PC with 4GB of RAM, 4 HDDs in 2 seperate RAID 0 stripes, a processor 30% faster than his, and more. I normally use a very powerful nVidia card for gaming, but just for the hell of it, and to run a few benchmarks, I installed the same Radeon card in my PC as his iMac came with. My PC, including that card, cost over $2200 in components (including an OEM copy of Windows Vista Home Premium), it uses more than twice the electricity, and makes a shit load of noise (less now that I moved it to an Antec nine Hundred case and 120mm fans). Guess what, in sheer CPU power, naturally mine was faster, but in WoW, he got 6 FPS better than me using the same settings. Photoshop runs better on his iMac too. In fact, putting my performance graphics card back in, he STILL outperformed my PC in Photoshop... He loads web sites faster, organises music faster, backs up faster, boots faster, switches programs easier, and, what really pisses me off, he can scan at 9600DPI with 1GB or RAM from the same HP scanner that my PC, with 4GB of RAM, states that I need more resources to scan over 1200dpi.
I've done EVERYTHING I can to Vista to speed it up. 4GB of ready boost, disabling services, uninstalling unnecessary programs, and this was a vanilla install with no extra programs installed, compeltely defragged, and more. I simply can't compete with Mac performance, not even for 25% more money.
Now, you go to Apple.com and configure the lowest end Power Mac you can ($2299). Go to Dell's site and configure a machine with exactly the same specs (or as close as Dell will let you get, which as far as CPU, RAM, HDD, Etc is basically an exact match. the Dell system T7400, no matter how much you play with it, will be nearly a $1000 premium over the Mac... Even if you stip it down to a core quad instead of Xeon and try to match it's other components, it's STILL more expensive. In fact, the Mac Pro can give you 2 faster quad cores (8 cores total) for less than 4 from dell...
Sure, $2300 might be a bit much for a tower PC, but if an iMac doesn't cut it for you, it's only about $500 more to step up, and still cheaper than a Dell.
Now, step down to iMac specs... Try the same thing. Dell is actually STILL more expensive than an iMac. You're ONLY benefit is that the Dell is customizable... and actually, it will be missing an integrated webcam and microphone, firewire support, and more. Not to mention it's size, noise, and electric draw vs the iMac.
You CAN build a cheaper Dell system than an iMac, but it's upgradability, even in a customozable chassis, is still very limited. Sure, you can add a few extra internal drives, but with FireWire, I'd actually PREFER external drives...
If I was a hardcore gamer looking at a rig, I'd get a custom built PC with SLI. If I was Joe user looking to play the most popular games, edit movies, and share media, I'd get an iMac. Since I'm both, I own both...
The question is going to come down to whether or not fair use applies to the situation. Fair use does not apply to software licensing, and fair use is NOT a guaranteed right. Fair use itself is barely holding up in courts, and slowly loosing ground each day. The idea is that you can legally make copies for yourself as backups, etc. However, HOW you use the license, and on WHAT equipment is not protected by Fair Use. This is no different realistically than saying there's a difference between a personal use license and a business license, If it's not Apple branded hardware, you can't use it.
They probably have grounds to sue and get an injunction on licensing grounds, but in terms of preventing a competitor from producing compatible hardware, they haven't a chance in hell. On licensing grounds, if they're not an authorised Apple reseller, then they're already going to get sued. As far as producing compatible hardware, no Apple can't sue them for selling a PC as "Apple OS X Compatible" (though they can sue for illegal use of a trademark no different than microsoft can sue a shop for displaying their logo in a window if they're not authorised to do so). However, because the EULA prevents users from installing the software legally, were Psystar to not inform customers of that fact, they'd be opening themselves up to a class action lawsuit that's much more cut and dry than the "Vista Capable" suit launched at microsoft. Sure "Apple Compatible" is one thing. the hardware CAN run it (though at $399, good luck... no dedicated graphics, cheap processor, low end board, slow hdd, what's it gonna really do? Does it even meet Apple's OS X 10.5 system requirements?) Without being able to legally install the license, they can be sued into the ground for even suggesting it's possible.
The hardware is Intel's, not Apple's. EFI is a standard, not Apple proprietary technology.
By opening the seal of the packaged software, you are agreeing that you have read the EULA and accepted it's terms. It's binding. I'm not talking about opening the box, I'm talking about opening the seal on the DVD case inside the box, after you have access to the EULA itself.
When you buy a PC that comes pre-installed, you get the EULA presented when you power it on. Dell can still force you to keep the PC even if you don't agree to the EULA, but they have a return window. So does Apple for their retail package, you just have to send it to them instead of BestBuy and wait for your refund in the mail.
Psystar clearly violated Apple's EULA, Reseller License Agreement, trademarks, and more. The fact that they're offline so quickly and completely shows the power of Apple's case. Others that have been ordered to cease and decist have fought (and lost), but these guys are already done.
I do not bike to the store, it's about 4 miles from my house, but the store I hit is on my way to work and back. It might be 600 yards of extra driving to stop there, and I only do it once every 8-10 days or so unless I have a critical need or unexpected purchase to make.
It took effort (and budgeting, and some creative storage choices, and a good system for making grocery lists) but I managed to get my wife out of the shopping daily routine. We did it so successfully we don't even shop weekly anymore. If I had a pantry instead of a few kitchen cabinets we could do even better on long term shelf goods, but we still need fresh veggie, milk, and other items on a more frequent basis, so it really doesn't matter.
As for the bags, even at $1.50 each, I'm still wasting more energy cleaning them by far then the energy to make and recylce the disposable ones, and about 100 disposables equals the oil used in 1 re-usable.
The analog network I'm referring to is the one dismantled before the one they just dismantled this year. The one that supported the old "bag" car phones... That wnet offline nearly a decade ago... pre-CDMA analog.
There are still some planes flying without updated aviaonics, but none of them are permitted to fly in commercial airports, only at private fields. The landing systems, beacon requirements, communication, and other systems in planes, even ones 40 years old or more still flying, have all been stripped and upgraded within the last 25 years. One of the processes was not only to upgrade tower, ground, and plane communication systems, and avionic readouts, but also to better shield all of those systems. If they don't have these new systems, they can't be tracked properly by tower systems (they can be seen by radar, but not properly identified, nor communicated with in existing FAA solutions)
FM and many other forms of broadcast can cause interference. The reports your reading only state "interference" but not specifically from cel phones.
Takeoff and landing, they make you turn everything off and put it away anyway (and you should). This is not so much an interference risk, but in the case of an issue, to keep small objects from flying around the cabin and slamming into people...
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Their numbers, not mine. I think 82 at night is uncomfortable, too uncomfortable. I handle 78 at night OK, but anything more and I'd be changing sheets daily from the sweat. Pillow top mattresses hold heat well, and even with a thin sheet and a ceiling fan running, I can't do much more.
I have to think that in a typical 3 bedroom house that an efficient air conditioner, running at night when it's not fighting the sun, could actually use less electricity than 3-4 ceiling fans running.
Of course, MOST parts of the country don't stay above 82 at night, except on rare nights. Simply opening the windows is fine by me in SC for all but about 6 weeks of the year. When I liven in CT we didn't have AC at all except in the kitchen and living room.
My info is right from the EPA. It's not MY decision of what is and isn't comfortable. Perhaps if you didn't keep your house at 64 all winter you'd be used to 78. Today while I've been out and about I took the chance to notice a few thermostat settings:
Starbucks, 79 degrees
BestBuy, 78 degrees
My bank's lobby, 78 degrees
McCallister's Deli, 75 degrees (some older woman complained it was cold while we were there)
My house is currently 78 degrees. If I was wearing a suit, or jeans and a thinck shirt, sure, I'de be uncomfortable, but I'm in a thin summer polo I wore to work and a pair of Khakis. Perfectly comfortable.
I have a few friends like you. They're all over 200 lbs (some closer to 275). One has been inspired by The Biggest looser, and he's lost over 80 lbs in the last 10 months. We used to call him "Yeti" he liked it so cold, now he's comfy at closer to 80, and won't let you near his thermostat to make it cooler.
Actually, in SC, power companies don't have to give you a SINGLE CENT. If you overproduce, your meter does NOT run backwards. You end up giving them power for free.
There are few states that require power companies to pay you for your power. Most power companies "pay" you simply because they use simple power meters, and generating power back into the grid, assuming it's phased properly and switched in a way they support, just runs the meter backwards. When they meter guy checks your meter, all that's important is today's reading and the last one. If you generated enough power to actually produce, NET, more than you use, your meter would actually read less today than it did last month. They are NOT required to pay you cash for that power, except I believe in NJ.
I know of NOWHERE where power companies are required to pay for MORE for electricity than they are billing you for it. Technically, when your meter is currently running backwards, what's happening is that power you "paid for" is being "bought back" from them. This is a temporary phenomenon, and the meter will run the other way again for most of the night. The $/KWh they're "paying" you is simple the metered rate. This is in comparrison the the "COST" of the power that they make themselves, or what they buy excess power from other power companies at. Yes, technically they're "paying" several times more for your power, but in reality, you're not selling your power to another consumer, you're simply "using less" yourself. The power company does not mark up the power they buy from you, it's provided to others at the exact same $/KWh that they get their own electricity for direct from the power cvompany.
What IS happening, is that the power company is billing you for fewer KWhs. The power you add to their grid during the day is sold to other people at $0 profit. But you can look at this from one side or the other, because the net energy vs billed meter hours is exactly the same profit for the power company, same cost to consumers, exact same economy as if you simply used 100% of your own power and used less of theirs. Buy allowing it to flow into their grid during the day, you're saving them from having to provide you someone else more by using auxiliarry power sources. Its actually saving you money, saving them money and logistics, and costing the other consumers the exact same amount....
The only possible way this could be abused would be if so many people were generating excess power that it actually started to effect the bottom line of the power company, simply because instead of producing 1 billion KWhs, they're only producing 900 million, meaning there's 10% fewer hours they could bill for. If a regional, unregulated power company (legal monopoly) decided to raise the cost of electricty to offset this loss of revenue, that's the only possible abuse. Of course, it's these local companies that refuse to let your meters run backwards.
I have 2 houses. 1 is about 3 hours from the other, both in the same state. At one house, if I produces excess electricity, I get NO refund or credit. in other words, the power company is getting power from me for free, then SELLING it to other people. They make 300% more profit off my power than their own... At the other house, I'm not legally allowed to connect my own power system to theirs at all, so excess power would just be given off as wasted heat.
Many water heaters are natural gas. Do you expect to keep yours as the price of fuel goes up? Most people I know are replacing their gas water heaters with electric since doing so has at this point about a 4 year return on investment just in the fact that they won't need the gas hookup (minimum $20 per month fee), let alone the actual gas costs.
I'm in an apartment complex here in SC. Of the 16 buildings here, only 1 had gas heaters at this point. It's the oldest building, and not only does the water heater make hot water for the house, but it's also the boiler for the heat system, so it's prohibitively expensive to replace (water heater, heat exchanger, ventalation return, and AC unit all at once).
Tankless systems save at best 15% energy vs today's good insulated tank heaters.
Problem: tankless heaters use beterrn 90 and 120 AMPS of power in real time. The average household is running hot water for 45 minutes of time between 6 and 8 AM, and another 30-60 minutes of time between 6PM and 10PM.
Making hot water on demand means using power on demand. Here's why this is an issue (completely made up, but I expect reasonable numbers)
A typical air conditioner runs, in the peak of heat of a day, for about 10 minutes per cycle about twice per hour (2 minutes per hour). Everyone in California has air conditioning. They use 20 Amps typically when running the compressor, and as much as 30 amps for about 20 seconds when spinning up. Based on the law of averages, it's possible about 35% of air conditioners could be running concurrently in a neighorhood of say 1000 homes, and about 2% of them could be spinning up at that time. That's a little over 7000Amps of power draw @ 220volts
At the same time, lets assume just 25% of those houses have on demand hot water. That's 250 homes out of the 1000 that between 6AM and 8AM "could" be using hot water on demand. Since they typically use it for 45 minutes, that means that about 40% of them will be using it at the same time, possibly more. At a typical 90 amps, that's 9000 amps of power. I'd also say that's "conservitive" to say that only 40% would be using it at the same time. I'de bet that about 7AM, 75% of them are likely taking showers, washing breakfast dishes, shaving, or in some way using hot water. We could be talking 25% of the population using TWICE the amount of electricity that air conditioners use. (in short sperts).
You see, over the course of 24 hours, an AC unit uses a LOT more electricity than a water heater. The water heater uses enough that in most places, power companies ask (and in some places require) you to add timer systems, so that your water tank is only on at certain times of non-peak electric generation. If your water heater needs to make 120 gallons of hot water a day, who cares if it looses 10% or even 20% of it's energy to store that water for later if we'd have to resort to methods of handling the peak loads of on-demand power to go tankless, methods which by themselves are usually less efficient than the amount you just lost by storing hot water.
Also, don't forget, when looking at a tankless system, you're not only looking at a $700-1200 unit, compared to a $400 water tank, you're also looking at about $200 in plumbing charges, and depending on your home design, up to $2500 to have an electrician install a 2nd power box, additional 90-120 amp 220 volt line from a pole, and home-run to your water heater closet, and some new circuit breakers. (A friend of mine bought a heater, installed it himself, then found out he needed 110 AMPs to run it, $2200 later the electrician and CP&L were done with him... He figures it will take 16 years to pay off the difference vs having simply replacede his talk with a top of the line efficient model, and the tankless heater only has a 10 year warranty...
Electric cars and plug in hybrids are going to be a plague. When everyone gets home from work and plugs in at once, we will REQUIRE a system to handle it. Unfortunately, we need a FLEXIBLE system. When you come home and plug in, you might have 25% battery free, but maybe you know you're headed out again after dinner to run errands or something. You need to be able to plug in and tell the system when you expect to leave again, so it knows how to prioritize your load.
More so, in hybrids, it needs to know the fuel economy of your vehicle and the average price of fuel, so it can determine, on its own, if say paying a higher price for electricity to get priority charge might actually cost more than running on gas, maybe it won't charge. Of course, it also needs to know your battery level, and amount of gas remaining in the tank.
This by no means is an impossible system to program (it's all of about 10 decisions, and a few numbers a simple chip can pull from freely available sources on the web and a few sensors in the car). What we need is a way to allow the human to prioritise it, and say "charge now" or "don't bother, I'm not leaving until morning..." It needs to know our schedule.
Most of us, ideally, should be charging at work, not at home... A parking garage, or streetside meter with a plug in adapter and credit card reader (or power company account card reader, to direct bill to your power bill at home) is the best place to charge. We havce aple sunlight to borrow for solar charging during the day, nothing at night. We can pump water up hill during the day and charge at night just the same, but at a loss of efficiency of about 40%.
By using wind, solar, and other 100 % renewable power sources, they can overproduce enough juice during the day to pump that water themselves. The wind, tidal, and geothermal systems provide a nice base load at night to supplement the other power sources. Also, the water's not running downhioll all the time, just what's needed to stem the overdemand for short periods.
We've been trying to get these things built in the USA for years, but places we can make them are too far from need points, so without building our superconducting redundant electric grid, we're a few decades off from reality here. They could power California easy enough from the rocky mountanis off that though...
Yea, I call BS on that too. My fridge uses a 120v AC on a 20 Amp circuit. My cable modem uses 12v DC at 1.5 Amps. I don't know the conversion, but I'd be willing to bet I can run the modem for close to a month on what the fridge uses running the compressor for 30 minutes.
The batter backup I have under my desk provides 1500VA. It will run my telephone base station (wireless phone dock), wi-fi router/firewall, cable modem, VoIP box, and cell phone charger plus it's own LCD display screen for about 8 hours without power from the wall. It would run my fridge for about 7 minutes...
Actually, scientists have been looking at creating VAST underwater resivoirs, combined with surface resivoirs, in a cyclic pumping solution. The idea is that water exists in it's natural state underground. During the day, when solar is being generated faster than it can be used, we pump water to the surface, or simply a higher level resivoir. At night, we let it flow back to it's subteranian home, and generate power. Since the flow of water from surface to underground can be tightly controlled, we can produce variable power at will, and "store" wind and solar energy.
The resivoirs are manmade, in mostly non-pourous rock, that are coated with a sealant. The underground portion would be hundreds of feet underground. The surface resivoir would fill and drain like a tide (and "sureface" doesn't necesarily mean open to air, it could just be one higher up in the rock bed)
Since the water is contantly cycled, it can also be easily filtered, so contamination is not an issue. As a bonus, in some places these can be built where rain runoff normally goes, and we can turn it into a great big water purification plant, and any water arriving by steam or river generates electricity. We don't need to dam it off, just funnel it into a hole in the ground, so there's no mass change to the environment (no new lakes 6 miles across to deal with). If we start by pumping seawater to the location, and fill the system from scratch, we also don't have to cannibalize existing ecosystems to get the water, and desalination and filtering would render it drinkable for future uses.
With all that water, we could build the nuclear plant down there, 500 feet underground, where it's safe from terorists, airplanes, and leaks.
Sure, it's gonna cost A LOT, but water power systems have VERY long lifespans, as do solar and wind generators. We'll need to replace the filters regularly, and the pumps occasionally, but a modular infrastructure would be part of the plan.
It's quite nearly sci-fi, but also quite possible.
Expanding the system for additional power generation is as simple as building another resivoir below the 2, giving another chamber to flood water into. We'd just need more solar and wind to pump it back to the surface.
Instant poewr, at instant notice, over superconducting lines to regional power grids anywhere in the USA we need it.
I forgot the EPA link:'
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/product_specs/program_reqs/thermostats_prog_req.pdf
sorry
Actually, 74 "room tempurature" is considdered cool to most people, including my wife. 76 is a comfortable setting for most people. The standard settings that the EPA and your power company recomend it to keep the tempurature at 78 or higher in the summer and 68 or below in the Winter.
Actually, in the summer, you should wake at 78 degrees, it should rise to 85 when you're not home, return to 78 in the evening, and rise slightly to 82 at night. In the winter, you should wake at 70, it should drop to 62 when noone is home in the daytime, return to 70 in the evening, and settle at 66 when sleeping. A tolerance of +/- 2 degrees is permitted in the thermostat (if set to 78, it will rise to 80 before cooling to 76, then slowly rise back to 80, etc...)
This is the Energy Start setting you need to comply with in order to receive EnergyStar certification fro your home, and the accompanying discount on your power bill.. When you signed up for EnergyStar discounts, you AGREED to these settings. Failure to maintain them, should your power company be aware, could leave you lible to repay any back discounts you recieved. I've never heard of this, but EPA certified programable thermostats all use this default setting (and some can not be overridden if they're monitored by your power company, something Califiornia is about to pass into law).
I got $200 from the power company for allowing them, at their cost, to install a meter regulator for my electric water heater. I have run out of hot water once in 3 years, and we took 7 showers in 2 hours, combined with running a load of dishes and a load of laundry.
My water heater happens not only to be a well insulated newer model, but I added an insulating wrap to it, and turned the temp up to about 150.
If I run out of water during a metered time (which that wasn't, I simply exceeded it's capacity to keep up with us), all I'd have needed to do was flip- an override switch manually on the meter.
The water heater gets NO electricity for 15 hours of the day (in 2 shifts). At it's worst, it's about 5 degrees cooler than when powered.
One thing i'll keep you away from though: on-demand water heaters. Yes, they CAN save electricity, but keep in mind, heating water on the run takes a LOT of energy (90-120 AMPS depending on the heater, 4-6 times what your OVEN uses...). Yes, if your old heater is poorly insulated, switching to on-demand might sound like a good idea, but simply installing a highly efficient tank heater means you have hot water anytime, regardless of when it heated it. If everyone switches to on-demand water heaters, imaging the energy load at 6AM!!!!
One of my personal pet peaves is those damed plug-in scent warmers.
;D
I had a few, and when going through my previous home a few years back (it was INCREDIBLY poortly insulated, and I did everything I could to save power and avoid $350 bills), i took a serious look at what those things were costing me.
On average, they only burn about 4 watts each. I had 4 of those for 18 total watts (a few diferent types that used different power loads), and one candle plate (thing you set jar candles on to melt, used 17 watts).
Over 30 watts, running 24/7/365 (and often with dried up cartidges we'd forget to replace). You know what? Not only did it waste a lot of power, they damned things actually don't smell as good, or last as long, as some scented oil in a diffuser (spherical bowl with some wooden wicks stuck in it). I have 4 of these in my house now. You can pick up a good diffuser at a nature shop, world market store, or other places, or make one yourself by hitting a craft shop. The oil itself is cheap in bulk, and I cut it 3:1 with perfume base (aka rubbing alcohol). It's about $5 worth of oil to fill one, but I only do that about 3 times a year... Same cost in plug-ins for that room? $4 every 45 days... more than twice the cost not counting the electricity saved!
warning: If you have small childred or michevous cats, you may want to 1) place your oil difuser out of reach/access or 2) use strong double sided tape and affic it permanantly in place (if you have a spot you can do that to). I have 2 of mine in wall mount sconces, one above the fridge, and 1 in my bedroom on top of the gentlemans chest (about 5 feet off the floor). Getting spilled oil out of a carpet, furniture, or other surface is not something I plan to ever have to do.... (again)
"many industrial users tend to use less"
Trust me on this. I am an IT provider to nearly 100 industrial sites as part of my commercial client base. NONE of them shut down their systems at night, NOT ONE. They may let a bunch of employees go home, and many don't run 3rd shifts, but most of the equipment stays on, even the lights in most cases.
It's a very rare industrial site that has not learned that the time and energy and logistics of stopping production and starting it again, with product left on the line partially assembled, is not only counter productive, but in many cases simply costs more.
It's easier to use fewer people, or slow the line down slightly, and run 24/7, than it is to stop/start daily.
Commerical (most of them), sure, they turn out the ligths at night, but not industial.
Unfortunately, it's not "at night" that's the issue anyway. It's the few hours at the peak of the morning, and at sunset that are the worst, especially in summer when AC runs on electricity only, where in the winter much heat is from other sources (coal, gas, oil, wood, etc).
AC units kick on and off frequently, every 15-45 minutes depending on the home, climate, and time of day. During the peak heat of the day, everyone is running one, businesses and homes alike. Although it "saves electricity" (assuming your house is well insulated) to use a timer based AC system (wamer when noone is home, cooler when thay are, automatically) the real truth is that now we not only have to deal millions of units turning on and off, but nearly ALL of them turn on about 4:15-4:30, and run continuously while they cool the house down to it's comfort temp from it's all-day noone-is-home temp. This is a MASSIVE load on the system.
By adding some inteligence to the grid, we can stagger the times AC units come on and off. By allowing some tollerances, and some minor schedule adjustments, we can 1) prevent every AC unit from running at the same time, 2) cool your house earlier one day, and later another, balancing your electric use with others, 3) keep your house withing 3 degrees of your target at all times, 4) charge you more for unaceptable "comfort" levels (if you like it colder in your house than 78 degrees in the summer, no problem, we'll just charge you more), 5) we can avoid a lot of "surge" use, avoiding lots of expensive supplement power, and lower to overall cost WITHOUT building more power plants.
We do need more power plants. As people bring home plug-in hybrids or full electric cars, we'll have to account for this. We can't have half of california plug their car in at 5:45PM and expect all of them to start charging at once...
The good news is (most) electronics are getting more efficient. As we switch light bulbs, get more inteligent and more efficient ACs, fridges, and other appliances, use lower power PCs and TVs, and start doing other things like eliminating "sleep creap" from devices, throwing out plug-in scent warmers, etc, we can offset a bunch of it, but not even close to all. I can only hope that all of our NEW power will come anything but fossil fuel.
Line conditioners can be added to an entire house for a few hundred bucks. These don't completely clean the line of all issues, but spikes are dropped to a ground line, and a lot of exterior noise is removed. It's a good start, but does not protect from brown out or sags in power.
In a newer home, with a modern breaker panel, you should not be getting flickering from voltage irregularity in your house, but most people live in homes or apartments built more than 20 years ago, and most systems older than that do not properly isolate one circuit from another.
Your PS may be rated for 100-240 volt (really 100-120 and then 200-240, assuming the position of the switch on the PS). But that's it's own operating limits, not the components attached. unless you have a high end PS with active conditioning (very few do), then slight variations in voltage going in to the PS do translate through the transformer. Your CPU clock runs at up to 1300MHz, but this assumes predictable 3v or 5v signals. When power fluctuates up and down at small intervals, the CPU clock timing can also fluctuate. This causes voltage iregularities in the board based on capacator timing, other onboard transformers, and circuit paths. It becomes possible using high performance electronics for timing in differnt parts of a board to conflict, and this is a primary cause of mainbord lock-ups.
CPUs are typically, on most mainboards, protected from onboard voltage regulators. This typically is limited to higher end systems, (and nearly all server and workstation grade equipment). Many modern PCs are also beginning to include these components on lower end products.
Your home theater howeverequipment, usually no.
Electronic parts fail for the folowing reasons:
- environemt (temp, humidity, condensation, etc)
- abuse (lack of cleaning, physical damage)
- manufacturing defects (usually reveal themselves in 30-60 days)
- Mechanical failure (does not apply to solid state electronics)
- electrical damage (causing either complete part failure, or micro fractures in circuitry).
All outside factors removed the only real way for a computer device (excluding the HDD, CD, Floppy etc moving parts) to fail, something has to cause micro circuit damage. the only 2 causes of this are 1) improperly regulated power, and 2) EMP or other high intensity EMI. Since MI powerful enough to cause circuit damage is typically only associated with very close lightnight strikes, nuclear weapons, and other EMP causing events (all very rare) this leaves the bulk, over 97%, of all electronic component failures being left to bad power...
When a power supply is set to produce 3v 5v or 12v current, and the expected input is 110volt to do so, everything is happy. When power runs below 104 volt, the PS needs to adjust to accomodate a continual 3v current. Since power frequencies are at 60Hz, but mainboard frequencies are hundreds of times this, circuits can't be adjusted fast enough to account, and over time, these miniscule errors cause erosion of the substrate materials, and eventually lead to shorts in the microarchitecture. You can look around online and see before/after images of what a CPU looks like under high detail microscope after exposure to cleaned vs uncleaned power.
Although yes, you CAN get a UPS for as little as $40, it's simply no where near powerful enough to handle a 700watt stereo, big screen TV, game station, and more...
UPS units have very specific voltage limitations in terms of how much energy the battery can produce. The rating is in VAs (Volts time Amps).
Take the Amp requirement on all the pieces and parts of your home theatre system, multiple that bu 120 volts, and you'll quickly see than even a $300-400 UPS can't handle the load. even if it could, you're talking about placing a massive device somewhere near your entertainment center, with a battery weighing 50-70 pounds, and cooling fans that make quite a bit of noise.
Overloading a UPS battery can not only cause damage to your equipment, BUT IT IS A CLEAR FIRE HAZARD.
The Home Theatre units do not use batteries, they use electrical buffers. TVs are not designed to be powered when there's no electyricity, so a small buffer of about 10-15 seconds is all that is needed. When power dips, fluctuates, or has "static" in the line, it can be cleaned. These units range in size and cost, but are typically about $200 on the higher end for full home thatre filtering of up to 12-20 AMPS. There are higher end units costing over $1000 that fit in and look like your existing self audio equipment, and provide additional features to safely shut down your electronics using infrared signals before cutting power in an outage, and also small batteries to keep your TV fan running for a minute or two for projection TVs (the bulb may crack if the TV looses power suddenly and is not allowed to go through a cooling cycle. These bulbs are not covered under most waranties and cost up to $300 each. Want to know more? RTFM).
Equal performance is subject to debate. True, a simple increase in cable guage provides better signal, but filtering of external interference, Monster does that a bit better than their competitors. Is it worth it though? If you install properly sized cables and route them away from sources of interference, it's no big deal.
Now, that's really for analog signals... As for digital, it's not really a concern. A $15 HDMI or DVI cable is just as good as a $85 HDMI cable, assuming they're both rated for the same frequency response and distance (HDMI has several classifications, and it CAN make a difference).
As for fiber cables, light is light. A thicker, stronger shell simply helps protect you from over bending the cable and refracting the beam, but it adds no shielding or signal quality improvement of any kind, and in fact, the fiber core itself must be a very specific size in microns. Changing this size like you do in ordinary cables is not optional.
If you have a high end system, increasing cable thickness, adding better cable contacts, and improving shielding can be important, and can improve audio and video quality. On the other hand, unless you're running cables across power lines, very close to speakers, close to tube TVs, or over long distances, Monster offers no "discernable" differences vs their half priced competitors.
That said never use the cheap shit cables that actually come in the box. Allways buy quality replacements, and ensure the connectors are made from materials that don't corrode (i.e. not copper, silver, or aluminum) gold contacts are great, platinum is not worth the expense. In most cases you'll need new cables anyway just to make the distance between devices as 3' is almost never enough, but don't buy cheap unshielded cables ever. Allways look for decent stuff.
When buying a stereo or speakers, look to buy models that support screw on connections or tightening rings for the speaker wire. The cheap little clip style slots, like you typically find on the back of cheaper speakers and all-in-one stereo units do not provide a sufficient contact surface for 100 watt and higher outputs.
As for filtering, modern home theater equipment is more computer than TV or stereo, and this stuff is VERY sensitive to low quality poewr. A surge protector is WORTHLESS! You need power filtration with real time voltage regulation. Monster does a good job providing very high quality filtering systems for as little as $200-300. If you have high def, a suround sound stereo, a PS3 or xbox360, keep this in mind. 97% of all electronic failure is the result of low or inconsitent power. Surge protectors only stop massive oversurges (typically over 160 volts). Damage to computer electronics cn occur at voltage below 104 or above 116. Do your lights ever flicker in your house? Especially when your AC turns on or when your fridge kicks in? If so, GO BUY A POWER FILTER for every digital device in your house!!!
I'm even more worried about coordinated strikes. Our power grid has very little redundancy. there are about 20 sites in the USA that is more than a few were taken out at the same time, we'd be looking at nearly nationwide blackouts, and weeks to repair the grid.
Strap a whole bunch of C4 to a few super toewrs, bring em down, blow up a few regional transforming stations, etc, we'd by up shit creek...
Some of these are guarded, but they're are not enough guards to stop a large pack of determined terrorists... People who are willing to die don't fear rent-a-cops...
It's a miracle this hasn't happened yet.
Gaining control of the mainframe coul,d cause a lot more damage (forced oversurges, frying transformers, etc), and it's a BIG concern, but there certainly are other worries.
granted, water systems, even sewer systems, are nearly as vulnerable...
Apple is internally working on an open OSX solution, to be deployed on cusom built PCs. Details are scant, but we know they've been working with multiple hardware vendors behind closed doors for years, and have build drivers for a TON of products the Mac currently can;t be installed on.
Assuming Apple comes up with a 1) simple way of identifying compatible mac components, 2) intel releases some decent EFI mainboards, and 3) component manufacturers can actually work together, we will be seeing a full release of OS X in the future.
We expect that the Apple install process will cross check basic component support, access the Net via the network, and centrally download all the drivers it needs for the install process to work, and notify you before you install of unsupported devices it detects.
Of course, there will NOT be a $399 PC that will be certified to run it. You need dedicated graphics, and that alone is going to put you into $799 and higher PC solutions, but we expect Dell and others may start offering "Apple Compatible" PCs in the next 2 years or so, assuming Microsoft ever gets off it's ass, bows to intel and the resto of the works, and adds native EFI support to an upcoming XP patch and to Vista. If Microsof't doesn't, sooner rather than later, you won't be able to install Windows on PCs coming out with the latest chipsets...
Agreed. Linux may not support all of the devices microsoft does, but then again, how many DOES microsoft actually support? Take a look at their HCL on microsoft.com for either Vista or Windows. You'll not of course, Microsoft won't actually provide device or driver support for anything that's not on the initial windows CD distribution... anufacturers have chosen not to support Linux, but even still, with people hacking drivers into linux for devices, the OS is still rock solid, running on code that's barely beta tasted, and put together by people who work for free or for fun.
...and it;s still uglier and harder to use than not just Apple, but other OS out there too?
When a program hangs in Linux, BSD, OS X, etc, the OS doens't go down. The desktop doesn't reset, other applications don't fail. They're all running on the same hardware... Intel or AMD CPU, same RAM, same HDD, same chipsets, same drive controllers... Why is microsoft so much slower, so less stable, so difficult to troubleshoot, so resource intensive?
If people could simply drop Windows and move to Linux, and maintain 100% of their data, programs, etc, they would have done so long ago.
With Office being an open standard, and every OS on earth almost being able to open and edit Office docs, work with images, video, music and more, there's little people can't move to a mac. Most home users have NOTHING that's not Mac compatible on their PCs, except maybe a few games. They're starting to catch on to this.... Apple and Linux are gainign market share fast.
If more people would pay attention to the fact that Macs, spec for spec, not only have lower TCO over 3-5 years than PCs, but they actually COST LESS THAN DELL SYSTEMS FROM DAY 1 (with the same specs), there wuold be more of them. too bad there are so many Apple haters out there that still spread FUD about what a Mac can do and what a Mac really costs.... the ONLY mac I can configure cheaper on Dell.com is the mini, and it's not very mini any more if I do that, it's only $80 cheaper, and won't run Aero.
And what part, other than the graphics card, inside your iMac can't you upgrade?
the HDD, RAM, even the CPU can all be replaced. It already has digital 7.1 surround support, firewire, camera, microphone, bl.uetooth, wireless, and more. What components would you like to change again??? Graphic processor? Even I'll tell you that except for a select few good games available on a Mac, you need a PC for gaming (or a PS3 and high def TV). Any good gaming PC is going to set you back over $2K anyway so at that point, if you need that much power, get a poewr mac and use boot camp to run Windows on it....
My father has owned macs since 1984 (even had a Lisa too!). The SHORTEST time he's ever used one was for 6 years. longest was 11 years. Yes, 11 years... He has 3 active Macs now. A g4 iMac, a Core 2 duo iMac, and a Powerbook 15" core 2. The most he ever put into one was more RAM or an external HDD.
He edits movies, thousands of pictures, and plays WoW on his $1800 Mac that only has 1GB of RAM and a single HDD.
The LONGEST I've ever gotten out of a PC, doing the same job I bought it for at the time, is 4.5 years. I've had to replace mainbords in as little as 2 years in order to keep up with video editing software. I have a vista PC with 4GB of RAM, 4 HDDs in 2 seperate RAID 0 stripes, a processor 30% faster than his, and more. I normally use a very powerful nVidia card for gaming, but just for the hell of it, and to run a few benchmarks, I installed the same Radeon card in my PC as his iMac came with. My PC, including that card, cost over $2200 in components (including an OEM copy of Windows Vista Home Premium), it uses more than twice the electricity, and makes a shit load of noise (less now that I moved it to an Antec nine Hundred case and 120mm fans). Guess what, in sheer CPU power, naturally mine was faster, but in WoW, he got 6 FPS better than me using the same settings. Photoshop runs better on his iMac too. In fact, putting my performance graphics card back in, he STILL outperformed my PC in Photoshop... He loads web sites faster, organises music faster, backs up faster, boots faster, switches programs easier, and, what really pisses me off, he can scan at 9600DPI with 1GB or RAM from the same HP scanner that my PC, with 4GB of RAM, states that I need more resources to scan over 1200dpi.
I've done EVERYTHING I can to Vista to speed it up. 4GB of ready boost, disabling services, uninstalling unnecessary programs, and this was a vanilla install with no extra programs installed, compeltely defragged, and more. I simply can't compete with Mac performance, not even for 25% more money.
Now, you go to Apple.com and configure the lowest end Power Mac you can ($2299). Go to Dell's site and configure a machine with exactly the same specs (or as close as Dell will let you get, which as far as CPU, RAM, HDD, Etc is basically an exact match. the Dell system T7400, no matter how much you play with it, will be nearly a $1000 premium over the Mac... Even if you stip it down to a core quad instead of Xeon and try to match it's other components, it's STILL more expensive. In fact, the Mac Pro can give you 2 faster quad cores (8 cores total) for less than 4 from dell...
Sure, $2300 might be a bit much for a tower PC, but if an iMac doesn't cut it for you, it's only about $500 more to step up, and still cheaper than a Dell.
Now, step down to iMac specs... Try the same thing. Dell is actually STILL more expensive than an iMac. You're ONLY benefit is that the Dell is customizable... and actually, it will be missing an integrated webcam and microphone, firewire support, and more. Not to mention it's size, noise, and electric draw vs the iMac.
You CAN build a cheaper Dell system than an iMac, but it's upgradability, even in a customozable chassis, is still very limited. Sure, you can add a few extra internal drives, but with FireWire, I'd actually PREFER external drives...
If I was a hardcore gamer looking at a rig, I'd get a custom built PC with SLI. If I was Joe user looking to play the most popular games, edit movies, and share media, I'd get an iMac. Since I'm both, I own both...
The hardware is Intel's, not Apple's. EFI is a standard, not Apple proprietary technology.
By opening the seal of the packaged software, you are agreeing that you have read the EULA and accepted it's terms. It's binding. I'm not talking about opening the box, I'm talking about opening the seal on the DVD case inside the box, after you have access to the EULA itself.
When you buy a PC that comes pre-installed, you get the EULA presented when you power it on. Dell can still force you to keep the PC even if you don't agree to the EULA, but they have a return window. So does Apple for their retail package, you just have to send it to them instead of BestBuy and wait for your refund in the mail.
Psystar clearly violated Apple's EULA, Reseller License Agreement, trademarks, and more. The fact that they're offline so quickly and completely shows the power of Apple's case. Others that have been ordered to cease and decist have fought (and lost), but these guys are already done.
I do not bike to the store, it's about 4 miles from my house, but the store I hit is on my way to work and back. It might be 600 yards of extra driving to stop there, and I only do it once every 8-10 days or so unless I have a critical need or unexpected purchase to make.
It took effort (and budgeting, and some creative storage choices, and a good system for making grocery lists) but I managed to get my wife out of the shopping daily routine. We did it so successfully we don't even shop weekly anymore. If I had a pantry instead of a few kitchen cabinets we could do even better on long term shelf goods, but we still need fresh veggie, milk, and other items on a more frequent basis, so it really doesn't matter.
As for the bags, even at $1.50 each, I'm still wasting more energy cleaning them by far then the energy to make and recylce the disposable ones, and about 100 disposables equals the oil used in 1 re-usable.
The analog network I'm referring to is the one dismantled before the one they just dismantled this year. The one that supported the old "bag" car phones... That wnet offline nearly a decade ago... pre-CDMA analog.
There are still some planes flying without updated aviaonics, but none of them are permitted to fly in commercial airports, only at private fields. The landing systems, beacon requirements, communication, and other systems in planes, even ones 40 years old or more still flying, have all been stripped and upgraded within the last 25 years. One of the processes was not only to upgrade tower, ground, and plane communication systems, and avionic readouts, but also to better shield all of those systems. If they don't have these new systems, they can't be tracked properly by tower systems (they can be seen by radar, but not properly identified, nor communicated with in existing FAA solutions)
FM and many other forms of broadcast can cause interference. The reports your reading only state "interference" but not specifically from cel phones.
Takeoff and landing, they make you turn everything off and put it away anyway (and you should). This is not so much an interference risk, but in the case of an issue, to keep small objects from flying around the cabin and slamming into people...