Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Power

MIT Unveils First Solar Cells Printed On Paper 125

Posted by timothy from the let's-give-them-some-post-unveiing-privacy dept.
lucidkoan writes "MIT researchers recently unveiled the world's first thin-film solar cell printed on a sheet of paper. The panel was created using a process similar to that of an inkjet printer, producing semiconductor-coated paper imbued with carbon-based dyes that give the cells an efficiency of 1.5 to 2 percent. That's not incredibly efficient, but the convenience factor makes up for it. And in the future, researchers hope that the same process used in the paper solar cells could be used to print cells on metal foil or even plastic. If they're able to gear efficiencies up to scale, the development could revolutionize the production and installation of solar panels."

Comment Re:sustainable growth (Score 1) 432

by Bruha (#31858046) Attached to: The Genius In Apple's Vertical Platform

Do not forget Apple loves to make new hardware incompatible with older hardware. My Mac Pro can not run newer video cards. My only thinking at the time, is that GPU's become too slow over the long term, CPU is just fine still. We'll they prevented me from using the new cards even though they'd run fine in Windows on the same hardware.

So I went out and built a more powerful machine than my Mac Pro, and I dont have to buy shiny new video cards, I just go SLI with a second one of the type I bought with the machine I built. Then upgrade to a new shiny card, when a single model blows my SLI pair out of the water.

I went with Linux, then Mac, then back to Windows 7. What I have learned, you can use anything and make it work, but Linux shines for servers, Apple is a trap to be avoided, and Windows has finally gotten their act together.

Comment Re:For What It's Worth $999 in 1998 = $1333 Today (Score -1, Offtopic) 293

by sopssa (#31850552) Attached to: The iPad vs. Microsoft's "Jupiter" Devices

Well what it's worth the first tech demos about it were disclosed 4-5 months ago and more details now an month ago. They usually disclose technical things earlier on rather like Apple who goes fully by PR and marketing (and where it makes sense to disclose products and have strict NDA's to keep it secret just prior launch to keep all the fanboys hype it)

Comment $200 doesn't really include.. (Score 2, Insightful) 531

by kuzb (#31824648) Attached to: Ubuntu on a Dime

The sysadmin to go with it.

Ubuntu is all well and good until you need something that is not covered by its package manager. It's all well and good until some piece of hardware only has limited support via some hack.

The problem with Linux is that even with all the advancements, it's still a fragmented platform that only works properly if you stay within it's narrow selection of hardware that is known to work.
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Comment Re:JS needs threads (Score 1) 531

by tixxit (#30286346) Attached to: Trying To Bust JavaScript Out of the Browser
What goes on in the back-end is irrelevant. What matters is that your script is single threaded. All functions are atomic and busy waits will prevent any other JS from executing. If an event happens, the browser will wait until the current function is done executing before notifying the callback for the event. This actually makes programming for JS very easy and does not really hinder the event-driven nature of client-side browser scripting at all. At best, I think you can think of callbacks to the server as worker threads (work is being done by the server), though when your client-side code is called back, it will be sequential and it won't execute concurrently with any of your other code.

Comment Re:That cloud word again (Score 1) 305

by element-o.p. (#30286246) Attached to: The Cloud Ate My Homework
Pick the best tool for the job. While I'm not a big Microsoft fan -- and I'm even less of an Exchange fan -- you don't pick a server platform because it's your pet O/S; you pick a server platform because it's what you need to get the job done. If you need to run an Exchange server, then build a Windows server (or more likely, several Windows servers) and run Exchange.

From the client side, I use a Linux desktop to connect to an Exchange server for e-mail at work, and it works just fine because it supports standard SMTP and IMAPS. I greatly preferred the Postfix server we used to use (because my organization owned it and therefore I had access to it, unlike the Exchange server that our new corporate overlords mandated), but in truth, I don't really have any major complaints from a user perspective.

Slashdot Top Deals

Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.

Close