PV doesn't make sense at any scale.
I've just installed a 2.5 kW Solar system on my house in Western Australia, at a cost of just over $2500. Based on initial readings, output from the unit looks like being between 3,500 to 5,000 kWh/year. My electricity provider charges between 30 and 45c per kWh, and pays 8c per kWh for electricity fed back into the grid.
So my payback time for the initial investment is somwhere between 1 and three years if I consume mostly self-generated power. The panels and inverter I've installed have a 25 year warranty,
How does this not make sense?
And I'm not alone in this, Australia faces an unprecedented oversupply of energy, with no new energy generation needed for 10 years. Coal power stations are sutting down, and even new gas power stations are being mothballed as they are unable to compete.
Nobody knows for sure (except certain corporate lawyers) what these patents entail.
They do now. The Chinese Government released details of all 310 Microsoft patents used in Android licensing agreements last month. You can download the list here: http://images.mofcom.gov.cn/pe... (warning: docx)
That could be another reason why Samsung is now willing to contest the extortion. Very few of the patents are novel or non-obvious.
Which confirms what I thought about this market all along, that it was foolish developers chasing nickels in place of dollars.
And I'm fine with that, as long as the market remains a competitive Darwinian pool.
The nature of any rapidly expanding ecosystem is that there will be a multiplicity of variously capable denizens that'll be culled to the fittest survivors, particularly as resources become scarcer. Apple's app store is transitioning from that explosive expansion phase and is now hitting the resource ($) limits as iOS loses ground against their competitors. Other app stores will follow suit as they also reach saturation point, and that's - potentially - a good thing.
The only reason it could become a negative is if App store owner/managers promote products for their own reasons instead of letting competition cull the weakest.
nick-nack on some guy's desk == medical implant
Read the next paragraph. I've quoted it below for you.
Cool factor aside, they've been scanning patients' actual bones, optimising them in software and printing titanium replacements (mostly hip joints) there for almost a decade now.
You had me at "3D Printed Titanium Jaw Implants". Awesome!
It's cool, but not really news.
I was doing some work in Royal Perth Hospital sometime around 2008, and saw a small, beautifully detailed metal skull on one of the managers' desks. I asked him about it and was told he'd taken an MRI of his own skull and had it printed quarter-sized in sintered titanium. It was the best paperweight I've ever seen.
Cool factor aside, they've been scanning patients' actual bones, optimising them in software and printing titanium replacements (mostly hip joints) there for almost a decade now. There's even a few commercial madical 3d printing companies around AU (Anatomics is one).
It's great that SA is making jaws for people now though.
I use ODF but no-one else does because MS Office doesn't properly support it, I'm crippling my ability to share documents around purely for ideological reasons.
Microsoft OSs are down to 14% market share.
It simply makes no sense to continue using their outdated lockin-inspired formats. The world needs to transition to document editing formats that're portable across whatever computing devices users want to buy.
ODF was designed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium to be that set of formats in 2005, and was only derailed by an intense and deeply corrupt effort by Microsoft. It's incredibly sad that we've had to wait for almost a decade for governments to finally start the transition.
I'm pretty sure a government would have the resources to develop a renderer for an open document format,
Or they could just link to the web page: http://webodf.org/
No wonder none of that stuff happened - no one read past the first page and a half.
No. Just no. That's pure and slick as goose fat spin control. Businesses simply don't work that way.
That stuff didn't happen because Microsoft decided to spend the next decade and a half focused on embracing, extending and extinguishing or just f***ing killing and just f***ing burying their competitors instead of making good products.
With toxic corporate citizenship at their heart, they stacked standards committees instead of making a better Office product. When online security and malware became a problem, instead of improving and securing their colander-like OS they funded a feral and failing software company to attack a community-built competitor. When that failed, they wielded 235 patents as a FUD-bludgeon, and sold more to a 3rd party patent troll. When it became clear they couldn't compete in the mobile space, they used some questionable patents to extort money from manufacturers using a competing OS. Their customers suffered high costs and poor products because, whenever possible, they chose to litigate instead of innovate.
That's why they now have 14% market share and are laying off thousands of workers. As soon as there were viable alternatives, ex-Microsoft customers fled to them in droves.
Does the thing run only on Windoze 8 ?
Window anyway.
It's a VB6 program running on a single PC, supposedly for security reasons. The system is highly manual and failure prone enough that they're probably too embarrassed to release the code.
The system was developed internally by the AEC in 2001, when an upgrade to Windows 2000 rendered an existing COBOL-based application the commission was using to tally-up union elections incompatible with its standard operating environment. It was re-written as a Microsoft Visual Basic application and runs on Microsoft SQL.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/...
Why on EARTH would you want to scale this up??
You could use windtraps to increase humidity and use the electricity to pump the resulting water to your sietch water stores. Maybe not necessary on earth now, but who knows...
I was getting rather sick and tired of the Internet slowly being divided into two forms of traffic:
Popcorn Time.
When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect. -- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy
