As an actual product available right now, there's this 250 watt inverter. from Enphase, intended to work with one solar panel. That's 54 cubic inches, or 12W/cubic inch. Google wants 50W/cubic inch, so Google is asking for 4x the power density. This one happens to be configured for 48VDC input, but that's not hard to change. It exceeds the efficiency limit set by Google.

Enphase sells those little inverters for a one-inverter-per-solar-panel system, where power is combined on the AC side. The inverter, at 171 mm x 173 mm x 30 mm, is a lot smaller than the panel it sits behind. Making it smaller won't have any effect on system size.

One big difference: Enphase offers a 25 year warranty on that unit. Google only wants to run for 100 hours. They'll probably get something that will pass their tests but wouldn't last a year in a real solar installation.

We consolidated about 20ish old servers (and added new systems) in to two Dell R720xds that are VM hypervisors. Not only does this save on power n' cooling but it is way faster, more reliable, and flexible. It is much easier and faster to rebuild and stand up a VM, you can snapshot them before making changes, if we need to reboot the hypervisor or update firmware we can migrate VMs over to the other host so there's no downtime. Plus less time is wasted on admining them since there are less systems, and they are newer.

On top of that they have good support contracts, and some excellent reliability features that you didn't get on systems even 5ish years ago (like actively scanning HDDs to look for failures).

Big time win in my book. Now does that mean we rush out and replace them with new units every year? No, of course not, but when the time comes that they are going out of support, or more likely that usage is growing past what they can be upgraded to handle, we'll replace them with newer, more powerful, systems. It is just a much better use of resources.

Yes. When they compared their measurements against the measurements they gathered from the people they didn't measure, they took that bias into account.

:^P

The US has "Christian ISPs", with server side porno filtering. They're very small. And very retro. One has terms that say they reserve the right to disconnect your dial-up connection after 10 minutes of inactivity.

Seems like you are trying to work out a solution to a problem you don't have yet. Maybe first see if users are just willing to play nice. Get a powerful system and let them have at it. That's what we do. I work for an engineering college and we have a fairly large Linux server that is for instructional use. Students can log in and run the provided programs. Our resource management? None, unless the system is getting hit hard, in which case we will see what is happening and maybe manually nice something or talk to a user. We basically never have to. People use it to do their assignments and go about their business.

Hardware is fairly cheap, so you can throw a lot of power at the problem. Get a system with a decent amount of cores and RAM and you'll probably find out that it is fine.

Now, if things become a repeated problem then sure, look at a technical solution. However don't go getting all draconian without a reason. You may just be wasting your time and resources.

I think you have that backward. M-Th is when you go to work then come home and want to just watch TV for the night. F/S/S is when you go out and do something because you don't have to be home early.

That's right, the study failed to correct for income.

Even today, per capita wages are 30% higher in the West vs in the East of Germany. It shouldn't be a mystery that people offered a prize with greater value cheated more.

> Netflix's primary focus should be on getting their streaming catalog to match their DVD catalog.

In which case the streaming service would cost at least $50/month.

People expect FAR too much from what is an $8/month streaming service. The DVD service is cheap because you can only get a handful of DVDs at a time, but with streaming, you could watch 24/7... 12 movies a day, 360 movies a month.

The way to look at Netflix streaming is, as if it were a channel, not an archive. With a channel, you look at the channel, and decide if you want to watch what the channel is offering. If you take Netflix streaming to be some kind of archive, you'll end up trying to search for random movies which will leave you a raging mess, as is seen so often when discussing the service.

I had forgotten NetFlix still mailed DVDs.

Nobody would, except perhaps for those with inadequate Internet bandwidth.

However, for a large number of movies you can't currently "access the data instantly online" (at least, not via Netflix). Netflix's primary focus should be on getting their streaming catalog to match their DVD catalog.

The quickest numbers I could find say that at the scales of large power-plants, the generator is very efficient, but the turbine not so much, around 50%. This would put the system as a whole at around 40% efficency sunlight -> electricity. That's competitive with the best solar voltaic systems tested in the lab, and 50-100% better than practical systems on the market. Assuming their system really does scale up to power plant sizes, of course.

Companies that do these mass layoffs should be banned from utilizing H1B visa employees for one month per employee terminated.

One of the most fair, hard-working & awesome people I know was born & raised in East Germany. She was also one of the first people over the wall when it came down. I've worked with her for 19 years & I'm pretty sure she'd have an exception to this "study".

So, you're saying that when 70% of the cost of a legal employee is state-mandated non-wage expense, that's the business' fault?

The problem isn't the businesses, nor the employees, nor the wages. It's the number of fingers the government has in your pocket if you try to do things right and lawful.

I once looked into what it would take to have one legal part-time minimum-wage employee for one year in Los Angeles County. It came to $28,000 before I paid a cent of wages. Since that exceeds my best net and is several times the value of the employee, obviously it wasn't happening. Someone didn't get a job, and I didn't expand my business.

No, they value the fact that you just can't stay in business when your out of pocket cost is $28/hour for a $10/hour job that earns the business maybe $15/hour in billable labor (and remember, there's also overhead to pay before you can even think about profit).

The business owners I've talked to would rather NOT hire illegals, because there's also an unreliability factor (90% can't be counted on to show up every day) and a quality control factor (most are less qualified than you'd really want), but when it's hire the illegal or go out of business thanks to the mandated costs of legal labor... well, I don't like it either, but I understand why it happens.