I was under the impression that the issue of translating LED light into a broad swath of color was an already solved problem (except for some fine-tuning optimization), using appropriately-sized nanoparticles which hand the energy from the photons around, slicing-and-recombining energy from photons into different sized packets and re-emitting the light at a frequency characteristic of the size of the nanoparticle. Cover the LED with a bunch of these in a range of sizes and you get a smooth spectrum.

Works the other way, too: Coat a solar cell with such particles and they take the random-frequency photons from the sun and slice them up into multiple new photons at a frequency good for the solar cell bandgap, and mash the levtovers into more big photons to re-slice to the correct size. (It's not 100%, since some of the photons get away. But it's more than a 2x improvement over a bare cell, which only takes one slice off each photon and throws the rest away.)

If this is correct, this project looks like just a fine-tuning of making the nanoparticles, or finding materials for them that are somewhat more efficient than what was already being used (which was pretty good).

I haven't been following this all THAT closely. Have I misunderstood the current stuff? Or is this just a little incremental tweak along the cutting edge?

When your chosen platform can't do something, just redefine the goal and then hate on anyone who doesn't accept that definition. So any game I can't get on Linux is a "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" game? Well then count me in as wanting to play those! Of games I've played lately that don't run on Linux Skyrim has topped the list, 200 hours in it so far. It is an extremely entertaining game, I have gotten my money's worth and more out of it. Also on the list would be Xcom, Torchlight 2, Deus Ex, Fallen Enchantress, Shogun 2 Total War, Terraia and so on. Now if those are all "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" games according to you, fine, but I don't care I liked them, a lot, and want to play them. Crysis? Not on the list, I didn't care for it, so I haven't bought any of the sequels.

Frankly the measure of how good the platform is for gaming isn't how many games you can find for it, it is how many games that you want to play run on it. That'll vary person to person. However trying to point to a bunch of little indy or half-finished OSS titles isn't going to make many gamers happy. Sorry, but I want Skyrim, it is all kinds of worth it and not just for the graphics (though when yo uload up some mods those are pretty impressive too). I don't want Vega Strike.

Mother Theresa would no doubt have printed a medical tool for removing IUDs.

Which would have been totally useless since most of the countries and places she setup shop didn't have access to birth control to begin with.

India, with its huge population, had a large program making IUDs available at no cost to people in the poorer regions who wanted them.

Mother Theresa's work included providing medical treatment to the poor in many of these same regions. Her clinics were noted for removing the government-provided IUDs of women who were there for other procedures, without seeking permission or even informing the woman that it had been done.

Don't you just pull on the string?

Not if you don't want to kill or sterilize the woman.

If you want higher resolutions and frame rates, you need more powerful GPUs to handle it. For example moving to 2560x1600 or to 120fps doubles the pixel requirement over 1920x1080@60fps. So whatever amount of power you needed to achieve 1080p60, double that for either of those targets. 4k will require a quadrupling, and 120fps 4k would require 8x the power.

All this is assuming you are getting 60fps in the first place. Now maybe you are fine with trading off lower frame rates, or lower resolutions, that's all up to you. If 720p30 is your target, you can get away with a whole lot less power. However that doesn't mean that nobody wants to target higher resolutions or frame rates.

There are also other visual quality settings to consider, like anti-aliasing and so on that can require more power. Depending on what you are targeting with that, you can need a lot of power.

Personally I really find frame rates much below 60 pretty annoying in most games. I really like the feeling of fluidity you get. 120 fps is even better, but the monitor I normally use doesn't handle that. Well maintaining that 60fps at a 2.5k resolution is not a trivial feat. I don't think a $250 graphics card would do that for most games.

Seriously, for some people, gaming is their hobby and that kind of money is not that much when you talk what people spend on hobbies. My coworker just bought himself like a $2000 turbo for his car, to replace (or augment, I'm not sure) the one that's already there. He has no need for it, but he likes playing with his car.

Now that you, and most others, don't want to spend that kind of money is understandable and not problematic. There's a reason why companies have a lineup of stuff and why the high end stuff is just for those with plenty of money. It also doesn't scale linearly since the higher end something is, the less units get sold, and so the more the fixed costs influence the unit cost.

However don't hate on it. That you don't wish to spend that kind of money doesn't mean that nobody should. Also you should be glad people do: The expensive parts fund the cheap parts. They can recover more R&D costs on these units, letting them sell lower end parts for less, since lower end parts are the same tech, just less of it.

I am, and gas costs made me decide to pay $30K for my Nissan LEAF.

I analyzed TCO (excluding maintenance costs, which are much lower for electrics, but I couldn't quantify that so I just ignored it) for about 20 different vehicles, including EVs, hybrids and pure ICE vehicles,. My model assumed that the new vehicle was going to be an additional vehicle, and that the other (gas-burning) vehicle would be available for trips beyond the range of the EV. I assumed very conservative ranges for the EVs, for example I estimated the LEAF's range at 60 miles (it's really more like 80-120, depending on conditions). Finally, I created a statistical model of my driving habits and calculated the total cost over 8 years.

The result was that the three EVs I looked at had the top three spots... they were the cheapest to drive overall, in spite of being by far the most expensive up front. Even better, thanks to tax credits the break-even point was at 2-3 years. Without the tax credits it was about 6 years. The vehicle immediately behind the EVs was the 18K Honda Insight hybrid, then a mix of other hybrids and more-efficient gas vehicles and finally a long tail of gas vehicles trailing the pack.

Of course, your driving patterns may be different, your electricity costs may be higher or gas prices lower (oh, I assumed that gas prices would continue increasing at the same rate they've increased over the last 8 years), etc., etc, etc., but I've walked several other people through applying my model to their situations and in every single case the EVs have been extremely competitive -- and usually the very cheapest.

In practice, what I've found -- for me -- is that my model was very conservative. In fact, the LEAF is even cheaper than I expected. Partly that's because I was able to get a better deal on the car than I had assumed, and partly it's because I do most of my charging at work, so my actual energy costs are dramatically lower than my model had anticipated.

Oh, and it's a very nice car, not a "tin can" that can't keep me as warm or cool as I like. It's a 3000-pound vehicle that accelerates 0-60 in 7.8 seconds, will do 90+ mph and can easily keep the cab at 60 degrees or 90 degrees or anywhere in between, regardless of outside temperature. It also has power everything, a nice stereo, GPS navigation, XM radio, bluetooth, backup camera, and computer or smartphone-based remote control... it's loaded. Of course, stomping on the gas pedal, driving 90 mph and blasting the heat (the AC doesn't use so much, plus it doesn't have to work against the heat generated by an ICE) will drop my range from 120 miles down to about 70 -- but my model only assumed a 60 mile range. It's a compact, but the alternatives I compared it against were also compacts.

EVs are very real, and very practical, today. And it's only going to get better. If Tesla can produce a $30K car with a 200-mile range, it'll be a huge hit with cost-conscious people, because that's enough range that for most people it can be a primary car -- no need for another ICE vehicle except on the rare long-distance trips, and it's cost-effective to rent for those.

When you post stuff like that, and fanboys mod it to +5, it looks really silly. The reason isn't because it is not true, but because it is not impressive. Yes, Linux has a few games for it including some older Source games. Yay. Trying to imply that because it has Steam it has games is silly. Roughly 6 of my 163 Steam games will run on Linux and most of those are the older Source engine games.

Having Steam doesn't mean you get games. It means there's a platform to sell games on that many Linux users will hate on (costs money, has DRM, no source code). The games themselves have to be ported and so far, not much of that has been going on.

It does not strengthen your point when you go and make a rather silly argument. The "but it has Steam!" argument that keeps getting trotted out when someone comments on Linux and gaming reminds me of Mac users back in the 90s pointing to the 10 or so old titles you could find in the store as proof that there were plenty of games on the Mac.

Linux gaming is not in a good state currently, and trying to mask that is silly.

Guns are tools of the weak and afraid. They clutch them close to their chests to make them feel like they have some power in this crazy, cruel world.

But all we really want is love, approval, and security. Hence, teddy bears.

At least it's better than my first impulse to print a vagina.

Oooh, you just had to go the self-immolation route, you insensitive clod!

Oh, EMulate. OK.

I've never seen "licensed" grid tie systems that didn't do what you describe.

And you won't: They can't be "licenced" if they don't do this.

About the only way you can feed the grid legitimately without such a device is by pushing on an induction motor (as happens sometimes in normal applications, like with a mo-gen system for an electric elevator when the elevator is being slowed down.) Induction motors depend on the grid for excitation and won't self-generate unless you've got enough capacitors hung across them (and your load) to make the net power factor capacitive. (This is unlikely but can happen in islanding, so you generally aren't allowed to hang a prime mover, like a water wheel or windmill blade, on an induction motor, and hook it to the grid, without adding such controllers. Generation from induction motors in an outage should only last for a few seconds while they suck the inertia out of some spinning mass and run down.)

Last I looked it cost about $2,000 extra to have a grid tie inverter with sell-back (and high-current load direct-connect with inverter "helping"), compared to an equivalent inverter from the same manufacturer that only fed the load with inverter output but could charge the batteries / feed the inverter with rectified line power when the grid was up.

In this case the $2k-ish bought you an extra box containing:
  - a contactor (to jumper the line to the inverter output) and
  - a circuit board that controlled the contactor and acted as a peripheral to the brain of the inverter, providing it with phase measurements (to line-up the inverter phase with the line phase before closing the contactor) and a voltage and frequency measurements (to tell the brain when the grid was failing, so it could open the contactor and cut you loose).

Though this was an add-on box, other products with the function built in also brought a similar premium compared to non-sell equivalents from the same manufacturer.

Straight grid-tie devices feed the harvested power to the grid and depend on it for interconnect and timing reference. Yes they don't feed a dead grid - but that means they don't feed YOU when the grid is down, either.

I'm maybe three years out-of-date on this information so the market may have changed.

Mother Theresa would no doubt have printed a medical tool for removing IUDs.

Even if only a third of the people stick around after din-din (and it's usually more), it's still the equivalent of getting more better than a 10% increase in manpower for the price of nine dinners (in bulk) per day per extra head - FAR less than the cost of hiring another head.

Did the math wrong: Make that about 17% more "heads" for the price of six dinners per night for one in three staying an extra half-shift..

FWIW, most "free food" programs encourage workers to come in earlier (for breakfast) or stay later (work past dinner time) or to not spend a long time off the company property over lunch. The extra time at work usually pays for the food costs.

It pays MUCH more than that. A typical thing that happens at startups is the company buys dinner - and the bulk of the engineers chow down and stick around another four hours. Not only do they get half-again as much time, but they get it in a block. For a programmer or other design engineer that means they haven't "lost state" and are even more productive than if they'd just worked three days instead of two.

Even if only a third of the people stick around after din-din (and it's usually more), it's still the equivalent of getting more better than a 10% increase in manpower for the price of nine dinners (in bulk) per day per extra head - FAR less than the cost of hiring another head.

And then there's an adminstrative pathology: The new management comes in, sees how much is spent on the food (but not how much is gained as a result), decides that their predecessors were stupid and the employees were looting the company, and stops the food. So come dinner time the employees go out (or home) to dinner and don't come back. Immediately it's like they lost somewhere between 10% and 33% of their work force without any reduction in payroll costs. (That's not counting how disgruntled some of the employees become.)

I've been at three companies where this happened, and observed several more. All but one of 'em folded shortly thereafter - and the one that survived went through a near-bankruptcy that destroyed the original investors' equity and left it in the hands of the bondholders before it recovered.

It could even keep a local part of the grid up while all others around them suffer power failures.

And that is a BIG no-no. Because it kills linemen trying to fix the outage.

Those transformers work both ways. Your little generator or inverter gets stepped up to maybe 8,000 or 12,000 volts. Then a lineman who thinks the power is down brushes against a wire (or comes within a quarter-inch of it) and is "burned" - to death.

Grid-connected inverters with a "sell" feature MUST monitor the network and shut down if they detect islanding - being cut off from the grid, with one or a collection of generators running autonomously. It's perfectly OK to feed power into the grid when it's up (if you're using UL approved equipment, connected according to code, inspected for compliance, and the utility knows you're doing it according to the rules.) It's perfectly OK to have things wired so your equipment still feed your house if the grid goes down, but it MUST cut itself off from the dying or dead grid and stay off until the grid comes back up and stabilizes at the nominal voltage and frequency.