KBToys went out of business much more quietly than Circuit City or LNT, but it was equally depressing seeing them move the last remaining products to the front so they could strip the paint from the walls in the back.

They didn't care when TomToms cost $600 and hardly anybody had them, I guess now that everybody got one for the holidays for under $100 they finally noticed

Anybody else think it's funny that the people who want macs the most are paid the least? Graphic Designers make half what most engineers do, but they almost always have nice macs.

Having worked in the industry for a US based solar manufacturer, there are a couple of misconceptions that are extremely common. Thin-film amorphous Silicon modules are much less expensive to produce because they use a gas based deposition process rather than traditional (blue looking) crystalline modules. Crystalline must compete for silicon ingots with the semiconductor industry resulting in increased cost of materials. Thin-film however are not what you would put on the roof of your residence since they require more square footage to provide the same amount of kilowatt hours. In other words, the effort required to place either a single crystalline module or a single thin-film module is exactly the same, so if labor is the biggest cost in your installation you're better off paying more for a more energy dense panel and putting up less of them. The main reason thin-film is good for commercial applications is because they generate more kilowatt hours of energy per year per kilowatt installed. Crystalline modules "switch off" sooner and "turn on" later because they require more direct sunlight to function. Because of this, thin-film modules have a quicker energy payback. In summary, if you install 100kW of crystalline you will use less space (good thing), generate less power, and cost more money than thin-film panels. Even though you need more structures when you install thin-film, if you're putting up a megawatt you can take advantage of economy of scale and incur a proportionally lower installation cost per kW. That said, the inexpensive manufacturing cost of thin-film modules for commercial sized installations (the roof of Wal-Mart for instance, or a large desert install) makes sense in those quantities. If you're putting them on the roof of your house, use more expensive and more energy dense crystalline. Eventually thin-film technology will catch up to crystalline on efficiency, but keep in mind what commercial-scale installations need is the cheapest way to generate massive amounts of kilowatt hours per year while taking advantage of all the tax write-offs and solar credits.