hillside wrote:Yes, there will be some kind of mass orbiting the sun no matter what we do, but I'd like to at least maintain the current ecological equilibrium as best we can. It might be nice to restore some of what we have already lost, but stopping the (not so) slow spiral to a-worse-place-than-we-are-in-now would be the first step.
Don't expect it. One question to ask is how much of global warming is man-made, and how much is the result of really long term climate cycles. Remember, our recorded history has taken place since coming
out of a glaciation period. The overall trend has been warmer for a long time.
Human activity has contributed to, but not caused the problems, and there is a limit to what human activity can do to limit or reverse it.
Back to Puppy (and other small Linuxes). If people made a real effort to reuse their old equipment instead of always buying new, it could make a significant difference in energy use and resource depletion. I don't know how much energy it takes to manufacture a new computer system, but it has to be substantial.
On the obverse, power consumption is
dropping in current systems, simply because power has a monetary cost. The manufacturers are working on power saving features to reduce the total cost of ownership of a system. That old system you keep running instead of upgrading may use a lot more power than the newer machine you pass on.
I've got Puppy running on an old notebook I was given by a friend, who bought a newer, faster system. It's a device using power in my home that
wasn't there before, and I now use
more energy because I'm running Puppy.
The questions are very seldom as simple as they sound.
I'm hoping that we will soon see some new technology coming to market in the solar energy area. I read about some folks who have developed a glass coating that causes light to scatter horizontally when it strikes the surface. The light then bounces inside the glass structure to the edges where solar cells are mounted to collect the energy. They can collect all the energy from the glass surface by using a minimal number of cells around the outside edge, thus greatly reducing the cost of the solar energy produced. I'm ready to buy that when they get it to market. I want a solar Puppy!
I used to be involved in alternative energy, many years ago. The barrier then was the same as it is now: people stayed with traditional energy sources because they were ultimately
cheaper than going the alternative route. The big wins in the US were installing solar hot water heaters, which accounted for about 20% of normal home energy usage, and showed a relatively short payback. The other big win was passive - upgrade your insulation to better retain and use the heat you you needed to generate in cold weather.
Photovoltaics are a different matter, and semiconductor economics apply. The big cost in solar cells is the fab to
make them, and a good chunk of the cost of a solar panel will be an amortized share of the cost of financing the plant. The more you make, the larger a base you have over which to spread the cost, and the cheaper you can price the product. There were suggestions years back that the US government might subsidize some costs of photovoltaic manufacture to help get the economies of scale to kick in earlier.
There was a chap I heard about years ago who claimed to have invented a method to make amorphous solar cells, rather than crystalline. They could be made in any configuration desired, and could even convert waste heat. When I saw the latter, I said "Whoa! Waste heat? If this is for real, this guy will become the richest man n the world!"
It never hit the market, so I assume there were problems in moving from lab to production. The guy in question was a recognized expert in the industry, so the claim wasn't BS. He thought he could do it.
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Dennis