Recent Comments:
Struggling Toshiba looks for help from LCDs, not Blu-ray {Engadget HD}
Sep 19th 2008 9:03PM So, Toshiba is the only CE company with any sense since every other CE company is making "unprofitable" blu-ray players?
The thing is, in any developing product category, you need to get in early in order to generate the IP necessary for future profitability. The price of gadgets these days is largely determined by the patents you need to license, not the cost of raw materials. Even though the blu-ray specs are mostly complete, there's still a lot of room to innovate in the manufacturing of the drives and in the software codecs.
By not investing in blu-ray now, Toshiba will have a hard time playing catch up if/when blu-ray goes mainstream.
Panasonic's gigantic 150-inch plasma is official! {Engadget HD}
Jan 7th 2008 5:19PM 1080p is 2k! The 2k is for the horizontal resolution, which is 1920 for 1080p.
California to get world's largest solar farm {Engadget}
Jul 10th 2007 12:03AM People for some strange reason tend to dismiss direct solar energy off-hand, without looking at the numbers. More solar energy hits the earth's surface in one hour than the entire world consumes in all other forms in one year. To meet the world's total power demand would require us to panel over less than 1% of the world's *land* area (the source I'll cite below will say 0.16%, but I'm a little more conservative). I'm pretty sure we can find 1% of the world's land that is plentiful in sunlight and not so useful for anything else. Between our densely populated cities, we have lots and lots of rather barren land. And even within cities, solar panels on roofs in much of the US would reduce our draw on the grid by more than 50%. In fact, during the day, when the sun is brightest and industry is busiest, solar roof panels can feed the grid to reduce the peak demand on the power plants.
Now, compare this to nuclear. An average nuclear plant produces 1GW. We have less than 1000 nuclear plants in the world right now, if I recall correctly. World power demand from all sources is about 20TW. If we were to totally replace word power demand with nuclear, we'd have to build roughly 1 nuclear plant a day for the next 50 years.
Sources:
http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area/
http://www.ecotopia.com/ases/SolarToday/DawnOfTheSolarEra.pdf
