DPC (dinner party conversation)

Good News for your next DPC (dinner party conversation)

Free Energy, are you kidding?

The new tax credit  extension will add an extra 20 gigawatts of solar power—more than every panel ever installed in the U.S. prior to 2015. Combine this with the advances in battery storage and large swaths of the planet that don’t presently have electricity will have the potential to light up in the early 2020s. Having unlimited, clean energy will be transformative for the developing world—and the planet.

Solar and wind capture energy are already advancing on exponential curves with installation rates regularly doubling and costs falling.  Even without the subsidies, the costs of U.S. solar installations could be halved by 2022, reducing the returns on investments in homes to less than four years.  By, 2030, solar capture could provide 100 percent of today’s energy; by 2035, it could be free—just as cell-phone calls are today.

Let’s talk...

“Hey Siri,” “OK Google,” “Alexa,” “Cortana” —are getting close to a time when they will be really useful. Expect to see enhanced and extended voice command capabilities in practically every device that might need them.

Yottabyte my....

Absolutely everything that can be connected will be connected. Therefore, we are going to drown in data.  Nothing can stop it. The velocity of data is increasing and will always increase.

That means it is time to learn about zettabytes.

One bit or binary digital is the smallest (and largest) unit of computer data.

Bits are generally arranged and stored in eight-bit multiples called bytes.

One thousand bytes equals a kilobyte or KB.

One million bytes equals a megabyte or MB.

One billion bytes equals a gigabyte or GB.

One trillion bytes equals a terabyte or TB.  

A petabyte or one PB is equal to 1,000 terabytes. 

An exabyte or EB is equal to a million terabytes.

A zettabyte or ZB is equal to one billion terabytes.

If that’s how much data we’ll store in the cloud by 2019, you might as well know that 500 zettabytes is equal to half a yottabyte,

A yottabyte or YB is equal to one trillion terabytes.

JUST FYI...

Get ready for super-thin, super-cheap, and “someday” flexible 4K TVs. If you’re buying a TV today, you don’t really need a 4K set, but if you’re going to buy a set when these new models become available (in about a year or two), you will enjoy amazing color space, incredible dynamic range (whiter whites and blacker blacks), astounding resolution and unnoticeable refresh rates. We’re even going to see flexible screens on display which, when productized, will usher in a true paradigm shift.

Tesla Motors Inc. delivered 17,400 vehicles in the last three months of 2015, the most in a quarter by a wide margin and 75% more than a year earlier as the company rushed to hand over Model X sport-utility vehicles to customers who have been waiting...

Roomba has a robo-vacuum that not only cleans your floor, it can create an invariant map of your floor plan.