Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

  • 0 Posts
  • 96 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 20th, 2023
  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.workstoUplifting News@lemmy.world•California passes bill to make plug-in solar systems easier and cheaper to installEnglish
    11·
    6 hours ago

    I imagine there are two assumptions:

    • Such a “balcony” system isn’t going to be 600 watts. I’ve got a pair of 100 watt panels that together would each make a fairly good awning for any of my windows. I also have a 200 watt Anker brand panel (one of those weird ones that feels like it’s made of a quarter inch thick sheet of denim) that’s the size of a beach towel. 6 of those 100 watt panels would come close to the size of queen-size bed. You’re not going to have many apartment dwellers dangling something that big out the window.

    • Most people most of the time don’t have circuits loaded to the very edge of the envelope. If you plugged it into a circuit that’s drawing 10 amps…it’ll still draw 10 amps. It’s just that ~8.2 of them are coming through the breaker, the other ~1.8 are being provided by the solar panel.

    It does still sketch me out a little because it breaks certain fundamental design rules of the power grid. Power should come from female sockets not male plugs, and it should come from before a breaker, not after.

    This isn’t how I’m doing my personal solar power.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit NowEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    Okay, Zen_Shinobi got the details wrong but the landscape right. It wasn’t that difficult to rack up a long distance bill with your computer. It usually wasn’t your ISP collecting that bill though.

    In the early 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to have an ISP that wasn’t your phone company. AOL, Compuserve, all the little Randonets. The first ISP my father used was NANDOnet, which was operated by the Charlotte News and Observer. We were in a different area code than Charlotte, so using his state of the art 14.4kbaud modem to access NANDOnet accrued a long distance charge like any other phone call to Charlotte. You don’t remember the likes of Earthlink and AOL advertising “more local numbers?”

    Well into the 90’s, you’d have use for a modem even if you didn’t have an ISP at all. BBSes were often a computer with a modem attached. You’d dial directly into that BBS. No TCP/IP at all going on; you essentially had two computers connected together with an arbitrarily long serial cable. These BBS systems were owned by random nerds scattered across North America, so using BBS systems almost certainly meant long-distance phone calls. Doing things like multiplayer gaming in something like Doom over a modem could, theoretically, be done over a long distance line if you were that kind of decadent.

    Anyone remember porn dialers? There were probably other industry sectors that used this business model, but it was commonly associated with the early internet porn industry. It’s the 1990’s, nobody’s got a Venmo account, hell you can’t rely on every American having a Visa card. How do you bill your customers? What you do is you host a website purely for advertisement purposes, you don’t ship your actual product over HTTP at all. You offer a download of a scummy piece of software that uses the customer’s modem to directly dial your 900 number. They can download…almost certainly pictures probably not video, while connected, and then their phone company bills the customer for the toll. Not unlike a phone sex service, same business model, slightly different product.