20% efficiency in terms of light -> electricity. A 50% laser efficiency (electricity -> light) is really good, possible for some diode lasers, if you pump a fiber laser with diodes to get a high quality beam for cutting materials or weapons purposes maybe you get 25%.
That demo would require about 45 kW of laser power with good beam quality which would be totally possible with a fiber laser
Those sat to ground power sources use gallium arsenide switched FETs = synchronous rectification, avoiding the voltage drop of diodes has been tested on a small scale, the 10GW orbital 35% efficient solar arrays, maybe next week... Solar boilers, end to end, are more efficient than solar cells, but mechanical complexity(leaks, corrosion, worker avarice) made one US plan in the South West non viable. As we sit silicon-perovskite tandem solar cells will top out around 42-45% - unless Schockley is end runned? Ternary -??.
A good lecture = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0VJX0_Td0&t=2s&ab_channel=...
Solar thermal as well as solar-chemical systems have the problem of start-up.
PVs do not have any problem starting up, they produce less than full power with less than full illumination but they produce something and once the illumination is full they produce full power immediately.
Many solar thermal power plants are fired with natural gas in the morning to get them spun up to the point where they can take advantage of the solar energy. Without that they'd probably lose a few hours of production.
I was thinking of"how much is enough" so they can power 'instruments'. I am also thinking of 'how can we use this tech to revive space-instruments (the next generation of 'Voyagers' may be equipped with such receivers?)
I also wonder how difficult/impossible would it be, and the 'throughput'. Assuming that you want to recharge a recon drone (or the 'next generation of Voyagers flying in space) that flies over XYZ area/country/etc. Would it take 1sec or 10seconds 'of beam', and the accuracy/waste/total amount one would have to 'dispense' in order to give that drone the X seconds of 'juice' to keep it running for 1000x X seconds of flight duration. And what about clouds/mist/rain/snow/birds/etc.
'Infinite energy' for a drone (I mean no dependency to come down to refuel) is a game changer.
Would that work with 'instruments buried underground? And at what depth? ('War of the worlds' scenario). Could someone bury a device, with only the receiver protruding from the ground, with a battery to keep it alive, and waiting to be activated by a satellite passing by giving it the "10 seconds beam" to fully charge it and.. (I am thinking of the recent drone-related incidents/attacks within Russia and Iran)(if you park a drone for 10 months, its battery will deplete, right?)(I don't have a drone, but batteries are batteries).
A second thought on the matter, can one 'program' the light to be also transferring data? Park the drones in <insert foreign territory>. No programming. In the middle of nowhere (no 4G-5G). You fly a satellite over it, beam down the 'juice' (together with the instructions - no interception of the transfer is possible). Someone finds it 'before', they only get the hardware but no info/intel.
"The possibilities are endless" (and so are the nightmares)
Then do as you please without the that if you are dealing with a user or leave it plural if multiple…
And if we’re talking personal preference I really dislike caps in reserved words in sql, even before highlighting was everywhere it still just feels archaic for no good reason
Ha re: audio cues for debugging… your pc speaker is truly an underused tool when debugging something infrequent… for example our system processes a lot of xml data and usually it’s fine but for our test suite hearing beeps and knowing there are server side issues immediately is a great thing
I ended up digging the book out and finding the passage; hopefully it's ok to share because it's an amazing story and helps illustrate what makes that book so great to me:
"The best caveman debugging solution I ever saw was one that used the PC speaker. Herman was a programmer who worked on Ultima V through Ultima IX, and one of his talents was perfect pitch. He could tell you the difference between a B and a B flat and get it right every time. He used this to his advantage when he was searching for the nastiest crasher bugs of them all - they didn't even allow the debugger window to pop up. He wrote a special checker program that output specific tones through the PC speaker and peppered the code with these checks. If you walked into his office while his spiced-up version of the game was running, it sounded a little like raw modem noise, until the game crashed. Because the PC speaker wasn't dependent on the CPU, it would remain emitting the tone of his last check. "Hmm...that's a D," he would say, and zero in on the line of code that caused the crash."
As a corollary to 2, management tends to love graphs… whatever your using to build should have a plugin that could show unit test success counts and generate even a simple line graph… that alone might be enough incentive to add more testing
You’ve talked me into running some load tests around and before these times… around thanksgiving I’ll give it a shot too… I wonder though if it’s just a redirection of traffic… if regular business sites are less busy because people are shopping it would just slightly shift the load from one “side” to the other
I miss notes - it was really a better way to organize companies than anything later. Historical valuable data, records of why decisions were made, ephemeral email like things but for groups, user programmable if it didn't quite match your needs, robust encryption, it had it all.
oh I always nust assumed Lotus Notes was just lesser Outlook. can you give examples - such has how did it capture why decisions were made - that sounds ... hard or just "someone wrote it down"
It was a low/nocode environment; anyone (with enough rights) could knock up a simple app with rules/workflows and share it with the company. It made collecting, distributing and organising information easy if you knew what you were doing. It also created complex monsters as it was both too easy and too hard to use. I liked it a lot; we moved from Notes to Exchange and Sharepoint back in the day and it was awful for effiency. We required so much more people to do the same things. Luckily I left shortly after.
For your company you have a lot of smart people other than coders. And Notes had a rich collaborative set of intrinsically that you could hip out work flow applications like an accountant with spreadsheets. And built in security and auditing and all that. And since you had the ability to craft tools to fit the exact situation, automation of processes went so fast and was done by people familiar with the business side of the process. We did have a Notes team that would do apps for teams that couldn’t but also had a rich ecosystem of business line apps that were so much better than spreadsheet apps or Access apps.
