Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

I’d invest in air conditioning, lighting, pump manufactures, water treatment equipment companies (esp. reverse osmosis), battery companies (for all those electric cars), electrical equipment manufactures (transformers, transmission, solid state power controls, etc).

Things that people will want more of if the the cost of electric power is lower AND availability is nearly unlimited (in the long run). Electric power would no longer be a limiting resoure…it would be a manufactured good! What will be the market growth in Africa for air conditioning when there is cheap power available………

A major and exponentially growing power requirement is computation. Google’s distributed data centers, the internet, remote computing, all these 24/7 power hungry servers…they just suck up the juice.

The cost of the internet is mostly the electrical power required to run the infrastructure. With cheap/free power you can expect all sorts of interesting things in the computational arena.

There is an endless demand for supercomputing. I expect the future will have desktop computers being essentially dumb terminals, and computational resources will be delivered as a service. Bandwidth will be essentially free, what you’ll pay for is how much computation you used.
Yes, and Google will take SUCH good care of your data … I suppose you could store locally and process remotely, but that’s not much of a wall, Chinese or otherwise, for those who value their privacy even a little bit.

Thank goodness for paper and safe deposit boxes! Computers didn’t go mainstream until I was nearly 30, so one of my definitions of a ‘green’ computer could be alien to a lot of people.

With 64GB solid state drives going for around $150 in single pieces (pricewatch.com/hard drives), the electrical price of commercial and residential computing is going to plummet while effective speed skyrockets. I’m planning my next computer around 2 of these in a RAID o configuration so’s I can cheap the CPU and motherboard and probably never notice the rig’s not ‘state of the art’. 😉