Solar Nanotubes Make Light Work?
I have been reporting on developments in photovoltaic cells for as long as I can remember and there’s always some new technology or fabrication method that’s going to improve upon the woeful efficiency of today’s silicon based solar cells. I’m still waiting and outside the labs most commercial cells still only manage a fairly miserable 20 – 30 percent efficiency, which basically means that during their lifetime very few solar cells ever recover the enormous amount of energy put into their manufacture, let alone live long enough to generate ‘free’ electricity. I have no doubt that one day the problem will be licked and this might just be the development to do it. It’s a rolled up graphene layer nanotube and it’s the brainchild of a team of researchers at Cornell University. The first problem, though, is that it’s tiny, no larger than a DNA molecule, which means you’ll need an awful lot of them to do anything useful. The good news is that it’s very efficient and when exposed to light the tubular structure creates more electrons, and the cylindrical structure makes it easier for them to flow. I know, we’ve been here before so don’t hold your breath, but one day, it will happen, and maybe, just maybe this is where it started…
Microsoft Office 2007 IT Value Calculator
The Microsoft Office 2007 IT Value Calculator is a Microsoft Excel workbook that was designed and developed by Forrester Consulting to calculate the return on investment, costs, and benefits of an IT administrator can expect from deploying Microsoft Office 2007 within an corporate environment.
The financial impact of Office 2007 on an organization is calculated using formulas and macros that model imageForrester’s well-known Total Economic Impact (TEI) methodology, which systematically looks at the potential effects of technology investments across four dimensions: Read more
Double-Quick Data Destruction
If you sell or otherwise dispose of your computer you must delete all of the data it contains. This is vitally important, not just from a security standpoint, but it’s also technically illegal to sell on a PC with Windows and many commercial programs installed unless you also transfer the licences, though this is almost impossible to do.
Active KillDisk remains my favourite method for deleting the data on a drive, but here’s a new one, called Darik’s Boot and Nuke, and this program really lives up to it’s name! Just boot the PC using a CD, DVD, pen drive or floppy and it totally destroys all of the data on every drive it finds. Read more
