Slashdot Mirror
Price of Power in a Data Center
mstansberry writes "Much like the rest of the country, IT is facing an energy crisis. The utilities are bracing companies for price spikes this winter and according to experts and IT pros, those prices aren't going to come down any time soon. This is thefirst article in a four-part series investigating the impact of energy issues on IT."
Tell everyone to stop folding http://folding.stanford.edu/ ?
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
P.S. The submitter has a nice fishing web site and is holding about a 12" trout on his main page. Nice catch ... but I'd
recommend he go on a
fishing charter
in Seward Alaska if he wants to catch some mongo fish.
This trip was a major slayfest and my brother was
Captain
Crudd who knows how to fish with a beer in his hand.
it was a extra $200 a month. ouchy.
We have a page on our site with some calculations on how much energy is being saved because we're using Linux VServer and why dedicated servers are not environmentally-friendly (at least not with the current technology - this may change). The numbers are probably off a bit, but they give you some idea.
Also the street price for a 20A circuit in a datacenter is $200-$300, while the cost of a megabit is $100 or less. So a rack of servers that requires two power circuits and pushes 3Mbps (not an unusual scenario) costs twice as much in power than in bandwidth.
And here's another article on this issue. And another.
Energy prices are going to hurt everybody.
From here:
"EIA expects energy expenditures will be 18% higher this winter compared to last winter, which will be 8.3% of the annual gross domestic product, a record since 1987 when it was 8.4%."
And for those of you who want to find a way to save energy: Here's 60 Tips To Save Energy This Winter
Run the heat in the winter with Intel chips! Just do batch-processing, or some intense rendering work.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Pedal faster!!
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
"It's the other side of Moore's Law," Sneider said. "As the cost of [buying] these machines decreases, the cost of powering and cooling them increases."
I don't agree with this. How power efficient was Eniac? Also, my laptop lasts much longer the one I had a few years back. I think we're making progress on the power front, but the demand for computing power is attracting more and more dollars, the power cost is largely insignificant with regards to the return on investment.
No Sigs!
How much power loss is due to ludicrous numbers of layers of processing that go on in modern OSes and applications?
Time for the OS vendors to realize that smaller, efficient code footprints will save money in real world terms.
Then again, I code in java for a living (Ducks)
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
And the cost of extracting a ton of coal hasn't changed much from 1995 to 2005. But it shows what a sham commodity trading is - the price of a ton of coal (because it is 'energy' related) is traded relative to the price of a barrel of oil or the cost of a cfu of natural gas.
All this does is further underline the boom/bust cycles of the energy business and how it negatively affects the economy.
This is thefirst article in a four-part series investigating the impact of energy issues on IT.
Does this mean three slashdot dupes forthcoming?
Materials needed: Fans. Flexible duct. Duct tape (of course).
Procedure: Place fans in datacenter. Tape duct to fans. Route duct to office spaces.
Results: Save money on heating and cooling bills.....
Have you ever heard of supply and demand? If we fix oil prices at $25 per barrel, the oil companies will just sell it to China at $70, and we will have NONE. If China convinces Venesula to sell them all their oil, we will see $100 oil very soon.
Just on the cusp of hydrogen fuel cell techonology becoming available, we're about to be hit hard with spikes in both gas and electricity. The SK crown corporation SaskEnergy asked the rate review panel for a 41% increase, but the review panel recommended "only" 27%. Auto gas prices have soared as high as $1.20/litre but have settled back at about a $1 CDN. Natural gas though is what scares Canadians, since most heat their homes with either that or electricity.
Sask Power is running advertising imploring people to unplug their underused second fridge, turn off their computers when not in use, and upgrade to LDC screens to save about 66% the power expense over CRT technology. They claim savings of $50/year if you turn off your computer when it's not in use.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The end user might actually benefit from this if it spurs some more innovation in the low-power computing sector. We as computer users take our power consumption for granted, IMO, when there are places in the world lacking the electricity for a simple light bulb.
In general this will pass along additional costs to the end user, similar to how the price of oil adds cost to our everyday consumables. I am curious as to how many tons of coal/gas/uranium or whatever power source you fancy is produced by us computer users en masse. I think an answer to this would stagger us all.
I could see the truth if I was blind.
HP just came out with multicore half-height blades. Their latest requirements are 30 amp, three phase power per PDU for a blade rack, with 4 pdus/rack for redundancy. That's enough power service to cover 3 modern 3000 square foot homes when you factor the energy back to 240 volts.
Getting the power to something this silly isn't the pain. COOLING something that consumes 14KW in a 4 square foot space is the challenge anyone in data center management faces. Both HP and IBM have come out with the "innovation" of heat exchangers that run off your chilled water loop. Some of us have been there and done that and don't want to try it again.
Every time someone comes to me selling density and physical consolidation, I throw them out on their ass. It's cheaper to just buy or build more traditional raised floor space and run good old fashioned 6, 4, or 2u servers than to cool a bunch of blade racks.
STFU & GBTW
Much of the energy used is for air conditioning. One might think that this would be easy for data centers in Michigan, but I've worked for places that heat the building and air condition the data center in January. One place had the data center a/c die, and a box fan in a window allowed everything to run. A box fan has to be cheaper to run than a/c. So what we might see is smarter environmental control. At least in the winter, it makes sense to run outside air in, and use the waste heat to heat the rest of the building.
Perhaps data centers could be moved to Canada.
-- Stephen.
Oil still costs about $15 to pump out of the ground, but instead of the $25 price before we invaded Iraq, it's pushing $70+ as a "permanent high".
Supply and demand.
FTA:"Historically, I haven't managed the electric bill. But now we're aware and interested in it," Doherty said. "If I told my boss that my staff wanted a 27% increase [in pay], I'd be downstairs on the carpet."
First, it's good that he's paying attention to the electric bill now. But he should have been paying attention to it in the past (last year saw a spike in prces, too). TCO and all that. Of course, electricity may be negligible compared to other costs, depending on their setup.
Second, it's highly unlikely that a 27% boost to electricity costs is anywhere near as much as a 27% boost in salaries. Furthermore, salaries are more controllable internally.
Good for him to point it out though.
Of interest, one of my company's vendors has been assessing us a fuel surcharge for a couple years now (though shipping & distribution is not a core function of theirs). They are now adding a "utilities" surcharge to their invoices... due to management relationships, we're stuck with this vendor, who has raised our effective rates 18% in the past two years. Anyone else have a similar experience?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Shouldn't there be an initiative to certify computer systems as "low energy", i.e. using low power processors, come with LCD monitors, etc?
Just as the state of Massachusetts chose to use F/OSS to save in office software, why not asking government offices to replace CRT's with LCD monitors?
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=125653 0
Pebble bed reactors (with built in steam cracking!), biodiesel & ethanol, a sprinkling of wind energy and solar where appropriate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
It warms my heart to know the ball is rolling on these things, and more. I just have to keep pushing, but another set of hands makes the work lighter. Everyone?
This isn't really a new problem, as you can see from this article dated January 5, 2001. From the article: Amazingly, a large hosted-server operation can average the same power usage as a steel manufacturing plant.
do.what.promptcmds
mention that much of the power loss and heat generation is due to thousands of power supplies in each data center. If data center racked computers used DC power, the power conversion takes place in one area, and only heat generated by power usage is generated in the data center. This reduces power losses due to multiple AC/DC conversions, as well as the heat generated in those conversions. Less heat means less AirCon is needed, so less power there too. This is such a simple thing to do as well. Most huge telecom or carrier grade equipment is buit for -48vdc operations. The ROI for running DC data centers is even money in very few months of operation. The equipment already exists, so its not new, just needs to be implemented.
Additionally, when your data center power is DC, the AC source can be from anywhere, meaning that if you find a local generation facility that is cheap to run, you can reduce the amount of energy that you have to purchase from the grid.
The trick to making aircon units efficient is not generating the heat in the first place. Despite what CPU heat there is, power conversion accounts for huge amounts of data center heat.
Try replacing CRTs with LED displays too, less heat generated, less power used, less aircon required.
IMHO, replacing CPUs to save energy is the least 'bang for buck' energy savings thing you can do, even if it is popular to talk about. The only place it really matters to people is in laptops.... The data center is a place they could care less about CPU heat... for the most part.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
your life ambition has been accomplished, you have achieved a first post on /. you may die now... (please)
There's not a whole lot we can do about the price short of bombing Vienna, and somehow I doubt even Bush would do that.
English is easier said than done.
I bought myself a watt meter to measure the power of some of my home electronics. So I tested my friend's laptop, it was a Dell, 15 inch monitor P4. Under linux the laptop was drawing 50-100watts (which is very high for a laptop), under windows it was drawing from 30-50 watts. Linux on desktops has the same power management as windows on desktops though.
First, it's Venezuela. Second, even if that were true, which it is not, oil is a commodity. If Venezuela sells all its oil to China, that will just free up oil elsewhere in the world.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
... is going to be the new benchmark. Sun is already heading in that direction with their low-power AMD offerings, and even more so with the new
Niagara systems. When the other vendors get their acts together, expect them to follow suit.
Yes, in an ideal world the U.S. government could "stick it to the man" and pass all kinds of new laws to try to force gas prices to be lower.
However, we as a nation are really at the mercy of the oil industry, and the people in the government know this.
Recently, a bill (the Senate version) was squashed that would have encouraged the oil industry to build new refineries. The opponents claimed it would relax too many environmental regulations, and that oil companies have been voluntarily shutting down refineries. Perhaps this is true, but now the oil industry has been handed an excuse not to build new refineries.
How do we force the companies to sell oil at a cheaper price? Does the government rush in and take control of the companies? We can pass laws that "encourage" alternative energies, but does that reduce the cost of oil right now?
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
I've never been a big fan of laptops, I enjoy installing new video cards too much to like an un-upgradable lappy. But with power the way it is, and the nearly silent operation of a laptop, I really have to consider it. I use my computer for TV, and music, and the fans are getting so loud along with the hard drives, that I just don't think I will go the desktop route again. Even if I don't tote my laptop around and instead use it as a "silent" and low power-use desktop, I'm beginning to think it's a better investment than another desktop.
Has anyone bought a laptop-like desktop [without an integrated LCD for instance] and been satisfied playing either games or watching TV/DVD on it?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Let's be realistic, they won't come down...ever. If they can get another 20% (example) out of you this year, do you think they're going to drop it 20% next year after the "crisis"? 10% even? No way. Just like any other energy business that is at a near-monopoly level (gasoline), they can raise it whenever they feel like it and blame it on whatever they want. What are you going to do, go to the competition? In the area I live in (Midland, Michigan) and the surrounding cities (Saginaw, Bay City, Flint, etc) we get ONE choice for gas and electricity - Consumer's Energy. That's it. You don't like their service or prices? Tough shit. You're stuck. There have been "alternative companies" in the past, but all they do is resell energy for Consumers Energy - it's all going through the same pipes and wires.
It sucks, but that's the way it is.
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
This is subject to debate, but experience having worked in a datacenter has shown me that one of the problems is that of all the computing power that occupies a typical datacenter, 90% of it is redundant overhead that never gets used. Still, these servers just sit there, sucking electricity and requiring expensive HVAC to maintain.
I knew a wise man once who said that in theory, if your CPU usage isn't 100% all the time, you're wasting money. This is at least partially true. We have many many servers who are idle most of the time, and even at "peak periods" the load average barely budges. One of the services we support is RAM-heavy, but uses almost *no* CPU whatsoever, still, our clients specify pipe-hitting four-way boxes with large disk arrays--one box per service. Ludicrous!
By combining several services on a single box, you can eliminate the need to host extra/redundant servers, and save a bunch of cash in the process. Sure, it may be less convenient to administer, but let's face it, folks, any move toward consolidating deployments in the datacenter is only going to save space/money.
Now, that being said, most people could care less, thinking "hardware's cheap" and they'll just throw dozens of boxes at the problem and forget about it. Maybe that will change, maybe not...
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Nonetheless, having the computer repetitively recompute the exact same answers (parse that huge XML config file! JIT-compile that Java app, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN!) is an exercise in keeping your hardware vendor happy, and a sign of laziness on the part of programmers. Who among us doubts that one AMD64 with a few gigs of RAM could, if programmed properly, calculate the payroll for the entire USA every night?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
"About $15" is approximate. The industry average was actually about $12:bbl when I researched it in 2002. I'm just building in inflation and a margin of error.
--
make install -not war
A company I used to work for piped the heat from the datacenter to the rest of the building, and apparently saved a lot of money.
At home, my office is upstairs. I close all of the upstaris heating vents during the winter. My computers keep it warm enough. (And in Minnesota, that's saying something!)
http://cubemonkey.net/quotes -- fortune-mod quote generator
It sounds like Linux was running the laptop at a higher clock rate. Many laptops have a configurable clock rate, and will turn the rate down when power savings are needed (for example, when AC power disappears and the laptop switches to battery power).
A little fiddling with the power controls of Linux would probably get it to the same power consumption as Windows. While you measured something real, it's probably a configuration issue more than a builtin Linux vs. Windows difference.
Good to know that it's only the USA that has any concerns over use of power, global warming and all that.
God Bless America!
If I look at my own guilty fact sheet, I can see that I'm guilty of the following...
On the plus side, I have converted to LCD's whenever I nave needed to replace a monitor. It's a start, but a small one.
Since I have been looking at low power home servers for myself, I have started to look at the power used by the servers at work. There is allot of crap, mostly Windows stuff, that I run on solo servers. I'm sure I need no explain the reasoning behind that, but it's clear that it's not really efficient.
We have been looking at VM Ware and Xen with an eye towards reducing the number of hardware devices we need to have space and cooling and spare parts for, but The power consumption savings alone may be enough to tip the balance with Management.
Has anyone done a nice comparison of power usage after smushing 7 or 8 systems into 2 VM Ware boxes?
Eschew Obfuscation
Capitalism is all about supply and demand and the cost of buying A vs B vs doing without.
A barrel of oil may cost $x to pump out of the ground, deliver, process, and burn and coal may cost a fraction of that for the same energy-equivalent.
But it doesn't matter. As long as the demand at either of those prices exceeds supply, the open-market price of both will be about the same and will be higher than the "production" costs.
When the demand is between the two "production costs" that one will be heavily favored, possibly knocking the more expensive one off the market entirely until prices rise or production costs go down.
By the way, even within the same commodity, you have this effect:
Oil in some places is dirt-cheap to produce. In others it is so expensive to extract that nobody bothers unless they think oil prices will stay high enough to make it worthwhile. But once it gets out of the ground, it's just oil.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Perhaps some planning needs to go into the building and location of these centres. Use the heat dissipation in a secondary system, place the actual building in a cooler climate or in a north facing direction etc, etc. These may be small things but when running huge systems it all adds up. The place i work has its servers and coms equipment located in a porta-cabin! Boy does it get hot.
My own personal opinion is that this is something we've brought upon ourselves. Both citizens and corporations who are not in the electricity business.
I've never understood why some industries allow things to happen that cause themselves to suffer while a small set of industries make enormous profit.
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
All of our servers run on reliable, inexpensive, sweet beautiful coal!
I'd love the government to step in and set things straight but I don't see that happening anytime soon. For now we'll either have to bare the pricing or start pushing alternatives which have been available for a good long time now.
"Exxon Mobil profit leaps on oil prices": "Exxon's quarterly profit was up 75 percent from a year earlier, and revenue rose 32 percent to more than $100 billion [...] $9 billion net profit reported on Thursday by Royal Dutch Shell Plc [...] Exxon said it did not see the point of a windfall profits tax ".
Windfall profits tax. To say nothing of a carbon deposit tax.
--
make install -not war
I think this entire subject needs to be prefaced with a discussion about Peak Oil. Several books have been written about the impending energy crisis, most notably, Beyond Oil : The View from Hubbert's Peak.
What really interests me is the usual human nature reaction to this. Government, business and the public at large seem to think that their "wish", that things continue as they always have continued, will ensure a continued cheap and easy to access energy supply.
Sure, Coal and Nuclear can and probably will supply our forseeable electrical needs, but what about transportation? Jet fuel, overseas shipping, etc?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
It's not only that the oil barons are their most athletic supporters, but that they are oil barons - notably the bushes and cheney. War in the middle east means OPEC raises prices, which means the U.S. oilmen raise prices, and everything is rosy for the oilmen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If problems start at tempetures above 80F, and you keep your temperature about around 75F, you have less time available if and when some system or enviroment changes suddenly making your tempeture rise. If you by default have set the tempeture to 60F, you will get lot more time react before you run to 1) problems and 2) to serious problems. So, to asses risk, I would prefer to having more colder place, than a place being near a limit where after problems arise. Just my two cents.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
We have existing price gouging and windfall profits laws to protect the consumers who define the market. We're spending and additional $QUARTER-TRILLION in Iraq, which is driving up prices and thereby profits. We have put the entire country's security, military and economic, at risk for these oil corporations, and they're reaping unprecedented profits, even atop last year's unprecedented profits. We're sacrificing economic growth and people's lives. We need to make the oil corporations share the cost. Corporate welfare that raises prices for extra profits is a double whammy that we must stop immediately.
--
make install -not war
As some predicted the arab peninsula being covered in solar panels for the time we are completely out of oil, I would make a note on solar power hosting as a sooner or nearer future.
I can imagine a huge installation in the middle of the desert running all the it buried below ground level in the cold, using minimum cooling energy, one level up, the staff and offices, using natural light channeled in thru tricky optics, airconditioned in natural ways and using solar power....
OK, I am an idiot, but It would just make sense, besides I have something with warm places..... I know I could save a fortune just with a few computers running at my house using the 12 hours of straight sunlight in the dry season, and even save some in the rainy season.
I also have to mention that a lot of money goues out of the window for cooling purposes in computing environments so just making the installations a little bit more energy-sane would make a serious saving on cooling energy (e.g. I have seen server rooms in the most stupid locations, where cooling cost 5x + more).
Does anyone have ever made a calculation (or have a link to) on how many square meters of solar panels would power a given server/worstation in different light conditions?
OK, do not flame I wrote, a given workstation because old pII-233 with LCD is different from 2 21" crts and a 4-proc renderer with 10 disks.
Uh, this is not true. China's demand is new demand. As demand increases, and supply does not, what happens? Note: This is not a bonus question, it is the entire quiz. Granted, production IS increasing, but I don't think that China's demand is going to fail to outstrip it dramatically as they haul themselves into the modern age.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As an international student currently living in the US, it is quite shocking to see how Americans waste electric power. It is simply not logical why people have to bring sweaters to be comfortable during the scorching summer (because the thermostat is set too low) whereas in winter, buildings become furnaces.
I won't even get started on the obscene generation of trash.
Hopefully these crises well force Americans to find ways of making themselves more efficient.
If you had one power source dumping all the voltages most computers need, you'd have a lot of small wires or several very fat ones. I'm not saying it's not do-able it's just something to consider.
If your main power supply gave you -48vdc, you can get away with smaller wires but you'll need dc/dc transformers to bring the voltage down.
It would help solve the heat problem though.
TANSTAAFL.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I made a typo a few minutes ago and said "LDC", but LED is the wrong technology. It's the kind of display used in clock radios with red blocky displays, if you aren't sure about the difference.
My power company is advertising a power savings of 66% by switching to an LCD from CRT montior. And they are telling people that a screen saver does not power down a CRT so they are still paying for power while it's on.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Seriously, prices shot up "because of Katrina." They should have plunged back down when the refinaries came back online but they only gave in a little.
You do realize that US is "borrowing" 2 million barrels a day from the EU, and that many other commodities are experiencing record highs due to the explosion in Asian economic growth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subthreshold_leakage
"Subthreshold leakage is the current that flows from the drain to source of a MOSFET when the transistor is supposed to be off.
In the past the subthreshold leakage of transistors has been very small, but as transistors have been scaled down, subthreshold leakage can compose nearly 50% of total power consumption."
Perhaps the government should have imposed restrictions on the energy consumption of CPUs earlier. All we've done is feeding the CPU's with more power so they become "more powerful".
It's a pity that it's only when CPU's can't get any more efficient that chip manufacturers start researching on "performance per watt"...
Hey, we all have interns dont we? Give them a exercycle with a generator attached.. Problem solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Reinvesting that money in safe fuels would be good. Damaging the economy to fund petrocorps' various antiliability strategies is bad. I'm encouraged to hear that SUV sales are drying up, that the American car corps which bet on those vile machines are sliding towards bankruptcy. But that would happen anyway. I'd rather see windfall taxes, gouging fines, pollution fines and eventual supply constraints all impede the Greenhouse pollution we're currently subsidizing every possible way. Of all those mechanisms, the end of cheap oil/gas, and the plastic/manufacturing ease it represents, is the least appealing one I want to see operating.
--
make install -not war
No, Bush and Cheney are public servants, they're acting in the national interest, their personal oil income and industry cronies are just a coincidence. We need oil experts to handle our oil problems. A giant purple dinosaur loves me and just wants to hug me.
--
make install -not war
What a bunch of bullcrap. The cost of pumping oil varies from well to well. Sure, it might cost Saudi Arabian Oil Company $15 per barrel, but if they only release enough oil for half the world's demand, other producers have to fill that supply. It can cost those other suppliers much more to pull oil out of the ground. And that high price is going to lift the market price.
but instead of the $25 price before we invaded Iraq, it's pushing $70+ as a "permanent high". Maybe Congress and the White Hosue can exercise some accountability for their totally failed energy policies (including sending us to war) by stopping the price gouging the oil corporations are abusing us with.
Oh really? So they're just going to tell Saudi Arabia or Venezuala to lower their prices? How are they going to force them to do that? Oh, you mean force American Oil companies. Well here's a clue: American oil companies are bench-warmers in the global oil market. The biggest American company, ExxonMobil, ranks just 16th in the world in total reserves. They control about 2% of the worlds oil. Hell, even Petronas, a Malaysian company, is bigger than America's biggest oil company.
And looking at the table you see that the market is dominated by state-owned, national oil companies like Saudi Arabian Oil Company, and Petroleos de Venezuela. The only way you're going to lower the price they charge for oil is to invade and force them. Otherwise they'll sell their oil to the highest bidder.
I know those corporations are their best bribers^Wcontributors, and their foreign sources are our best traitors^Wallies, but Americans will vote on the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate in elections next year. We might be willing to put up with a lot of BS on faith, but there's no denying we're not getting the spoils of all of our "superpower" status.
So your complaint is that Bush hasn't invaded enough countries yet to lower oil prices. Interesting.
The fact is state-run foreign oil companies set the price for oil. There is very little the government of the USA can do about it aside from rushing in with tanks to take their oil fields. Any kind of price control on this oil would mean it would get sold to someone else at a higher price, like the Chinese, for example.
Leading Oil and Gas Companies Around the World
Rank by 2004 Oil Equivalent Reserves Company Worldwide Liquids Reserves, Million Barrels Worldwide Natural Gas Reserves, Billion Cubic Feet Total Reserves in Oil Equivalent Barrels, Million Barrels
1 Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Arabia) 2,3 259,400 234,500 299,485
2 National Iranian Oil Company (Iran) 2,3 125,800 940,000 286,484
3 Qatar General Petroleum Corporation (Qatar) 3 15,207 910,000 170,763
4 Gazprom (Russia) 0 988,892 169,041
5 Iraq National Oil Company (Iraq) 2,3 115,000 110,000 133,803
6 Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (UAE) 3 92,200 196,100 125,721
7 Petroleos de Venezuela.S.A. (Venezuela) 3 78,998 149,891 104,620
8 Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (Kuwait) 3 99,000 55 99,009
9 Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (Nigeria) 2,3 35,255 176,000 65,340
10 National Oil Company (Libya) 2,3 39,000 52,000 47,889
11 Sonatrach (Algeria) 2,3 11,800 160,500 39,236
12 OAO Lukoil (Russia) 23,215 39,089 29,897
13 Petronas (Malaysia) 5,290 85,200 19,854
14 PetroChina Co. Ltd. (China) 10,941 44,554 18,557
15 Petroleos Mexicanos (Mexico) 14,803 14,807 17,334
16 ExxonMobil Corporation (United States) 8,395 31,843 13,838
17 BP Corporation (United Kingdom) 5,775 46,650 13,729
18 Egyptian General Petroleum Corp. (Egypt) 2 3,700 58,500 13,700
19 OAO Yukos (Russia) 10,950 7,800 12,283
20 Petroleo Brasilerio S.A. (Brazil) 2 9,945 11,247 11,868
Note: I'm not accusing you personally of hypocricy on this issue.
It's not only that the oil barons are their most athletic supporters ...
I don't think this means what you think it means.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
So you want to fix price oil? Never happen, it's directly anti-capitalist. The MARKET sets the prices, the oil companies spent lots of money to get efficient at $30/bbl oil. They had NOTHING to do with the prices going up, that was part increased demand, part Hurricanes (60%+ of oil and 30%+ of Gulf of Mexico production is still off line..see http://www.mms.gov/ they updated the offline figures daily), part specualtion by traders. If ANYONE is to be blamed it is the traders and their panic that drove prices high. Now they have to keep it high long enough to cover the options they bought so they don't lose money. Oil is a commodity just like OJ, and it's an open market, subject to some manipulation. The oil companies just benefit from the price increase, and when prices ease in the Market they will suffer decreased earning and lower stock prices.
We also have lots of crude avaulable but a supply bottleneck with old, not so efficient refineries that are located in harm's way on the Coasts. We have plenty of oil, just not enough refeneries. If we had surplus refining capacity Gas prices would go down a LOT. Also, it's NOT just USA oil companies that are making money, the ones in Eurpore (BP, Elf, Total) are doing well too. FYI, at $3/gal our prices are still less than the EU.
What percentage of a data center's revenue does power consume? What percentage of its expenses? If a cost that accounts for 2% of a company's revenues doubles, that's not good, but it's hardly a crisis.
Fuel accounted for 17% of Southwest Airlines' revenue, for example. A data center would have to be less than that, wouldn't it?
The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option on anything but Disk Drives.
It's already here. Once all processes on a system are blocking (waiting for something else to happen), the kernel normally executes a HLT (halt) instruction that waits for the next interrupt. Intel processors have reduced power consumption when executing HLT for as long as I can remember. Intel Pentium M processors also have SpeedStep technology. When not overridden by software, SpeedStep cuts the multiplier and the voltage when available power is reduced.
Pebble bed reactors kick ass. That being said, electrical power is only about 23% of total power consumption in the US. Most power used is in the form of oil (or it's refined products) being burned directly to heat homes and push cars around. We could make a *dramatic* difference in oil consumption by heating homes with electical power that didn't come from fossil fuels, but there are two big problems. It would take a massive investment in power distribution infrastructure - we simply can't deliver significantly more electrical power than we do today on existin lines - and no one wants to pay for that. It would also be more expensive than even current oil costs without some tech breakthrough being widely adopted.
Eventually I think the cost advantage of pebble-bed reactors will win the day, but building the power distribution infrastructure will take a generation.
If we could ever invent that magic battery we've been trying to invent for 30 years now, the whole problem would change. Heck, solar power would become viable for half the country if we could store lareg amounts of power densely and safely where it was needed!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What's important to realise is that this power isn't just being consumed by servers doing the flops, but (as anyone living in Las Vegas will well know) it's cooling that's soaking up all the juice. The article's probably right about the cost soaring in the near future, but mainly because cooling systems will rely ever more heavily on liquid and active cooling measures.
On an unrelated note, I wonder if anyone (like our good friends Microsoft) will do some studies into which OS will consume the most energy? Would it be Windows, turning up the thermostat with it's multiple unused processes, or Linux, it's kernel threading model making it the most efficient multi-purpose space-heater?
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
More and more players are entering the virtual market (look at the success of Citrix over the past decade, which is a technology that comes from a similar paradigm) - and that means that more and more datacenters are converting. While the cost per kwh might be rising, the costs of running a data-center are coming back under control.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
-Voltaire
I had an LED watch in the 70's!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You forget that the US companies such as Exxon are partners with these National Oil Companies in many of these reserves. In fact the Saudi National Oil Company sold "concessions" to produce and market the oil to American firms as recently as 1998 for certain production.
Saudi Arabs, Americans and Oil
By Robert L. Norberg
Human Resources
In 1949, when Harry Snyder was hired to head up the training of Saudi Arabs for Aramco, James Terry Duce, a company executive in New York, told him what was expected:
Your task at Aramco is to train Saudis as quickly and as soundly as possible to operate the Saudi oil industry. Inevitably, the Saudi Arab Government will eventually nationalize the industry. When that occurs, we want the young Saudis to have attained the proficiency that will enable them to operate the oil industry efficiently and with goodwill toward Aramco. Thus they will be serving their country's best interests and will be protecting the interests of our parent companies.1
This vision of the training mission and its ultimate result might have appeared reasonably attainable if recruits were available from local schools, knew a bit of English, and had some exposure to industrial practices. But those conditions did not exist when the concession agreement was signed in 1933, nor in 1949 as the postwar development of Saudi Arabia's petroleum resources gathered momentum. Tom Barger, a geologist who arrived in Arabia in 1937 and rose to board chairman before retiring in 1969, recalled many years later:
[One] aspect that impressed me was the enormous, inordinate poverty of the inhabitants. As I found out later, nearly everybody was hungry most of the time. . . . There's no education, obviously. The few people who could read and write largely had taught themselves. And there were some very learned men, as a matter of fact, among this population, although most of it was illiterate. They had practically no mechanical skills. We had new employees who couldn't get out of a room because they didn't know how to use a doorknob."2
B. C. Nelson, who served Aramco in employee relations for many years, recalled in 1965 what it had been like for Saudis recruited to Aramco in the early years of the enterprise:
Word spread to the desert and townspeople that in exchange for some physical effort the blue-eyed foreigners would give a man a handful of silver! And so they flocked to Aramco's budding oil centers . . . Imagine the effect on a recruit to be plunged into the mechanical age -- none of which fit in with his prior orientation or culture -- with little or nothing in his experience to help him adjust. The most amazing thing about these times in terms of one small facet of an Industrial Relations problem -- absenteeism-was not that, when they were handed their bag of money, they returned to their tribe with their glad tidings, but rather that they ever came back to work. Industrial discipline was practically unknown, so the amazing thing was that there was only a 75 percent turnover in the first few years.3
On-the-job training began on an informal basis in the 1930s and was soon complemented by rudimentary industrial training in classrooms. But without English, Arabic literacy, and basic arithmetic, there was a limit to the progress Saudis could make in job performance and advancement. In 1944, with operations revived after a wartime suspension, the Jabal (meaning "mountain" or "hill") School was opened in Dhahran.
Surely in 1944 no one expected history to remember the humble Jabal School. Yet the little company school endures as a symbol for development -- not for the development of an oil company, but for the development of a generation of very special young men. Many Saudis were introduced to the mystery of letters and numbers at the Jabal School. Among them were future scholars, successful businessmen and powerful executives.4
The Jabal School was the beginning of an ever-evolving, structured program of job-related training and general education that replicated under corpor
You're the one who said to fix the oil prices. I think we should fine price gouging and tax windfalls. The MARKET is FIXED by GAMERS picking up where Enron left off. Are you telling me that demand has MORE THAN TRIPLED as supply has increased?
Your whole comment is incoherent. "If ANYONE is to be blamed it is the traders and their panic" in the same breath as vague invocations of the MARKET and its invisible hand? Acknowledging American prices lower than European, without explaining how the MARKET does that?
Your mass of oversimplifications and random fact invocations isn't really worth arguing with. Especially when your lead is a strawman. Have fun arguing with yourself - it's both too easy and too confusing for me.
--
make install -not war
The monitor probably wont last 12 years
But in my experience, an LCD will tend to last longer than a CRT of the same size for the same reason that transistors last longer than tubes in any other application.
Selling oil at, or sligthly above the cost of pumping it up would be a loosing proposition.
OK, so you're a stupid IT nerd who thinks that IKEA's value add, in a competitive marketplace, is a good comparison to the oil business, which is run by cartels, monopolies and market gamers, all on corporate welfare and contrived global geopolitics. When IKEA's prices haven't tripled while their costs stay the same. Why the fuck are you bothering to show us how stupid you are by posting in public?
--
make install -not war
Well, if "we" just means "oil execs", then you're right. But Americans are getting screwed along with the rest of the world on this one. That's the "we" I care about.
--
make install -not war
LED is the wrong technology. It's the kind of display used in clock radios with red blocky displays
Not anymore. Displays built of organic light-emitting diodes have the potential to bring power consumption even lower than LCD because OLED doesn't need a backlight.
Got an email from one of the data centers we use (highly recommended dc, btw) yesterday. They report their electricity rates have risen 50% since 2002. Effective from 1 December they'll be charging an extra $6/server (for individually co-loed servers) or $1.25/amp on cabinets/racks.
You wouldn't want to be a $29/month dedicated server provider soaking up that kind of cost increase.
We happen to use mostly dual Xeon servers. They come with 500W power supplies and I'm pretty sure they soak up a good proportion of that power. The power price increases appear to be yet another reason to switch to AMD (with their CPUs' lower power consumption).
--
Powerful and Power efficient VPSs
Give me a fucking break. The MARKET is run by the traders, and yes, they can manipulate the price by direct or indirect means and overwhelm the "invisible hand". IIRC, Adam Smith's Invisible hand assumes a fair market with fair traders. I'm not sure that is the case in any commodity market.
Setting the market conditions for oil to limit the trading to fixed increases or decreases per day is about the only way to limit what you call "gouging". Corporate earnings ARE taxed, if you tax windfalls are you going to give a tax break when things are bad? "Robin Hood" taxes don't work plain and simple, they discourage investment in maximizing profit by the firm. Profit maximazation (by ethical means) is the mandate to business by the shareholders.
Gas is higher in the EU because it is a DIFFERENT market, they have different issues and the TAXES are higher. As smart as you are you should know that.
These are NOT over-simplifications, they are direct FACTS. Facts don't have to be complicated to be true. If you can't grasp simple facts then there is not any use continuing this discussion.
It's interesting to note that every time someone (a liberal, of course) yells about our dependency on foreign oil and how we have to reduce it (generally via alternate energy sources, and buying less SUVs), the "party line" is that we have signifigant domestic stocks of oil, stop being Chicken Little, consumerism is American, blah blah blah. But whenever the issue is controlling the price of crude, the "party line" is supply and demand, OPEC are the bad guys, etc, etc. Surely there is some sort of discrepency somewhere?
You have a distorted picture of what the "party line" is. If you're talking about economic conservatives, then the "party line" is that the market should be allowed to work. Price controls are historically a terrible idea and a failure. They lead to supply shortages.
There are some people that believe domestic supply is still significant, and it probably is. The trouble is that it's expensive to produce oil domestically. The price has to go up to make extracting it economical.
So there really isn't any contradiction. We have significant domestic supply, but the price must be high to bring those supplies on line.
Is there a reason, beyond political cronyism and/or idealism that we haven't nationalized our oil reserves like everyone else?
If you're worried about cronyism, nationalization is exactly what you don't want to do. Just who's going to end up in charge of the oil? Look what happend to FEMA when Bush put one of his cronies in charge. You want some buddy of the president in charge of domestic oil?
If we really essentially have to eat a 300% increase in oil price in *one year*, the vast majority of which is fuelled by gouging and speculation, isn't that a *really good reason* to take a long look at our energy usage and policies?
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation? How can you say the price is "wrong"? Define "gouging".
The "right price" is the price that balances the supply of oil with the damand for oil. If the price is too low, producers aren't willing to produce enough to supply all the people that want the oil. And people don't conserve since the oil is too cheap. So you have both waste and undersupply. That's exactly the wrong thing to have.
As much as people hate high prices, that's the only realistic way to get both conservation and more production. Perhaps even production of alternatives like biodiesel.
The other day I was wondering why my laptop (12" G4 1.25Ghz) was taking so long to process an image. I found it was unplugged, plugged it in, and saw the progress bar noticeably speed up.
It's very possible that corporations will simply pass taxes onto consumers and raise prices, thus countering most of the effect of using the collected money to subsidize lower prices.
English is easier said than done.
You're right. Prices are high because of the risk that there won't be any oil at all within ten years. Production may never peak. It may just end.
I wouldn't put it past anyone involved to do everything possible to keep consumers hooked on oil until the last minute. If oil peaks, and everyone knows it has peaked, bye-bye oil companies. The shit will hit the fan. People like you will be screaming for the heads of oil executives. Government regulators will step in to ensure the price of oil stays artificially low. Americans will never have an incentive to switch to renewables.
If, on the other hand, they can convince you that everything is fine, that, in fact production is increasing, until *wham* it's too late. If they can keep squeezing higher production rates out of the same fields, without there actually being any new oil, then the end of oil will just come sooner. When it does come, you'll be too busy building windmills to be able to retaliate and they will have sold every last drop of oil without even the threat of competition from renewable energy. If they can raise prices at the same time, then, what is this step again, oh yeah, profit!
BTW, I agree with you completely about the war and other waste/corruption.
I'm actually of the opinion that the market is better off with high oil prices. The US should be investing massively in renewables to offset foreign oil anyways. And we should be stockpiling what oil we have. If that means dealing with greedy oil companies, so be it. If that means government regulation to *increase* the cost of oil, so be it. Europe has been doing it for years. No one there is shocked when gas prices go up to even the cost of electricity, which is all $2.70/gallon really is anyways.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I don't know about you guys, but I've got a 37 1/2 KVA UPS along with the Liebert running....
Yikes....I'm glad we don't have our own power meter!
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Outsource to Canada. Cheap hydro power, and all the cold you could want.
The average desktop uses a power supply which is approximately 65% efficient (based on power factor). I'm not sure if servers are better than this as I've only checked one. If they're not, then it would be a good idea to switch to better power supply designs. Correcting the power factor would allow for a decrease in power usage with the only disadvantage being a slightly higher cost.
How much energy is consumed in producing the pebble bed reactors, their fuel, and the security to protect them from malfunction and sabotage? How much biodiesel and other solar could be produced with that energy investment?
--
make install -not war
I can't help but nitpick on this. They're not price "spikes" if they don't come back down. What the article is describing are price "hikes."
Why did it occur to you that they'd sell oil at the pumping price? Are you unable to see the vast gulf (pun intended) between $15 and $70? Where most of that profit is purely a result of risk perception and system gaming? That is, oil companies have forced market conditions to win not only record prices, but also unsustainable prices, which are wrecking the economy that must support them. How about those considerations, not your strange concern for the property value of otherwise forsaken deserts?
--
make install -not war
Because, quite obviously, oil didn't cost as much then.
So many geeks clamor for the latest and greatest video card, then upgrade to a new one every year or so. Ditto for CPUs. In reality, if they were concerned about conserving power, they'd make due with what they had. And really, is it worth all the power that goes into creating a high-end video card, plus all the power it takes when in use (yes, they use less power when you're not running 3D apps), just so you can get some high frame rates in Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R. or whatever? Now oil is 3x more expensive, and all of a sudden there's great worry.
On a side note, the current push it toward multi-core CPUs. Honestly, no one has made a multi-core CPU that uses less power than a single-core equivalent (and if they did, they could just drop the second core and they'd be there). Clearly the drive is toward using more energy, even if there's no clear benefit for many people.
It would be better to feed the equipment 220vac or 208vac instead of 48vdc. iirc, 208v based on a 3 phase feed should be most efficient since it requires one less transformer to step it down. Switched power supplies don't use resistance to regulate voltage, so the lower voltage won't really help at all with heat produced from regulating down to 12v. Every server I've ever seen was capable of handling 208v or 220v. A 48v setup would require more expensive power supplies and will cause higher resistance in the wiring, unless the wire gauge is increased accordingly which is very expensive.
I work for the government, indirectly, I work for a state university. Now at my department we would LOVE to go to all LCDs. Basically any new system we buy has an LCD instead of CRT. However we are not replete with money, we cannot afford to replace old systems, much less old monitors. I would say we still have 100-200 CRTs in use. Well, if the tax payers would like those replaced, we'd be happy to oblige, but we'll need the money first. I'd say it would cost $20,000-$60,000. Now that's just our department, we are one of hundreds (albeit a big one). I'd say it would be a several million dollar job campus wide. This is just one university, not to mention all the others, the state offices, local offices, primary schools, etc.
What it comes down to is nice idea, but it needs to start from an initative to get the money, not a demand on the state IT groups. Asking us to replace it isn't going to get anything done because we lack the funds. So if this is something you are serious about, look in to getting a ballot measure added to have a temporary tax increase to fund something like this.
My bad, I thought using the back button had caused my post to not go through.
-GameMaster
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
On the other hand, all these other companies controlling the price of our oil are nationalized, so the free market isn't really providing the US with the best advantage there, is it?
You want some buddy of the president in charge of domestic oil?
And thats different from now how, exactly? :P
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation?Because the ratio of supply to demand hasn't grown by 3x in the last year, even with Chinas increased demand. Of course, since (most) of the supply is controlled by relatively few people, it's hard to say what the "real" supply is.
People cite Hydrogen as a source but most the available Hydrogen production is a byproduct of fossil fuel refining
Actually Iceland is doing quite well in working with hydrogen, "Iceland launches energy revolution". However Iceland has a big advantage over other countries, they have an abundance of geothermal energy they can use to generate hydrogen from water.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There is really no short-term method governments can control "price gouging" outside of price caps (which is fixing an upper limit on price). Long-term the real issue is caused by the target industry's regulations which create artificial entry barriers.
u ging pricing above the market when no alternative retailer is available. There are plenty of alternative wholesalers and retailers in the global and domestic oil and gas market. The only real reason for lack of alternative retailers would be when government regulation impedes market entry.
People use the term "price gouging" anytime they percieve the price of a good is too high. This is a fallicy. The definition of price gouging is http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=price+go
I would argue what people percieve as "price gouging" is actually beneficial to a majority of consumers. Lets take the gas situation in Louisana immediately after Katrina as an example. The demand for gas increased substantially due to evacuation and rebuilding efforts. In a free market, this would quickly drive the price of gas well above its production costs. Louisana has "price gouging" laws, so retailers were not able to price gas at market levels. The first few consumers bought all the "cheaper" gas they could carry away and everyone else got nothing. None of the retailers were interested to hang around in the bad conditions and try to acquire and sell more gas. They knew they wouldn't earn substantial profits doing so. They got out of town, to come back and sell gas when conditions were better and it was more easily available.
If those retailers had been able to price gas at market levels, the first few consumers would have purchased only the gas they needed and not all they could get away with. The next group of consumers would have been able to acquire some much needed gas also at more expensive prices, instead of getting none. When the gas in storage was gone, those retailers would have looked at their pile of cash and said, "My goodness I like this. I am going to stick around in the miserable conditions and do whatever it takes to get more gas in here to sell." Now the 3rd group of consumers that got no gas with "price gouging" laws would be able to purchase some newly delivered and even more expensive gas. I think most consumers that got no gas would have been willing to pay a lot more for a little bit of gas.
"These prices are high because of risk, not insufficient supply."
Risk is priced into the supply curve that shows how much producers are willing to supply at each price point. If risk increases, it pulls the supply curve in. Producers are willing to supply less at any price, moving the quantity demanded lower and price higher back into market equilibrium. It is inherent to the market economy and most feel it is much better than a government managed economy. Think of how much dispute and consternation is put into political process in this country; now imagine if the same thing happened with every economic production and sales decision.
"China, our enemy."
You might want to rethink this. We might not agree with China's political decisions right now, but the only reason the US is not taking a harder stance with China is they are our best friend and savior economically. They produce commodity goods for us much more efficiently than we can, allowing us to buy more than we otherwise could and keep our standard of living higher. They are the largest holder of our currency, keeping its value stable enough to remain the world standard currency. They also finance our obscene deficits both public and private, allowing us to keep our economy and the world economy out of recession.
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation? How can you say the price is "wrong"? Define "gouging".
Whatever the cause it is evident that something is wrong with the market. As others have pointed out, the oil companies are reporting overwhelmingly huge profits. In an efficient market, cost of production and selling price converge. Since they are currently hugely divergent, somebody is jiggering the system. Since the USA, and anything to do with oil the world around, is pretty much a corptocracy, chances are the blame lays with the corps.
While killing services and cutting back on powered equipment is an option people should consider efficiency improvements.
:) And there are other 80plus manufacturers, its just that this is the only one I tested.
Speaking from experience, a large number of x86 boxes out there are running on power supplies which run in the 60 to 70 percent efficiency range. By replacing old low efficiency power supplies with some of the newer 80plus supplies you will save on electricity for the box and for cooling.
I did some tests with replacing a cheap 250 watt low efficiency power supply with Seasonic 250 watt 80 plus supplies and found a 20%+ reduction in power consumption at the AC outlet. When I ran the numbers the savings in electricity to the power supply alone would pay for the new supply in one year. And that does not include the saving in air conditioning costs.
http://www.seasonic.com/
And no I don't work for them or own stock.
burnin
Sounds like you should really take a look at http://silentpcreview.com/
If ANYONE is to be blamed it is the traders and their panic that drove prices high.
And you don't think traders are part of a free market?
FaclonShould there be a Law?
Right now I'm in a house that has a small "All Electric" label on the front that was put there sometime in the 1960's. The house now has a gas heater because gas was cheaper to heat with in the 1980's. With enough new nuke plants then many existing house could be converted to electric heat. In 20 years the use of petrol based fuels could be drastically reduced but that would require some long term planning which doesn't seem to be in fashion any more.
If China convinces Venesula to sell them all their oil, we will see $100 oil very soon.
Not if we invade Venuzuela first!
Oh wait...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
While Pebble bed reactors are safer and potentially more efficient there's still a problem with long term storage of the waste. Also there's the question about what happens to the power plant itself once it has reached it's lifespan.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If you examine the 2005 Energy Bill you will discover how deeply flawed it is. It is a bill written to protect the domestic oil companies at the expense of the middle-class taxpayer. Our government simply does not care about us. We need to make them care before they sell out our future to the highest bidder.
If you think about it OPEC might actually doing the world a favor by rationing the remaining supply of world crude oil. By doubling prices now, we are allowing the oil to last much longer than it would otherwise with a completely open tap. Also, there is absoletly no such thing as "price gouging". It's just a word used to incite anger. Yes, a monopoly can exist, however this is not the case regarding oil since so many countries produce it.
And most liberals don't really believe in "alternative energy" either. Even here where in California we have a nice windfarm, but environmentalists want to shut it down because they believe it is killing too many birds. I mean, you can't win either way with these people. Do you know what is really stifling alternative energy? Over regulation and government intervention.
You're an Anonymous meaningless Coward. If you're frustrated enough to post such twaddle, why not do something quieter, but constructive? Like walk to work or something.
--
make install -not war
Perfectly reversible computing does not produce heat.
Ever wondered what happens to bits that you erase out of memory or a register? They get dumped out of the chip and turn into heat.
Reversible logic reuses the electrical charge for your next computation, or for storing the next 1 that comes along.
On the downside, reversible hardware is much harder to design, but any addition of reverible logic on today's CPUs would decrease the amount of electricity needed and heat produced.
Electricity bills would be lower, and heat output would be smaller.
Laptops would last much longer, desktops wouldn't need a CPU cooler.
Even better, we could continue increasing the speed and diesize of CPUs.
One problem right now is that AMD, Intel, IBM, etc are perfectly able to produce a CPU that they have no hope of cooling. If reversible logic were used instead, you could have a 6GHz chip with the heat output of a 4.77 MHz 8086.
Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com
When the product triples its price, thereby at least quintupling its profits, sufficient to cripple the world's biggest economy, that's not a market with alternatives that allow competition to accurately set prices. That's a gamed market.
And just because Bush has made us dependent on the Chinese mafia government buying our debt to prop up their insane $3TRILLION budget while they cut taxes on the people with extra money (whose corporations are the only beneficiaries of our screwed up economy), doesn't mean China isn't our enemy. It means that we are sacrificing our strength to our enemy's advantage. They're not "more efficient", they just accept slavery and misery as part of the cost, because their government forces them to.
How about the simpler explanation of these fundamental macroeconomics: Bush and his corporate cronies have so little in common with most Americans that they're more closely allied to China slave labor masters than to us. So they bleed us on oil while undermining our jobs. Eventually the US will stop demanding China fix its political and labor exploitation, because the Chinese won't prop us up if we don't play along. A little later the Chinese will demand the US government "do something" about the "unbalanced power" of labor organizations that "unfairly compete" with China's production. You can fill in the blank.
Really, I'm nauseated by your justification of China's grip on our addiction to oil and debt. Communist slave labor and pollution is "more efficient"? Our "savior"? Only if you're a fascist.
--
make install -not war
Artificial risk and price gouging. Tell me that demand has increased threefold as supply has increased, why don't you?
--
make install -not war
Solar cells are actualy pretty efficient now.
The old style take about 3 years to pay the energy cost back.
New style ones are about 1.8 years.
Now with a lifetime of 20 years I say they pay back the energy cost.
The problem though is they are too expensive at the moment
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
Not if that is prohibited. That's how windfall taxes work. Price gouging has similar "antirecursion" techniques. We're not talking about some little tweak. We're talking about interventions to save the market, to save the economy. Those controls are complex, but they're not new - we've been exercising them here in the US on a daily basis for generations.
--
make install -not war
Sounds like good questions. I would point out, when you answer them, that the other methods you have above are not mutually exclusive. Biodiesel can only be expanded as far as the biomass producing farmland will go. A backup is needed, be it some form of battery or reserve generation capacity in the instances of a cloudy day.
m l e l
... well, I'll have to keep looking for numbers that would support that decision.
WARNING: Linked PDF
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/Economics.pdf
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.ht
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/fuelfactsheets
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biodies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_fuel
The battery is the real kicker. I've wanted to see for some time where the grid was only tapped for part of the energy needed for a home (or car, given Honda's home refueling idea) where the rest came from built in power generation and utilization ability. But without a battery solution to store excess energy, the grid must be overbuilt to handle a day when little ambient energy is available and more energy is required from remote generation.
Put available farmland to use generating biomass for Biodiesel and Ethanol, put solar panels on roofs and solar windows in standard. Converting good, arable farmland into fields full of solar panels
..and run all that waste heat through a stirling cycle generator? Not perpetual motion, but beats *dumping it* outside and they could probably get quite a bit of electric back..
It is very interesting to see that Hastert is very much a politician. Nothing in his blog says anything about law. He is talking about how oil companies shouldn't be rewarded since they aren't investing in America or doing anything to lower oil prices. But why does the speaker of the house of representatives care about oil prices or investing in America? It isn't his job to punish or reward anyone for anything. His job is to create and update laws to protect the citizens: not to promote investment in America, or fight injustice.
Still, it is early to tell. I would very much like to see what these guys on Capitol Hill think about each day. Maybe representation will return to the people after all?
Under linux the laptop was drawing 50-100watts (which is very high for a laptop), under windows it was drawing from 30-50 watts.
There are several aspects to power managment that many of the OSS kernels fail to take advantage of. 1) they don't turn down they CPU voltage and clock rate, even when the CPU is idle. 2) they don't turn the power off to unused chips and peripherals. 3) sometimes they don't even turn off some devices when the laptop is turned off. Anyone with a Compac Evo laptop has probably seen this. Shutdown your computer while running linux on mains, unplug it so you can take it home and look at the battery charge a few days later and it is down to half charge. Some of the internal devices (like ethernet transcivers) are never even turned off. While wake-on-lan etc. might make sense on desktops, one has to wonder what the folks were thinking when they decided to keep a laptop's ethernet powered even when the laptop might later be needlessly draining the battery.
Now some of this isn't the the fault of the OSS authors. In many cases the chip companies simply never release the information needed to correctly manage the power. That's got to change. Other times, it is simply that nobody cares enough about power usage to get off their butt and write the code. Certainly the amd64 CPU voltage/frequency settings fall into that category for the various BSD's. How many amd64 computers are out there running OSS, idling at 140watts when they could easily be idling at 90watts, a savings of ~30%.
Having switched our ancient house off of fuel oil heating and over to a massive geothermal heat pump system, I just felt like professing my love for it. Heating bill went down, down, down, and running it in reverse gives the old shack air conditioning besides. Yard was ugly for a while, though.
Sounds like he wasn't running cpufreqd. It doesn't exactly install itself.
What kind of efficiency is there in processes that convert hot (95C) water to electricity (and cool water)? Because at 0.1m^3:s, natural gas delivers 60KW to homes which could extract up to 30KW with fuel cells. Fuelcells whose 50% inefficiency is partly useable heat - and which generate more water. That's 10x the 3KW average US residential consumption. So a 10m^3 "water closet" could store a months energy, filled in a few days. Most residential energy is consumed by bathing and cooking, which can use the hot water at 100% efficiency (no cooling conversion). Insulation is quite good for small amounts, and certainly only a few hours, not weeks, of energy is necessary. But charging before storms or offsetting spikes is a good safeguard, as well as economic.
As for biodiesel, it's not limited to farmland. Bluegreen algae exceeds even sugarcane's 12% efficiency, which competes well with silicon PV's 20%. PV has extra costs in manufacturing/deployment/maintenence/disposal, and DC/AC/DC conversion. While ocean-borne films of bluegreen algae and fermentation could produce enough energy in bioreactors to replace all petrofuels for energy. And I'd like to see the returns from these energy investments funneled into space energy collection. A solar base on the Moon could replace all combustion energy on the Earth, and all the pollution that goes with it.
We're up against the wall, or at least staring at it as we rush headlong. It's time to think outside the box, or be buried in it.
--
make install -not war
yes, we've all read of the lost gulf productivity from the hurricanes...but..but.. where are the actual shortages at the retail pump??? You seen 'em? Not seeing them here. You can go get all the gas and diesel you want, at the much inflated price.
There's not only something fishy going on here, there's a whole school of "fishys". Check todays news? Exxon just broke the all time US world record quarterly sales, 100 billion, and quarterly net profit, 9.9 billion. They are taking advantage of the situation and gouging, plain and simple.
And no, I am not a "global free trader", I think that is misnamed and ill advised, so any arguments that "it's the market" mean little to me, because that IS the problem. The market is rigged and fixed, the cartels and middlemen "traders" design the scams, run the scams and bribe off the governments to perpetuate the scams, and brainwash people into accepting it. There is no reason that we as consumers don't have much better autos and cleaner greener and cheaper fuels other than they can make more money the way they are running the scams now. The market is run for the top 1%, not the other 99%. Bass ackwards. It's changing, as the net has enabled more and more people to get more and more information, and bypass the industry FUD.
Alternate energy is a booming market now, because people finally realised that it was out there and viable, defeating three decades of industrial cartel lies.
And finally, because of that, we are seeing significant tech advances. TOO BAD we were forced to waste all those years listening to them doofusses that "'it' wouldn't work", with "it" being anything but petroleum products. We listened to them kinda "free market" jerks for a year as california experienced 'rolling balckouts' and massive price increases for grid juice, that now turns out to have been caused by industrial scamsters cartel collusion and artificial scarcity. Grok cartel, collusion, price fixing? Does that sound "free"? Sure, "free" as in a thief gets your stuff for "free", or a flim flam artist gets your money after running a congame on you. that's the so called 'free market" as it exists in reality, not in quaint academic theory. I'm for FAIR markets, not that scam "free market" crap. That's for crooks and conmen.
It's not totally fixed yet, but at least we, people who follow this "we", are aware that these sorts of shenanigans have been going on. What we are seeing here now with gasoline prices is very similar appearing.
It does if you install ubuntu.
umm i don't see how "ratio of supply to demand" is really that relavent to price.
what matters more is the elasticity of the market. oil is very inelastic on both the supply and demand sides so small changes in quantity availible mean large changes in price.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Uh, you're a moron. I did not say China's demand was not increasing. What I said was that oil is a commodity. Even if Venezuela sold all it's oil to China, except for the relatively minor supply shock, world oil prices would not sky rocket. This is basic basic economics. Very basic. Get off of Slashdot, and get your stupid, ignorant ass to a 101 economics class.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Whee! I'm a moron! Never mind that China has the potential to become the largest consumer of oil in the world, and may very well end up raising the capital to consume that much, too. Also, oil prices, like any other prices, do not necessarily have any connection to reality. I'm sure you do know more about economics than I do; many people do. However, the real situation would seem to depend on how much oil China is willing to spend on oil, and that amount may increase amazingly in the fairly imminent future.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It means just exactly what I meant it to mean; nothing more, nothing less. I don't think a comparison between greedy oil barons and sweaty jockstraps is entirely unwarranted. Either way, the proper solution is extended submersion in water...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There haven't been any new coal generating power plants built in the US in over 20 years. there are proposals for new facilities as well as coal gasification plants, but no construction has begun. The existing power facilities are operating at close to maximum capacity. Any new generation is from the newer and *much* smaller gas-fired plants. Of course, with the price of natural gas increasing now the pace of this new construction has slowed.
US is big exporter of mining EQUIPMENT to China. China has there own production and Shell has a contract to build 10 coal gasification plants in China. So, demand for US coal is NOT being driven by China.
Explain this.
Just to be clear, which processes do you refer to in your first paragraph?
One of the selling points for Sun's Niagara is that a single Niagara processor can do the work of a bunch of single core servers - for about the same amount of power as one single core server.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Eat a dick, whoever moderated me overrated. You're all fucking dipshits.
I'm asking about processes to generate electricity from merely hot (95C) water. The other processes to which I refer are merely natural gas powering fuelcells which heat the water. Basically a big battery which gets much of its efficiency from using the hot water in household activity without further processing. But I'm looking for a process which can use the energy stored in the hot water without too much loss.
--
make install -not war
Ah, right. I'll go looking then. Thermocouples spring to mind, but they're not so good on efficiency if I recall. Natural gas has a nice looking efficiency figure. Hrm, well, how about a wiki article for flavor (to keep from being too drastically lightweight)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
For a financial data center ("Tier-4" class, 2(N+1)), the cost per kW is $10-15,000 for infrastructure alone. That quickly matches cost of WinTel boxes (although the depreciation cycle is considerably longer).
Energy Consumption works out close to 3x server power consumption, so 1kW of load is equal to 3kW total energy input. That comes close to $2,700 per year in energy costs for 1kW of server power.
The irony, of course, is an Anonymous Coward abusing the word "frick" while making nothing but a stupid blurt about idiocy and idiot filters.
--
make install -not war
Some kind of heat engine, I'd expect. But those things never seem very efficient, AFAIK. We don't harness "reversed entropy" too well, to my knowledge.
--
make install -not war
Moderation -1
100% Troll
Suggesting a jerk walk to work isn't a "Troll", it's a rhyme, silly TrollMod.
--
make install -not war
This is just the kind of screwed-up priorities that cause companies to lose all competitive edge.
Good (?) accounting tends to highlight grand total costs of small things. Good Lord, we spend $27,000 per year on paper clips! Better control them under lock & key. The lost-opportunity cost of the contract bid missed because somebody was hunting for paperclips does not, of course, appear on and ledger.
Now somebody has summed up the electrical costs of a really large server room and come up with a sum close to a human salary. That always impresses people. (Man is the measure of all things.)
But what is it as a fraction of total operations and capital?
At 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (a common residential cost except in badly-gouged locales; but high for major consumers, at least until lately and those 27% increases) your rule-of-thumb for 7x24 consumption is:
a buck per watt per year.
500-watt average constant consumption from a basic 3u rack server = $500/year. Easy, no?
But that's a pretty serious machine, home machines don't commonly have over 400W power supplies - and certainly don't use the 400W all the time. So we're allowing for air conditioning power in the estimate.
But a serious server starts at $10,000 and you won't get five years out of it, so the capital cost alone is $2000/year and up.
All but the most automated shops surely have a salaried sysadmin (and/or DBA, backup specialty guy...) for every ten machines. And those guys all cost $50,000 dead minimum. So that's another $5,000 per machined per year for care & feeding.
So that's $7000/year, plus power at $500. Maybe skyrocketing to $700 and a full 10% of costs.
And of course I had to assume that the $10,000 included 5 years of vendor support to keep it that low. Never mind insurance, rent on the space, huge UPS's, fire systems, air conditioning (not the power for it, the machinery). In truth, I can hardly imagine power reaching 10% of the operations cost.
Also, I'm taking some place like NCAR as my site: gargantuan computing power at the service of a dozen professors and their retinue of grad students. Totally running their own programs, not million-dollar software packages like SAP on Oracle. In short, the normal "IT" costs of programmers, analysts, support techs, software vendors, don't exist.
Because when they do, they dwarf the cost of running the server room and power dwindles down to being 10% of 10% of your total IT budget. Which in most companies is 5%-9% of total operating expenditure.
Wailing about this cost - which springs out on the accounting spreadsheet because it is up a large percentage from last year - leads to classic penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions.
Perhaps: "we'll use less power if we consolidate a dozen servers down into one big one". A lot of this has been done by IT departments, whom I swear are pining for the days of the mainframe.
But at least where I work, business didn't move off the mainframe because it was such a high cost per compute cycle - often enough we were increasing our total computing costs to go PC and small server. We did it for the flexibility.
And loss of flexibility could cost a business big - for want of a paperclip.
... a long overdue shift in priorities from raw clock speed to efficiency.
/. Normally I just think "what's the point" when I read about people wasting their time defacing classic hardware ranging from Sega Megadrives to Atari 800s and Commodore PETs in order to make novelty PCs. But there was a common element in them: those tiny little Mini ITX boards VIA makes. They not only take very little space but it seemed they also had very modest power requirements.
I have some systems here that are long overdue for an upgrade (4 and 6 years old--only thing that has been updated is hard drive and memory capacity). I do not need to upgrade to increase computational power or even capacity--I do not do gaming or intensive 3d rendering or anything and the computers in question are a couple of linux servers that host a few web sites, email accounts, a modest database server (less than 5 million records in a couple dozen tables of a handful of databases), file server. It is a small-office type setup and it hardly taxes the old hardware.
So why do I have to upgrade? The first reason I had was reliability. The Athlon-powered machine suffered a near-meltdown when the CPU fan failed not long ago and I suspect that there was some hardware damage as the machione started behaving flaky after the incident even though the new fan kept the machine cooler than ever. I disables some unused onboard peripherals in the BIOS (sound, serial ports etc) and the problem went away....hmmm doesn't look good.
However the second reason I have looked at is even more compelling than reliability, and that is POWER CONSUMPTION. Those old Intel and AMD processors run pretty hot and use a lot of power, and as servers they run 24/7/365. I was looking at my latest elecetricity bill and decided to do some calculations. I could realise MORE THAN $50 IN SAVINGS PER YEAR for every reduction of just 100 watts of power consumption. I came across one of those silly PC-modder articles of the nature that sometimes find themselves posted on
I looked into it and found that even the lower-powered fanless boards could replace the web server/file server. Not only would it be compact and quiet, but the entire system would use less power than the CPU chip alone in the current machines (which exceed 60 watts each). If I replace the old machines with EPIA boards I could save in the hundreds per year!
IIRC both AMD and Intel are realising what VIA and Transmeta did years ago--that the clock-speed race is completely pointless now. Not only do both companies invest heavily in mobile technologies--that technology is finding its way into desktops and servers as well. About bloody time I think. It'd be great if this turns into a golf-score style contest of watts-per-flop race.
Will it affect the hosting costs? Hope it wouldn't. When this power hike is expected to come into effect. Any idea how much the hike going to be? thanks.
asoft
In a perfect would, with unlimited oil, you would be correct. The supply of oil will expand and prices will fall until the oil companies are making only a modest profit. However, this is not a perfect world. For construction and geological reasons, the supply of oil is simply unable to expand quickly enough to cover demand. Since demand is higher then supply, the price of oil increases.
Also, oil is demand inelastic. When people are faced with petrol price rises, people don't really reduce their petrol usage. They just suck it up and whinge about it. So the price has to go up much further to make supply meet demand.
The US national average retail price of gasoline has been dropping quite steadily for the last 3 weeks. The price as of 2005-10-27 is $2.50, whereas on 2005-10-06, it was $2.79. That's almost 10 cents a week. I can't provide a link for the data other this, but you can go there, select your state and locality, then select "Pump Price Graphs" from the left column, select "USA Average" to show on your graph, and look at gas prices from the last 6 months.
And the good news is, the two big events that drove increased gas prices at the pump were hurricane Katrina and then hurricane Rita after that, and we have already dropped below the level it was just before the Katrina-related panic at the end of August.
And, there was an uptick in prices during the month of August and before Katrina, but we are already down almost 10 cents/gallon below the levels we were pre-Katrina. And if you look at the graphs, the derivative seems pretty close to constant, which might serve as an indicator that the drop in prices isn't going to stop right away.
The bottom line is, we may be below $2.50/gallon again fairly soon. In fact, the gas station nearest my house is already at $2.49 as of tonight. We could even drop below $2.00/gallon if we keep this up for another few weeks. Only time will tell, of course.
Bottom line is, yes, the gas companies have been making tons of money, but now prices seem to be dropping on their own. I don't think we're headed back to the days when gas was $1.00/gallon or even back to the days when it was $1.50/gallon, but we're moving in that direction steadily, at least as of right now.
Whatever the cause it is evident that something is wrong with the market. As others have pointed out, the oil companies are reporting overwhelmingly huge profits.
They aren't "overwhelmingly huge". They are average or below when compared to other industries. ExxonMobil, which leads the pack, makes about $0.10 per $1 revenue. That's below average for US companies.
The only reason profits seem so large now is because they were small a short time ago. If a billion dollar company makes $1 one year and then makes $3 the next year, then their profits have increased 200% and that increase sounds impressive. But $3 profit is hardly impressive.
It's easier to complain than check your facts, I guess.
The kernel support and userspace software for automated CPU scaling is already here. Ubuntu 5.10 runs powernowd by default, for example. I have a small Mini-ITX fileserver at home running this, and the CPU is currently running at 500MHz (normal maximum is 1GHz). As soon as the load climbs, the CPU speed is adjusted.
See:
http://www.deater.net/john/powernowd.html
Toshiba Satellite (2,6 GHz Celeron, 512 MB, Gentoo Linux) /. /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature)
~ 42 Watt while playing MP3 & reading
~ 76 Watt while doing emerge --sync (updating portage cache) - the temperature goes from 68 to 80 C
(cat
This is for the notebook only, power consumption of 17" LCD and speakers not included (as that's the same on Windows/Linux)
By the way, playing Warcraft 3 on Windows is about +40 Watt compared to surfing the web.
I hear there is a paper clip in your MS Office installation, whether you need it or not...
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
I filled my tank on Tuesday (Harrisburg, PA) and paid $2.29 for regular. I've seen prices fall as low as $2.19 here since then. I didn't want to get all excited and give our evil oil-masters any reason to believe that I was willing to pay MORE, so I didn't run through the streets exclaiming how CHEAP gas was all of a sudden ;)
On a side note, a rant: I am in fact one of the evil SUV driving American wastemongers. I bought a used 2000 Dodge Durango about 3 years ago because I had been doing quite a bit of construction on my home and was tired of borrowing and/or renting a truck. What I ended up with is a vehicle that gets an average of 13.5 mpg that's 1/2" too narrow to accommodate a sheet of drywall, plywood, or anything else 48" wide. I can't honestly understand why a company would make a monstrous vehicle like the 1997?-2004 Dodge Durango that was obviously marketed toward DIY and professional folks (RAM TOUGH!) that is completely useless to anyone other than the soccer-mom/grocery-getter. The sick part is that the rear liftgate is wide enough, but the two inch thick plastic/vinyl trim on each side just inside the liftgate is what causes the problem. I could understand the 1997 model year having this problem, but how could they sell a vehicle for seven years without fixing this? I know I should have measured the damn thing before I bought it, but I guess I was giving Chrysler/Dodge the benefit of the doubt... Moral of the story: If you are a little bit of a DIY guy and are looking for a cheapish used SUV to accomplish some hauling tasks, don't get a f'n Durango.
Prices aren't "dropping on their own". They're dropping in direct proportion to gas prices share of Bush's dropping performance ratings. Their "resilience" is more a measure of how much profit slack the oil companies can draw in when they need to. Otherwise, how do you explain their drop exactly as risk perception grows in the Mideast, actual risks come true devastatingly, including knocking out 25% of America's import, laying waste to the Gulf's production capacity, Venezuela (#4 supplier) converting its dollar marketing to euros and plausibly threatening to switch to China, etc etc? You're looking at a "25% off sale" on goods already jacked up by 75%. And you're staring down the barrel of a Winter already prepared by weeks of media ringers telling us how that will all be underwritten by higher heating fuel prices. There's a lot more to oil economics than a month of dropping gas prices while the oil president is in free fall.
--
make install -not war
Actually, had the supply of _crude_ stayed the same, removing refineries would cause a _fall_ in demand for crude and a fall in the price of crude. Refineries consume crude and output refined products like diesel. Shortages in refining capacity will not push the price of crude up.
Why Katrina pushed the price of crude up was nothing to do with refineries in the NO area, but the drilling platforms in the Gulf.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The document (which is very good, by the way) tells you to turn down your hot water heater. This is a bad idea, because the lowered temperature will see your bacteria levels skyrocket in there.
People often suggest turning that down to prevent scalding, but most studies have shown the danger of that is far, far less than the dangers of what could be growing in there.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Our electricity and natural gas prices are going up quite a bit too. I'm hearing a lot that we can expect to pay up to 50% more on energy costs this winter in Toronto.
My gas bill is on an "equalized" plan, which is that they estimate the costs and try to spread it out so that I pay the amount evenly each month over the course of the year. This gets adjusted once per year (in September). Our bill last month was almost 25% higher than the previous amount (which is now the amount I'm expecting to pay for the next year).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
IIRC, one of the main problems with reversible computing is that it requires insane amounts of memory, since you have to store the state at every point of the calculation. You can't throw away information like we do now (in the form of heat) since you have to remember exactly what calculations were done to be able to reverse it. OK, you might say, slap some big memory chips in there. Not so easy in practice...
On the silicon level, whatever method you are able to use to store the state information (be it capacitors or inductors) will take a certain overhead in energy usage simply to support that reversible process. If you can figure out how to reduce or get rid of that overhead, you'd have companies lining up at your door for your idea! Believe me, they would love to build reversible computers, but no one has discovered a good way of doing it yet. On the silicon level it is probably unrealistic to hope for a working solution. There are some interesting and more exotic ideas involving the 'unzipping' process in DNA, and quantum computing... but not much to show for it yet. Good luck!
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Dudes, get a clue
High oil prices is what the US govt and elite powers want
it means every nation now has to spend MORE US DOLLARS on oil, which means more mideast richfolk have
tonnes of cash, they dont know what to do with... and what do they do? They BUY US TBILLS/BONDS and lower
the US interest rate. If it wasnt for $70 oil, your home lending rates would be 15-30%. China already owns
more than 900b in bonds.
So make oil $70+, suck up 1.3trillion of earths cash, and use 30% of that to fund the US deficit and high debt
and keep rates down to prevent Depression-Mark2 total melt down.
Now how long can this last? who knows....
As they say, the MARKET is more powerfull than any govt in the long run, maybe the elite just want to
delay/save things for 2-5 years, while they cash out and save their asses, and then let the economy fall.
Face it, there is no free market, its all subtly controlled/manipulated, maybe not 100% of it, but >50% of it
. Enough of it to matter.
read financialsense.com and http://www.depression2.tv/
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
SEER is one incredibly botched measurement system, and I believe this statement is a direct cause of it.
The SEER numbers you see are usually about 10 to 15, however SEER is not an apples-to-apples comparison. It's BTUsOfCooling / WattHoursOfElectricityUsed. Half metric, half imperial. Who comes up with this stuff?
To turn BTUsOfCooling / WattHoursOfElectricityUsed into a sensible measurement like Cooling / ElectricityUsed, divide by 3.412.
So, a SEER of 13 becomes an efficiency ratio of 3.80. The reciprocal of 3.80 is .26, much closer to your '30% in practice' comment, so (assuming a SEER of 13) for every watt you bring into your datacenter, you need an extra .26 watts to bring it back out.
By the way, playing Warcraft 3 on Windows is about +40 Watt compared to surfing the web.
The graphics card is a power hog. Try loading a big image in a browser and then scrolling up and down with the scrollbar. You'll probably see the power shoot up while you're scrolling.
Why aren't all large computer facilities located in cold-weather climates to begin with? Cooler summers and colder winters could cut electricity bills substantially. Special outside vents could be setup that allow colder air into the building from outside during the winter.
I wasn't aware of any significant crude oil increases as a result of the hurricane.
Oil prices are high right now indeed but gasoline prices have jumped disproportionately when compared to rising and falling crude prices. The refinary companies are taking advantage of their opportunity to increase prices. Did you notice that gas is just 20 cents less than it was right after Katrina? Pretty sure all those refinaries are repaired by now.
Of course the whole think stinks to begin with. How does a natural disaster effect the price of something that is already at the gas station. I can see prices rising when the gas stations needed to be refilled because the environment made that gasoline more expensive to produce. One of these days someone is going to have to step into the field and show the oil companies how supply and demand actually works.Do you think all the corn and peas in the super market right now would have their prices marked up if the agriculture industry took a major hit? Don't bet on it.
There wasn't a great (percentage-wise) increase in the price of crude due to Katrina, but there _was_ an increase - it caused oil to hit a record price of over $70/bbl.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
One question of considerable concern I had was safe long term storage of nuclear waste, the link you provided on Synroc presents a possibility to how the waste may be handled. If nothing else I'd say it's better than simply storing canisters of nonprocessed waste.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Most of that was because of the fact that we had to import it though. Doesn't wreak of foul play like gas prices do.
You're hopeless
Doc,
Looking around I have found a couple of possibilities. I think that heat engines might not be the best way, given that (in my head) the stored hot water cannot be recycled into the system very efficiently. I'm probably wrong about that. Anyways, from what I've read, the underlying heat engine is very efficient, it just has a limited range of applications (submarines!). I'm also intrigued by this Quasiturbine engine. It is said it can be configured as a steam engine: Store superheated water in a nice insulated place and use it to drive your electrical system. Perhaps the way to go?
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/quasiturbine.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiturbine
http://www.howstuffworks.com/stirling-engine.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine
http://www.stirlingengine.com/
Those are interesting: I'm looking forward to poring through them when I've got the minutes. Meanwhile, I've been thinking about a "low pressure steam engine". The existing engines by that name are all relatively low pressure, but still hot: boiling at 100C. I'm thinking of the steam/turbine mechanism enclosed at low pressure, bringing the boiling point of the water down to maybe 50C. The turbine blown by the steam should consume the energy of the hot water, cooling it. A thermocouple could trigger a solenoid that changes the volume of the enclosed steam capsule, to ensure that the boiling point stays above the ambient temperature. Such a device seems to me to offer the efficiency of turbines, driven by the heated water, while remaining simple and safe. Maybe low pressure capsule turbines each produce only small energy when the phase of the depressurized water vaporizes, but there can be many of those capsules.
--
make install -not war