I calculated numbers for 50 people. Using those numbers (and again, most places don't use 300 watt consumption cad workstations, more like 175 watts for a standard PC), you're talking about $400 wasted per person. Not huge amounts, but if you're a company like GM, with 266,000 people, and you didn't shut off your personal workstations at night and weekends, you're talking about $106,400,000 dollars annually wasted (@ $0.20 per kWh). And that's just one fortune 500 company. If everyone there was just using a standard PC, you're still talking over 50 million dollars in wasted electricity.
I've heard this argument from people within my company. It didn't take must to shut them up though. Under most bios setting, you can set a time for the computer to auto-boot during the week.
People start work at 8am? Set the PC's to boot at 7:50. Some people show up a little early, change the boot times.
Within the OS settings, if there isn't any use within 120 minutes, have the system hibernate. Also, our CAD workstations consume ~300 watts an hour. At those levels, overnights and weekends amount to a fairly substantial amount of waste (and waste heat) generated.
At that level of consumption, each system consumes.$90 each night, and $3 per weekend. Multiply that by 50 workstations and per year, and the total amount of wasted electricity $19,500 annually. In a 500 person firm, add a zero to the end of that number. This is a huge amount of waste within corporate America, that only takes 2 minutes to change within a bios.
I like NIN as much as anyone, and that concert, along with those FX looks awesome, but there isn't much here that I see that looks much different than what Daft Punk have been doing with their concerts for quite sometime.
Yes, Daft Punk has a scripted show vs. playing instruments that interact with the AV, but the overall display, lighting and controller tech running the show behind the scenes seem much the same.
Eventually, our spaceships are going to be working on limited supplies of fuel, and "just using solar power" or some other alternative source of energy isn't gonna work out real well.
Solar works quite well for me, as it powers all of the servers at my workplace.
My workstation draws a constant 335 watts while idling. Albeit, it's an 8-core system with dual 24" monitors, but 300+ watts in not out of the question for some workstations.
You are correct that the heat is not a waste product and should be dealt with accordingly. I've re-ducted the 'waste' heat from our company's servers to help heat the rest of our building during most of the year.
Remember that California also deregulated their power system a couple years back. Had that not happened, there's no way Enron could have swindled so many people and companies. I have a feeling that the power companies down there are still attempting to recover their losses from that perfect example of what the 'free market' will do when one private group controls a commodity that everyone needs and has little to no oversight over.
Once the power reaches those lines to California, the BPA no longer has authority over it, including wholesale costs. All the operations and costs are then managed by mostly private companies. Blame them for your sisters horribly managed, and very expensive electricity.
"That is why power in the Pacific Northwest is much cheaper than in many other places. If there was a way to get more of that power to California, then the present rates would skyrocket."
For nearly 30 years, the BPA (being a gov agency isn't allowed to keep their wholesale profit) has been charging out of region, private buyers of the Northwest's dam power a slight amount more (~$.05), and using those profits to subsidize the local buyer's rates. There's been a long debate over that practice, but, everyone is still getting a much cheaper rate compared to what private, profit based competition charges consumers.
For 99% of situations, I absolutely agree with you. However, the feds regulate the Northwestern power grid and a large portion of the generation capacity (the dams).
The federally operated Bonneville Power Administration has done an excellent job for the past 80 years, using zero tax dollars. Their wholesale rates are dirt cheap (~$0.04 per KwH) and the grid reliability has always been top notch. We should extend their reach across the entire grid.
I'd love to see your sources for those 'statistics' of yours, because everyone I've heard is grossly misconstruing the truth.
The 15% Apple marketshare claim came out for new, retail sales only for a quarter, in the US. This stat didn't including online retail sales, so it pretty much knocked Dell and most HP machines out of their numbers, along with most all other major PC sellers. Again, complete 'Apple-washing' of statistics to make them sound better.
CNN money clearly states Apple's actual market share of sales, which is 4.7%, which mirrors Apple's real-world share.
Of all of the honest to goodness metrics very closely mirror the ones of this site. My personal site, along with my company's website's OS stats also mirror these numbers.
Apple has increased marketshare, but only by about 1% of total to 4.8% over the past two years. Vista on the otherhand, has gained 11% total market share over the same period of time, all while XP's share hasn't budged over the past three years.
As someone who designed, built and maintains 800+ square feet of a solar panel array, I can assure you that they need cleaning at most every 6 months. Even with 'bird strike' spots, the rain washes away 99% of everything within a couple days.
The *fact* is that there are few manufacturers of solar cells.. and most of them are differentiated anyway, so they don't compete.
That right there should be enough to show that you know next to nothing to what you're talking about. Here's a non-exhaustive list of just the USA's commercial solar panel manufacturers:
Some of the larger ones worldwide include Shell Solar, BP Solar, Sharp Solar, and Sunpower. The US based Sunpower Corporation had an annual revenue of over 3/4 of a billion dollars in 2007, and profits of 147 million dollars. Not exactly chump change.
Congratulations on all of you for not reading the article and not understanding what you're talking about - Solar thermal power does not need the sun out to keep generating electricity, as it stores the energy until its needed:
From the article, page 2.
"The key attribute of CSP is that it generates primary energy in the form of heat, which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity -- and with far greater efficiency. Commercial projects have already demonstrated that CSP systems can store energy by heating oil or molten salt, which can retain the heat for hours. Ausra and other companies are working on storing the heat directly with water in the tubes, which would significantly lower cost and avoid the need for heat exchangers."
"Adobe's Mac products lately have waned in performance compared to their Windows counterparts. He believes Adobe is gradually withdrawing resources from OS X development in hopes of moving customers to Windows, because it's cheaper to support one platform."
"Specifically, Apple's decision to use Intel-built chips in its hardware gave Adobe the opportunity to start from scratch, Hayhurst said. The company was able to build the type of application it wanted to, instead of porting old code over to the Mac platform. The end result, Hayhurst added, is a fast performer."
Aka, we're using the code from our current PC product (since they're identical), but we want to make our Mac customers feel special.
Seems pretty straight forward. Adobe dumped support for Apple because their PPC chips were underpowered and their market was being cut into too much to be profitable, and once Apple went intel, support came back within a single product cycle.
One thing that many people forget or didn't know about at the time of the Intel switch is that Adobe was about to drop support/development for Apple at the time. Apple was releasing more advanced photo and video editing software with their systems, and it began cutting into Adobe's bottom line to port software to the Mac. Adobe had said they would no longer develop Premiere, with threats to drop Indesign (Photoshop seemed safe). A couple months later, Apple had a 'revelation' and switched to Intel based chips, and Adobe continued development on Mac compatible software.
Had Adobe dropped support for Mac desktop publishing products, Apple would have been in big trouble.
And yes, I remember college instructors telling me how fast/better Apple products were for video editing with IBM processors, compared to the 'slow' Intel chips in PC's. They quickly changed their tune when Apple's marketing told them to; Now 5-time's faster!
I just ordered up a new LED bulb on the market yesterday. It won top awards from the US Dept. of Energy last year, and is a direct replacement for in-celing can lights. 13 watt consupmtion, 50,000 hour life. It's pretty steep to swallow the cost, at $130 a pop, but for me it's replacing a 50 watt halogen that dies every 2,000 hours and cost $20 each. It'll pay off in the long run.
The problem with most LED lighting to date is that they're terrible for wide area illumination, like a parking lot light. Their beams are very directional. Plus, even though they state a long life, they can begin to dim very early on. I've gone through several, albeit cheap, LED flashlights a year because of this. Even with new batteries, they are about 1/2 as bright as a new unit within a couple months. I hope this bulb is not like that.
Says the person who's using an edition of AutoCAD that Autodesk retired all support and discounts for last week. Yeah, that's Vista's fault that you use a software suite that's nearly 4 generations old.
What's interesting: hit 'check for updates' on the Vista windows update menu 3 times. One the third try, ta-da, Vista SP1 update shows up. Worked for both my desktop and laptop. It installs the incremental copy, so ~61 megs.
Not exactly. Pebble bed reactors aren't prone to large catastrophic explosions, like Chernobyl, they still can have serious accidents and radiation leaks. Google Hamm-Uentrop West Germany THTR-300 PBMR. That 300-megawatt reactor was shut down by the German goverment, after an accident in the reactor, on May 4 1986, that damaged the fuel pebble's cladding and released radiation into the area surrounding the plant.
Pebble bed reactors are not as 'safe' as people say, nor would I call the nuclear waste they leave 'clean.'
Of course the site certainly could be used to shine a positive spotlight on the great officers we also have.
The last time I was pulled over was a couple months ago. It was a female state trooper who pulled me over for doing 10 over on a county highway at 10pm and I had a trailer tail light out. I only got a warning, but it was actually an 'enjoyable' event. I was so impressed with her professionalism and personable attitude during the stop that I wish I would have gotten her name so I could write her superior to say she was an outstanding officer.
When I worked in media, I knew many officers personally - they too were great to work with. A site like this would be useful to post this info to.
The city of Seattle couldn't even do a monorail from downtown Seattle to the airport for 11 billion dollars . . . and the airport is only 14 miles away. The tax payers are still paying off that debacle.
What speed of hard drive is your laptop using? My Asus G1s-B2 loads Vista ultimate in about 35 seconds from cold - but I'm using a 7,200 rpm drive and built in 1gb turboboost cache. It runs circles around most desktops. If you complaining about boot times, and you're using a 4,200 rpm drive, don't blame Vista.
I was quite excited to see the movie, and knew that the camera work was shaky, but damn, it was horrible on my stomach. I could only look up for about 20% of the movie because I kept becoming nauseous. Why couldn't they have instructed the cameraman/actor to at least zoom out before running around. I even sat next to the wall of the theater to 'ground' my peripheral vision. After the film, I had to sit down for about 15 minutes outside just to keep from vomiting before getting to my car.
Keep in mind, I fly airplanes, never get car-sick and don't suffer from any form of motion sickness, but this movie is terrible for the big screen. Also, on a similar note, I hate the cinematography of all of the Jason Bourne films for their 'edgy' camera work.
Slashdot Mirror
I calculated numbers for 50 people. Using those numbers (and again, most places don't use 300 watt consumption cad workstations, more like 175 watts for a standard PC), you're talking about $400 wasted per person. Not huge amounts, but if you're a company like GM, with 266,000 people, and you didn't shut off your personal workstations at night and weekends, you're talking about $106,400,000 dollars annually wasted (@ $0.20 per kWh). And that's just one fortune 500 company. If everyone there was just using a standard PC, you're still talking over 50 million dollars in wasted electricity.
I've heard this argument from people within my company. It didn't take must to shut them up though. Under most bios setting, you can set a time for the computer to auto-boot during the week.
.$90 each night, and $3 per weekend. Multiply that by 50 workstations and per year, and the total amount of wasted electricity $19,500 annually. In a 500 person firm, add a zero to the end of that number. This is a huge amount of waste within corporate America, that only takes 2 minutes to change within a bios.
People start work at 8am? Set the PC's to boot at 7:50. Some people show up a little early, change the boot times.
Within the OS settings, if there isn't any use within 120 minutes, have the system hibernate. Also, our CAD workstations consume ~300 watts an hour. At those levels, overnights and weekends amount to a fairly substantial amount of waste (and waste heat) generated.
At that level of consumption, each system consumes
I like NIN as much as anyone, and that concert, along with those FX looks awesome, but there isn't much here that I see that looks much different than what Daft Punk have been doing with their concerts for quite sometime.
Yes, Daft Punk has a scripted show vs. playing instruments that interact with the AV, but the overall display, lighting and controller tech running the show behind the scenes seem much the same.
Eventually, our spaceships are going to be working on limited supplies of fuel, and "just using solar power" or some other alternative source of energy isn't gonna work out real well.
Solar works quite well for me, as it powers all of the servers at my workplace.
http://www.djc.com/news/en/11202007.html
My workstation draws a constant 335 watts while idling. Albeit, it's an 8-core system with dual 24" monitors, but 300+ watts in not out of the question for some workstations.
You are correct that the heat is not a waste product and should be dealt with accordingly. I've re-ducted the 'waste' heat from our company's servers to help heat the rest of our building during most of the year.
Here's an article I wrote about the effort: http://www.djc.com/news/en/11202007.html
Next week, the EPA is even giving us a national award for the effort.
That's what I did. No Really. http://www.jbdg.com/solar.html
Remember that California also deregulated their power system a couple years back. Had that not happened, there's no way Enron could have swindled so many people and companies. I have a feeling that the power companies down there are still attempting to recover their losses from that perfect example of what the 'free market' will do when one private group controls a commodity that everyone needs and has little to no oversight over.
Once the power reaches those lines to California, the BPA no longer has authority over it, including wholesale costs. All the operations and costs are then managed by mostly private companies. Blame them for your sisters horribly managed, and very expensive electricity.
"That is why power in the Pacific Northwest is much cheaper than in many other places. If there was a way to get more of that power to California, then the present rates would skyrocket."
You couldn't be more wrong on that.
http://www.koze950.com/2007/07/23/states-seek-rehearing-on-power-subsidy/
For nearly 30 years, the BPA (being a gov agency isn't allowed to keep their wholesale profit) has been charging out of region, private buyers of the Northwest's dam power a slight amount more (~$.05), and using those profits to subsidize the local buyer's rates. There's been a long debate over that practice, but, everyone is still getting a much cheaper rate compared to what private, profit based competition charges consumers.
For 99% of situations, I absolutely agree with you. However, the feds regulate the Northwestern power grid and a large portion of the generation capacity (the dams).
The federally operated Bonneville Power Administration has done an excellent job for the past 80 years, using zero tax dollars. Their wholesale rates are dirt cheap (~$0.04 per KwH) and the grid reliability has always been top notch. We should extend their reach across the entire grid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Power_Administration
I'd love to see your sources for those 'statistics' of yours, because everyone I've heard is grossly misconstruing the truth.
The 15% Apple marketshare claim came out for new, retail sales only for a quarter, in the US. This stat didn't including online retail sales, so it pretty much knocked Dell and most HP machines out of their numbers, along with most all other major PC sellers. Again, complete 'Apple-washing' of statistics to make them sound better.
CNN money clearly states Apple's actual market share of sales, which is 4.7%, which mirrors Apple's real-world share.
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/01/17/reports-apple-slipped-to-4th-place-in-q4-us-sales/
Of all of the honest to goodness metrics very closely mirror the ones of this site. My personal site, along with my company's website's OS stats also mirror these numbers.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
Apple has increased marketshare, but only by about 1% of total to 4.8% over the past two years. Vista on the otherhand, has gained 11% total market share over the same period of time, all while XP's share hasn't budged over the past three years.
There are indeed losses, but much less than you propose. Most solar DC to AC inverters are 90-93% efficient in their conversions - so only a 7-10% loss. http://www.beaconpower.com/products/SolarInverterSystems/docs/M4_M5_plus_datasheet_web.pdf The same goes for the conversion back to DC on the equipment side.
As someone who designed, built and maintains 800+ square feet of a solar panel array, I can assure you that they need cleaning at most every 6 months. Even with 'bird strike' spots, the rain washes away 99% of everything within a couple days.
That right there should be enough to show that you know next to nothing to what you're talking about. Here's a non-exhaustive list of just the USA's commercial solar panel manufacturers:
Suniva, GreenBrilliance, Signet Solar, Advent Solar, Innovalight, SunPower, Miasolé, DayStar Technologies, ASE Americas, Inc., Kyocera Solar, Atlantis Energy Inc., EPV Solar, Crystal Systems Energy Conversion Devices, Evergreen Solar, Powerlight, PowerFilm, Silicon Valley Solar (SV Solar), SunWize, TerraSolar, Inc., United Solar Systems Corp. (UniSolar), Solaicx, Alps Technology, OptiSolar, ICP Solar, Day4Energy.
Some of the larger ones worldwide include Shell Solar, BP Solar, Sharp Solar, and Sunpower. The US based Sunpower Corporation had an annual revenue of over 3/4 of a billion dollars in 2007, and profits of 147 million dollars. Not exactly chump change.
Congratulations on all of you for not reading the article and not understanding what you're talking about - Solar thermal power does not need the sun out to keep generating electricity, as it stores the energy until its needed:
From the article, page 2.
"The key attribute of CSP is that it generates primary energy in the form of heat, which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity -- and with far greater efficiency. Commercial projects have already demonstrated that CSP systems can store energy by heating oil or molten salt, which can retain the heat for hours. Ausra and other companies are working on storing the heat directly with water in the tubes, which would significantly lower cost and avoid the need for heat exchangers."
Cnet: March 2004
"Apple, Adobe drifting apart"
http://www.news.com/2100-1012-5181434.html
"Adobe's Mac products lately have waned in performance compared to their Windows counterparts. He believes Adobe is gradually withdrawing resources from OS X development in hopes of moving customers to Windows, because it's cheaper to support one platform."
Apple.com: WWDC 2005 -
"Apple to use intel microprocessors by 2007"
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html
Macworld: Jan 4 2007
"Adobe products return to Mac"
http://www.macworld.com/article/54661/2007/01/premiere.html/
"Specifically, Apple's decision to use Intel-built chips in its hardware gave Adobe the opportunity to start from scratch, Hayhurst said. The company was able to build the type of application it wanted to, instead of porting old code over to the Mac platform. The end result, Hayhurst added, is a fast performer."
Aka, we're using the code from our current PC product (since they're identical), but we want to make our Mac customers feel special.
Seems pretty straight forward. Adobe dumped support for Apple because their PPC chips were underpowered and their market was being cut into too much to be profitable, and once Apple went intel, support came back within a single product cycle.
One thing that many people forget or didn't know about at the time of the Intel switch is that Adobe was about to drop support/development for Apple at the time. Apple was releasing more advanced photo and video editing software with their systems, and it began cutting into Adobe's bottom line to port software to the Mac. Adobe had said they would no longer develop Premiere, with threats to drop Indesign (Photoshop seemed safe). A couple months later, Apple had a 'revelation' and switched to Intel based chips, and Adobe continued development on Mac compatible software.
Had Adobe dropped support for Mac desktop publishing products, Apple would have been in big trouble.
And yes, I remember college instructors telling me how fast/better Apple products were for video editing with IBM processors, compared to the 'slow' Intel chips in PC's. They quickly changed their tune when Apple's marketing told them to; Now 5-time's faster!
I just ordered up a new LED bulb on the market yesterday. It won top awards from the US Dept. of Energy last year, and is a direct replacement for in-celing can lights. 13 watt consupmtion, 50,000 hour life. It's pretty steep to swallow the cost, at $130 a pop, but for me it's replacing a 50 watt halogen that dies every 2,000 hours and cost $20 each. It'll pay off in the long run.
http://www.wattworks.com/LED%20LR6.htm
The problem with most LED lighting to date is that they're terrible for wide area illumination, like a parking lot light. Their beams are very directional. Plus, even though they state a long life, they can begin to dim very early on. I've gone through several, albeit cheap, LED flashlights a year because of this. Even with new batteries, they are about 1/2 as bright as a new unit within a couple months. I hope this bulb is not like that.
Says the person who's using an edition of AutoCAD that Autodesk retired all support and discounts for last week. Yeah, that's Vista's fault that you use a software suite that's nearly 4 generations old.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7176852
We recently upgraded to AutoCAD 2008, and 40% of our workstations are Vista. Zero problems here.
What's interesting: hit 'check for updates' on the Vista windows update menu 3 times. One the third try, ta-da, Vista SP1 update shows up. Worked for both my desktop and laptop. It installs the incremental copy, so ~61 megs.
Not exactly. Pebble bed reactors aren't prone to large catastrophic explosions, like Chernobyl, they still can have serious accidents and radiation leaks. Google Hamm-Uentrop West Germany THTR-300 PBMR. That 300-megawatt reactor was shut down by the German goverment, after an accident in the reactor, on May 4 1986, that damaged the fuel pebble's cladding and released radiation into the area surrounding the plant. Pebble bed reactors are not as 'safe' as people say, nor would I call the nuclear waste they leave 'clean.'
Of course the site certainly could be used to shine a positive spotlight on the great officers we also have. The last time I was pulled over was a couple months ago. It was a female state trooper who pulled me over for doing 10 over on a county highway at 10pm and I had a trailer tail light out. I only got a warning, but it was actually an 'enjoyable' event. I was so impressed with her professionalism and personable attitude during the stop that I wish I would have gotten her name so I could write her superior to say she was an outstanding officer. When I worked in media, I knew many officers personally - they too were great to work with. A site like this would be useful to post this info to.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2004131851_brodeur18m.html/
There is no way in hell any public project could get across a state, let alone the entire country, for 70 billion. Sad hunh?
What speed of hard drive is your laptop using? My Asus G1s-B2 loads Vista ultimate in about 35 seconds from cold - but I'm using a 7,200 rpm drive and built in 1gb turboboost cache. It runs circles around most desktops. If you complaining about boot times, and you're using a 4,200 rpm drive, don't blame Vista.
I was quite excited to see the movie, and knew that the camera work was shaky, but damn, it was horrible on my stomach. I could only look up for about 20% of the movie because I kept becoming nauseous. Why couldn't they have instructed the cameraman/actor to at least zoom out before running around. I even sat next to the wall of the theater to 'ground' my peripheral vision. After the film, I had to sit down for about 15 minutes outside just to keep from vomiting before getting to my car. Keep in mind, I fly airplanes, never get car-sick and don't suffer from any form of motion sickness, but this movie is terrible for the big screen. Also, on a similar note, I hate the cinematography of all of the Jason Bourne films for their 'edgy' camera work.