Carbon ends up in any of the 1000+ organic
compounds that come out the tailpipe. It is
mostly the ones that kill us directly or indirectly that people worry about.
A diesel engine emits less CO2 than an equivalent powered spark engine because
it has a higher thermal efficiency and thus uses less fuel to do the same work. Quite simply, if less carbon goes in, less carbon comes out.
A diesel engine
produces substantially less CO because it
such an engine always runs lean. For a rough comparison, a gasoline
car without a catalyst emits about 30 times
the CO as a diesel engine, and a gasoline engine with a three-way catalyst emits about twice as much CO. (From a 1993 report by the UK Department of the Environment titled "Diesel Vehicle Emissions and Urban Air Quality".) And remember, for the first 3 or 5 miles of driving, the catalyst in a gas car is largely ineffective! For those short trips to the store, a diesel engine is much cleaner than a gas engine.
The emissions challenges for diesel engines
are particulates and NOx. While a diesel naturally has lower NOx emissions than a gasoline engine, the catalysts used to reduce NOx on the gasoline engine do not work with the makeup of diesel exhaust so NOx emissions often end up higher than a catalyst equipped gas engine.
A fair amount of carbon ends up as particulate emissions--soot. This is suspected to be carcinogenic in sufficient doses but the jury is still out on how much is a problem. One study estimated the health impact of one cigarette to be roughly equivalent to six to ten years of inhaling typical concentrations of diesel particulate matter. (Apologies for not having the citation handy, but I can dig it up if anyone is interested.) Also, particulats are heavy and don't accumulate in the atmosphere like the smog producing emissions do.
But even if the health effects are small, the soot is still dirty which is an aesthetic problematic in urban environments. Aside from more careful control of the combustion process, efforts to minimize particulat emissions revolve around particulate trap oxidizers. In the early days, these didn't work very well and got a bad rap but in recent years the technology has improved substantially.
The reality is that the only way to reduce CO output is to reduce the utility of cars in
some way, by making them smaller or slower or more dangerous.
Gasoline engine emissions are a bit like a baloon: you squeeze one side to make it smaller and the
other side expands. Emissions of CO and NOx, among others, are regulated. Emissions of CO2 are not. Cars with 3-way catalyists reduce CO and NOx at the cost of much greater CO2 emissions.
In fact, there are ways to reduce CO2. One is to use engines that burn less fuel for an equivalent power output. Another is to use engines
that produce less CO and NOx to begin with so they
don't have to be converted to CO2.
Diesel engines accomplish both. As an added bonus, most diesel engines can run 100% biodiesel with little if any modification and biodiesel requires very few distribution infrastructure changes, thus making a transition economically viable.
And if you think automotive diesel engines are slow, noisy, and smokey, you obviously have not encountered a modern one.:-)
Um, not quite. Unless otherwise labeled, HTML is assumed to be ISO8859-1. All these pages using the Windows character encoding wouldn't bother me so much if they were shipped with a proper content encoding label.
And for what it is worth, SGML is character encoding neutral. The default SGML declaration sets things up for 7-bit ASCII but it is trivial to use SGML with any encoding you darn well please. The SGML declaration for HTML does exactly this to include the top half of ISO8859-1.
It may not have occured to you that most Intel PCs use IDE disks
It most certainly did occur to me. If you are trying to retrofit old Windows machines to run Unix, this is a problem. If you are building a machine specificly for Unix, not a problem. Even if Linux or BSD which squeeze amazing performance out of IDE hardware are slated for installation, there are compelling reasons to go SCSI. With Solaris it is a necessity because the IDE drivers are terrible (in terms of performance that is; they are reliable).
and that most people need an X server - both of which is no problem with Linux and *BSD.
Well, good thing that XFree86 works. Incidentally, this is the exact same X server that Linux and *BSD typically use. The only hassle here is that it isn't conveniently bundled.
First of all Solaris x86, is horrible when compared to Solaris/Sparc
I'm at a loss to explain why the general/. opinion is that Solaris/x86 sucks so hard. Certainly Sparc hardware is nicer than Intel hardware, but Intel hardware is good enough for Linux for most of you.
Sparc hardware is nicer than most Intel hardware...if you remove cost from the equation. But mostly I've found that Solaris users who dump on Intel Solaris are either just blind Sparc bigots, or formulated their opinion on an ancient version of Intel Solaris when it really was a terrible product. The Sparc bigots are really reflecting on Intel hardware, not the Solaris product. When pressed, I've found they will generally admit that there isn't really anything wrong with Intel Solaris. The past-bad-experience people just need to get with the program and realize that Intel Solaris has matured considerably and is every bit as capable as Sparc Solaris if you don't try to go beyond what the underlying hardware can handle. Just don't use IDE disks with it and expect to use a third-party X server, if you need an X server.
So that is the story with Sparc Solaris users. Linux/BSD users might reject it for ideological reasons, cost (it is free only for non-commercial use), baseline system requirements, and the painfully short hardware compatibility list. In my opinion, anything less than 128MB of RAM just doesn't cut it for a Solaris desktop system. FreeBSD is quite usable in the same capacity with half that.
Along many dimensions, FreeBSD does outperform Intel Solaris on the same hardware (I haven't done many comparisons with linux), but not by a huge margin (except metadata intensive filesystem I/O but rumor has it that Solaris 8 will include FreeBSD's softupdates code). FreeBSD generally has a snappier feel too it for interactive use, but I'm hard pressed to explain that through the synthetic and real world benchmarks I've run.
SMP is the one area where Solaris is the clear leader. Both Linux and BSD need same major internal reworking to get where Solaris is now. Intel Solaris also supports Intel's new address extension thingy so you can have truly staggering amounts of real RAM...if you can find the hardware that supports it.
And 1-meter resolution images of most of the continental USA have been available very inexpensively from the USGS in both print and electronic form for years.
We should worry about things that matter, like being able to call up a credit card company and getting all sorts of private account details just by knowing the card number and the zip code.
The sun hardware is the real expensive commitment, not the OS.
Solaris on Intel isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. I've got a couple Intel Solaris boxes that beat the pants of sun hardware that costs twice as much.
On the other hand, if you stay away from the Ultra5 and 10, you can be pretty certain that Sun hardware will work well. When buying Intel hardware, all standard disclaimers apply, but you can build a solid high performance system if you are careful. Anybody using Linux in a mission critical setting should already be familiar with all of this.
Oh, and Solaris 7 on Intel supports that address extension thing so you can have more than 4GB of ram now.
According to Rupert Battcock of Nabarro Nathanson lawyers, who specialises in intellectual property rights, the GPL and other open source licences would not protect someone from being sued in the UK if the software they have "provided" causes problems. IE - the fact that software is "provided without warranty" simply wouldn't wash with the UK judiciary. This means that organisations who want to use or recommend open source software for their clients would have to tread very carefully indeed. Rupert Battcock gave this talk at the "The Alternative Highway" a seminar delivered by the UKUUG in London last Tuesday, at which RMS also did his thing.
Believe it or not, it's not uncommon for these guys to do this, but they do overstep the mark sometimes. The store in Gateshead in the North of England, UK lost an injunction recently against an animal shelter called Cats'R'Us. They tried to use trademark infringement as their reason, but it's obvious that they are just plain bad to the core.
Slashdot Mirror
Carbon ends up in any of the 1000+ organic compounds that come out the tailpipe. It is mostly the ones that kill us directly or indirectly that people worry about.
A diesel engine emits less CO2 than an equivalent powered spark engine because it has a higher thermal efficiency and thus uses less fuel to do the same work. Quite simply, if less carbon goes in, less carbon comes out.
A diesel engine produces substantially less CO because it such an engine always runs lean. For a rough comparison, a gasoline car without a catalyst emits about 30 times the CO as a diesel engine, and a gasoline engine with a three-way catalyst emits about twice as much CO. (From a 1993 report by the UK Department of the Environment titled "Diesel Vehicle Emissions and Urban Air Quality".) And remember, for the first 3 or 5 miles of driving, the catalyst in a gas car is largely ineffective! For those short trips to the store, a diesel engine is much cleaner than a gas engine.The emissions challenges for diesel engines are particulates and NOx. While a diesel naturally has lower NOx emissions than a gasoline engine, the catalysts used to reduce NOx on the gasoline engine do not work with the makeup of diesel exhaust so NOx emissions often end up higher than a catalyst equipped gas engine.
A fair amount of carbon ends up as particulate emissions--soot. This is suspected to be carcinogenic in sufficient doses but the jury is still out on how much is a problem. One study estimated the health impact of one cigarette to be roughly equivalent to six to ten years of inhaling typical concentrations of diesel particulate matter. (Apologies for not having the citation handy, but I can dig it up if anyone is interested.) Also, particulats are heavy and don't accumulate in the atmosphere like the smog producing emissions do.
But even if the health effects are small, the soot is still dirty which is an aesthetic problematic in urban environments. Aside from more careful control of the combustion process, efforts to minimize particulat emissions revolve around particulate trap oxidizers. In the early days, these didn't work very well and got a bad rap but in recent years the technology has improved substantially.
The reality is that the only way to reduce CO output is to reduce the utility of cars in some way, by making them smaller or slower or more dangerous.
Gasoline engine emissions are a bit like a baloon: you squeeze one side to make it smaller and the other side expands. Emissions of CO and NOx, among others, are regulated. Emissions of CO2 are not. Cars with 3-way catalyists reduce CO and NOx at the cost of much greater CO2 emissions.
In fact, there are ways to reduce CO2. One is to use engines that burn less fuel for an equivalent power output. Another is to use engines that produce less CO and NOx to begin with so they don't have to be converted to CO2.
Diesel engines accomplish both. As an added bonus, most diesel engines can run 100% biodiesel with little if any modification and biodiesel requires very few distribution infrastructure changes, thus making a transition economically viable.
And if you think automotive diesel engines are slow, noisy, and smokey, you obviously have not encountered a modern one. :-)
Um, not quite. Unless otherwise labeled, HTML is assumed to be ISO8859-1. All these pages using the Windows character encoding wouldn't bother me so much if they were shipped with a proper content encoding label.
And for what it is worth, SGML is character encoding neutral. The default SGML declaration sets things up for 7-bit ASCII but it is trivial to use SGML with any encoding you darn well please. The SGML declaration for HTML does exactly this to include the top half of ISO8859-1.
It most certainly did occur to me. If you are trying to retrofit old Windows machines to run Unix, this is a problem. If you are building a machine specificly for Unix, not a problem. Even if Linux or BSD which squeeze amazing performance out of IDE hardware are slated for installation, there are compelling reasons to go SCSI. With Solaris it is a necessity because the IDE drivers are terrible (in terms of performance that is; they are reliable).
Well, good thing that XFree86 works. Incidentally, this is the exact same X server that Linux and *BSD typically use. The only hassle here is that it isn't conveniently bundled.
Sparc hardware is nicer than most Intel hardware...if you remove cost from the equation. But mostly I've found that Solaris users who dump on Intel Solaris are either just blind Sparc bigots, or formulated their opinion on an ancient version of Intel Solaris when it really was a terrible product. The Sparc bigots are really reflecting on Intel hardware, not the Solaris product. When pressed, I've found they will generally admit that there isn't really anything wrong with Intel Solaris. The past-bad-experience people just need to get with the program and realize that Intel Solaris has matured considerably and is every bit as capable as Sparc Solaris if you don't try to go beyond what the underlying hardware can handle. Just don't use IDE disks with it and expect to use a third-party X server, if you need an X server.
So that is the story with Sparc Solaris users. Linux/BSD users might reject it for ideological reasons, cost (it is free only for non-commercial use), baseline system requirements, and the painfully short hardware compatibility list. In my opinion, anything less than 128MB of RAM just doesn't cut it for a Solaris desktop system. FreeBSD is quite usable in the same capacity with half that.
Along many dimensions, FreeBSD does outperform Intel Solaris on the same hardware (I haven't done many comparisons with linux), but not by a huge margin (except metadata intensive filesystem I/O but rumor has it that Solaris 8 will include FreeBSD's softupdates code). FreeBSD generally has a snappier feel too it for interactive use, but I'm hard pressed to explain that through the synthetic and real world benchmarks I've run.
SMP is the one area where Solaris is the clear leader. Both Linux and BSD need same major internal reworking to get where Solaris is now. Intel Solaris also supports Intel's new address extension thingy so you can have truly staggering amounts of real RAM...if you can find the hardware that supports it.
And 1-meter resolution images of most of the continental USA have been available very inexpensively from the USGS in both print and electronic form for years.
We should worry about things that matter, like being able to call up a credit card company and getting all sorts of private account details just by knowing the card number and the zip code.
Solaris on Intel isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. I've got a couple Intel Solaris boxes that beat the pants of sun hardware that costs twice as much.
On the other hand, if you stay away from the Ultra5 and 10, you can be pretty certain that Sun hardware will work well. When buying Intel hardware, all standard disclaimers apply, but you can build a solid high performance system if you are careful. Anybody using Linux in a mission critical setting should already be familiar with all of this.
Oh, and Solaris 7 on Intel supports that address extension thing so you can have more than 4GB of ram now.
Microsoft's product development is not market driven nor user influenced.
According to Rupert Battcock of Nabarro Nathanson lawyers, who specialises in intellectual property rights, the GPL and other open source licences would not protect someone from being sued in the UK if the software they have "provided" causes problems. IE - the fact that software is "provided without warranty" simply wouldn't wash with the UK judiciary. This means that organisations who want to use or recommend open source software for their clients would have to tread very carefully indeed. Rupert Battcock gave this talk at the "The Alternative Highway" a seminar delivered by the UKUUG in London last Tuesday, at which RMS also did his thing.
Believe it or not, it's not uncommon for these guys to do this, but they do overstep the mark sometimes. The store in Gateshead in the North of England, UK lost an injunction recently against an animal shelter called Cats'R'Us. They tried to use trademark infringement as their reason, but it's obvious that they are just plain bad to the core.