You need to get a screw press to extract the oil, this is the same device used for most plant oils. Also search for "oil extraction machinery" and "oil mill machinery"
I live in the Southern California Desert some 40 miles from the Mojave Desert, The climate is very similar to India where I had seen these Jatropha plants growing.
It's not Toxic unless your planning on eating it, I am sure it no worse then Gasoline or Diesel which I don't recommend eating either.
As far as harvesting, you don't understand the India thinking. For them they view it as helping the poor to survive where using a machine would put them all out of work. I don't really believe that, I think they would just end up with better jobs maintaining and operating machines like we do here.
Anyhow Jatropha can be harvested using coffee harvesting machines that basically shake the trees till the fruit falls off.
Also anything that allow poor countries to produce something exportable would help there economies as a whole, assuming you believe in globalization. But you can't fight the inevitable.
> cheap labour to perform the back breaking work?
I don't see vegetarians complain that Mexicans who are living in horrible conditions pick the food they eat, just drove by 1000's of them on my way to work today, I really do feel for them.
But for me too work on this computer, someone need to grow and harvest the food for me since if I spend my time doing that, there will be no time to program.
Intelligence is not about computing power but about memory access. yes Morse law does predict computers will have the computing power as much as a human brain in a few short years. Since processing power increases 66% per year, but memory throughput isn't keeping up as it's only increasing at 11% per year.
Granted some day there will be super intelligent machines, but for now they are just really fast idiots. this.
By my estimates, it will be another 200 years to have computers be able to have equivalent performance to the Human brain in terms of memory performance.
They will also need to learn like we do and this will also take 20 years just to be as good as a clueless 20 year old.
I am sure we will have very good mimicking of intelligence well before 200 years, we probably could do it even now if enough money was thrown at the problem. But it wouldn't be Intelligent to the same depth and degree as we are. Well some of us are, there are a lot of really stupid people out there, usually working at call centers I find, we could probably replace them first.
I have been meaning to publish a paper on, as a Non-Academic does anyone have any ideas where I can publish this and make sure I can get proper credit before someone runs off with the ideas?
Back in 1996 I figure out that ping times are an excellent source for Random number, especially if your connected to the internet which usually thats where you'd want them. Just start pinging several of your favorite sites, like Google etc. Then take the least significant digits, scramble them a bit and presto, good random number. It's almost impossible to attack the system to De-randomize the ping times.
Of the the things I don't see people mention about random numbers is, how many can you generate per second. If you just need one ever now and then, there are may ways, but if you build a large system that relies on long random number heavily, then it really comes down to how many random bits per second can you generate.
I was using this for some online gambling sites, and it was critical that the card shuffles an dice rolls didn't have any possible patterns someone could exploit, since where would be a lot of money at stake.
I spend several weeks in India last summer studying Jatropha.
My wife's father S.W. Mensinkai founded University of Agricultural Sciences in Dharwad, near Hubli in Karnataka India (8 hrs by train north of Bangalore). He is considers the father of plant genetics in India. They are doing genetic engineering of Jatropha there.
One of the programs they are pushing is for farmer to plant Jatropha on the borders of other crops in the fields, turns out the bulls that wonder freely in India will not go near the stuff, so a row of these trees keeps them out of the farmers crops.
Very interesting work.
I brought back a hand full of seeds with me, and planted them, but they didn't take, maybe the Airport X-ray scanners killed them.
Anyhow;
Jatropha is related to the Castor bean plan that is responsible that the neurotoxin ricin is derived from.
It also have a toxin called curcin that is similar to ricin.
I don't know if burning Jatropha oil release this curcin toxin into the air?
But apparently when it's pressed to get the Oil out, the curcin remains in the "Cake" this is the solids left behind after the seeds have all the oils squeezed out.
From: http://www.intox.org/databank/documents/plant/jatropha/jhast.htm -------------
2.5 Poisonous parts
All parts are considered toxic but in particular the seeds.
2.6 Main toxins
Contains a purgative oil and a phytotoxin or toxalbumin
(curcin) similar to ricin in Ricinis. ------------
Apparently Canola oil (Short for Canadian Oil)is a genetically modified Rape seed (in the mustard family) with the toxins removed.
So if Jatropha had it's toxins removed through genetic modification it could also be a valuable food product.
Later in 2006 I moved to Santa Barbara and it turns out the first company in the US to start producing Jatropha Oils and Bio-Diesel was here in Santa Barbara. http://www.biodieselindustries.com/ They were even doing a project with the local High School to grow Jatropha.
Also Jatropha Oil is being use on the Indian Railways for some time too. I guess the plan is to plant Jatropha trees along the tracks, it keep the animals off the tracks and also since labor is very cheap, they would use the same trains to harvest the tree's for oil to power the trains.
One of the projects I was thinking of was to develop an engine optimized to run on Jatropha Oil. More importantly these three wheeled auto-rickshaws (called Tuck Tucks in Thailand) all use the exact same engines, so the idea is to make a direct drop in engine for rickshaws. The rickshaws there are Two-stroke gas engines and are a major source of pollution there spewing clouds of choking soot behind them. Maybe some day.
Many of the arguments for reliability, susceptibility to hacking and single point of failure are not justifiable. Yes, sure if a company sets things up poorly there will be reliablity problems.
But take Slashdot for example, it is very similar to software as a service. We write, read, share, and search for information. It's been very resistant to hacking, denial of service and has an amazing level of up time and fast clean connections from almost anywhere on Earth. The same can be said of Google, yahoo and AOL.
Techniques with redundancy like multiple server room locations (1000's of miles apart), multiple backbone and Internet providers, computer clusters, fail over and distributed software architectures can make up times very high.
The Internet is still relatively new, and here in the US we take reliable phone and power for granted, but for much of the world, the Internet is far more reliable then phones or power. I can personally vouch for that just from my last trips to China and India. I think it safe to assume Internet connectivity and web sites will only get more reliable.
Now look at local PC software, that is far more susceptible to data lost from power glitches, disk failures, fire, water damage from firemen or sprinklers, viruses, sabotage, prying eyes, computer theft or just plain old fashion stupidity, as in "rm -rf " in the wrong directory.
Also Software as a service is priceless when doing collaboration with people around the country or world. Also when traveling it can make laptops see like an unnecessary hassle to lug around and constantly worry about theft, damage, airport security and customs duties extortion common in third world countries.
Good lord, yes, I know what NUMA stands for. It's original design came out of members of the "PARALLEL Processing Connection" - PPC" that was run by Mitchell Loebel. That group used to meet at the Sun Micro Systems PAL1 headquarters building in Sunnyvale, Ca once a month, I was part of that organization for over 10 years. One of the PPC members was also a member of the IEEE committee for NUMA, David B. Gustavson, who also developed The Scalable Coherent Interface, SCI.
It's still a share memory system. Just not Symmetrical, so each processor can share different sections of the memory. All of these shared memory schemes have to implement complex algorithms to keep the CPU caches current and prevent race conditions.
The Sun Fire V210, V240, V440, 4800, 6800, 6900, 12K, 15K, 20K, 25K were based on Cache coherent NUMA (ccNUMA). Some of these supported up to 64 UltraSPARC processors.
I am talking about something around less than 0.2 nanoseconds Latency. Basically 1 cpu instruction of latency at 6ghz.
The Transputer send messages! not Registers at the cpu level!
This is a very large distinction because it allow you to parallelize all problems even those that can't be run in parallel in normal parallel architectures.
Hrm. According to this, the core ideas in this startup's work were discussed publicly at least as early as 1996. Which paper on that site? I don't see it.
I was also thinking about this as early as 1996 myself, the company to do this starting in 2001.
Parallel processors on a single die (chip) is very different from Thinking Machines & beowulf clusters.
Up till now there were only 2 types of Parallel processing.
1.) loosely coupled. Thinking Machines & beowulf clusters for example are using this, these are interconnected with Ethernet or some other Network medium and send messages back and forth.
2.) Tightly coupled, this is SMP, NUMA, SNOOPY, basically shared memory system where each processor shares the same global memory space.
Each requires very different programming strategies and are limited to certain types of problems.
There is also a third form that is lesser know. This systolic arrays. An example of this is TimeLogic, and many DOD type projects. This is usually done with a bunch of FPGA's and the math computations are done as a series of hardware pipelines without any CPU.
With the parallel core processor it's possible to make it like an SMP (share memory) type system, but you really get hammer with the memory bottleneck so after about 4 CPU's you don't really gain much.
What I had proposed with doing systolic array type of processing but with Simple but fast CPU's on one chip. They would be connected with CPU registers that would pass data directly from one CPU to the next. It's design would allow super tight coupling between each processor, so a programming problem wouldn't need to process a buffer at a time but could tackle problems that can't normally be broken up into parallel operations. For example a bignum math operation like multiplying 2 number that are 1024 bits long. Or large FFT, fast DVT, or matrix operations where each cpu could process part of a single operation that must be done serially, and can not be done using traditional parallel processing.
Specifically my interest was in video compression and image processing in real time. This is where DCT, motion vector searches Huffman coding and other operations that don't parallelize well would really get a boost using this type of processor.
I an not sure really what the point is, I guess I am just venting out of frustration. Also adding some information to anyone interested similar work I had done, showing this isn't a new idea.
I put $100,000 Cash and almost 2 years worth of work into this and got nothing, no one was even interested. But then I see a Bunch of MIT weenies do it and they get all kinds of attention as something new and revolutionary 6 1/2 years later.
There is also a real chance they took the idea right off my web site or slashdot post or maybe even present at my talk and never even gave me some credit for the concepts. There design really looks like it was lifted straight off my paper.
So I guess at least I am exposing some plagiarisms.
I mean what the heck is the point of having an incredibly good idea and investing so much time and money into it just to watch someone else profit from it without so much as a thank you.
I was at least trying not to whine and complain in my post and keep it purely informative and provide links to my very similar earlier works.
Maybe your right, but I am not ready to concede yet. It's hard to say from the article exactly what there doing. I didn't catch the part about ionic and fan together. I would really like to see a diagram, patent, photo or anything that would provide more information about what they actually did.
But there images seem to be a flat surface. This can not be directly against the silicon but something like a Intel's P4 square copper heat spreader.
I don't see how ionic current could work between the fins of a heatsink. If this technology only work directly on the heat spreader of the CPU's then it's no where's near as effective as a heatsink against the CPU.
From comments on the bottom of the article.
On 14-Aug-2007 by LearmSceince But the surface of the chip doesn't contact the air. It contacts the metal heat sink! Heatsinks are all about increasing surface area while allowing air flow. Surface area of a thermal interface reduces the thermal resistance. I could see how an ionic current could break up that slow air layer on the surface, but I don't know if it will do better then some corrugation of the heatsink surfaces to add turbulence. Corrugations or grooves will also increase surface area, but I think the patents on that are long expired by now.
No, the electric charge is put into the air and onto the dust. The air releases it ions into the metal, but the dust gets almost glued on there. It really take water to get it off, a lot more then a little air flow will be required to remove it.
Also there really isn't that much airflow, especially when compared to a fan. And not much turbulence when compared to a fan also, where did anyone come up with the idea that fans have laminar flow. Laminar flow is very difficult to achieve.
Also turbulence is very easy to add to a heat sink, just add some corrugations or other patterns onto the surface of the fins.
If they are talking about a CPU acting a Anode with just a flat metal heat spreader and no heatsink the heatsink and fan improves cooling 100x
I was doing a heatsink with Ionic cooling. vs a heatsink with or without a fan.
The fan wins hand down. The Ionic was better then just a bare heatsink. The interest in the Ionic was that it's silent. I had my heatsink as the anode, with -6KV on the cathode that was a fine wire tracing the fins about 1 inch away. My heatsink was very large 3 inch fins, and 16 inches across. and 17 inches long. The fin spacing was about 1/2 between fins.
In 2 weeks the system would be so clogged with dust it's cooling was failing.
Nope, that link was something different. These using Ion's for quantum computing,
the parent article here and those other ones, were just using the air currents generated by a high voltage electric fields in air. It's actually very crude technology.
From Sep 17, 2006 http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 17/2134250
Ionic Cooling For Your Computer master0ne writes, "We (the folks over at InventGeek) have produced the first ionic cooling system for your high-end gaming system. This system produces absolutely no noise and in fact has no moving parts at all. While this is a proof of concept, it demonstrates that you can get the CFM you need to cool a system efficiently with no moving parts and no increase in power consumption." And another post From Jan 3, 2007 http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/ 03/1951256
Ionic Winds Chilling Your Computer Iddo Genuth writes to mention The Future of Things online magazine is reporting that Kronos Advanced Technologies in cooperation with Intel and the University of Washington claims to have developed a new type of ultra-thin, silent cooling technology for processors. The piece covers many of the cooling technologies currently available, how their new corona discharge cooler works, and a short interview with several of the key team members. And my reply on that one. http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21484 8&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=174537 66
One was using the Ionic Breeze technique to provide just a slight air flow, but it increases the efficiency of the heat sink but a large amount. Problem that they fail to mention is the heatsink really attracts dust, just like the ionic breaze, so you need to get in there with a brush quite often.
Below is a link to many of the prototypes I built. I don't have a photo of the ionic version, but it was just the desktop unit with the large aluminum heatsinks with a plastic duct/ shield was added and a set of fine wires was run across the bottom of the large aluminum heat sinks with -6000V DC on it. The aluminum heat sinks were grounded. Here is another reply from Jonathan Walther
Give John Sokol the credit (Score:3, Informative) by Jonathan Walther (676089) Alter Relationship on Wednesday January 03, @09:00PM (#17452802) Back in 2002 when John Sokol was designing the first, and still the most efficient silent computer, we discussed the ionic air cooling. I think it was Bill Drury who first mentioned it. We put it off as a possible future direction to go. It didn't seem like it would be nearly as productive a direction as the thermal ground technology John developed. Time has proven John right; his thermal plane and thermal ground patents will revolutionize the computer industry fairly soon now. As a director of Nisvara, I can't reveal more than that at this time. But if you want a silent computer with no moving parts and even lower power consumption than these "coronal discharge" guys are claiming, get in touch with John Sokol.
The article states: Particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization, This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into helical structures. Under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.
I have a theory that has been called crackpot by many of my friends, Maybe it's nutty, but I am putting it here in the event that someday if it's proven correct maybe I will get a little credit.
Let me add a few minor crackpot theory alterations, maybe it's possible for high temperature plasma based DNA, life to slowly adapt to cooler non-plasma organic life?
Possibly how life was formed. (my crackpot theory) Dec 30, 2006
1. All higher elements such as carbon an Oxygen had to be formed in the core of a star. These could only have been released in a super Nova.
2. Our planet, sun and solar system much have been formed from the remains of such a super Nova.
3. Within a star must be strata of gases, liquids and light solids like rocky material and heavy iron solids. These were created in the nuclear reactions and precipitate down withing the star and eventually settle into there own strata.
( I have since been told only plasma can exist, but I am not completely convinced. Either way there would still be strata, and now we learned that inorganic DNA like molecules can form within plasma )
4. All objects such as comets and asteroids must be composed of super nova debris. I would think each of the three types of objects comets *water" and smaller "water" asteroids are from similar strata while stony asteroids are from silicon rich layers and then heavy ones from Iron rich layers.
5. With in a star, nothing is really solid at such fantastic temperatures and pressure but everything must seem like a super heated ocean environment.
6. Like in the oceans we have solid methane gas that only stays solid because of the pressure. And we also have super heated water that stays liquid at +700C, and supports life at these temperatures.
7. Below the earth crust is far more life then at the surface, these are all extreme-o-files living off of other chemical processes such as sulfur reactions. These single celled organisms also live in very high temperatures and pressures.
8. Comets are full of amino acids. How did they get there? They must have been formed within the star itself?
9 The chemistry of a Red giant star and regular stars must contain oceans of liquid Hydrogen, methane and water at different strata. All at somewhere near 4000C (measured within a sunspot) possibly lower and at enormous pressure.
10. For the most part much of the chemistry at 0 to 50 C on at 1 atmosphere of pressure can work at much higher temperatures when under higher pressure.
11. The Volume of high temperature oceans within a sun are much much larger then can be found on any planet.
12. With increased volume this increases the probability of interesting rare chemistry occurring such as the type that created DNA. Also the stability over a very like time, 5 Billion years, would allow such reactions to occur and evolve.
13. The creation of DNA / and it's protein molecular engine, the single celled organism) is the only think I find incredible to have evolved on earth. That engine It's the most complex thing on this planet.
14 Like on earth appeared almost immediately after the surface cooled. This seems like life was trapped in
It's a slippery slope. $20 isn't much for us computer guys, but for someone working at in a retail store or supermarket or some other close to minimum wage job, it can be a lot for someone barely able to make ends meet.
Once they can legally charge more for some individuals, then it can and most likely will increase it. Why not $100 extra, $200, $500,eventually a $1000 extra.
If you earning $10K a month or more this is not much, but many people are earning only $2000 to $3000 per month they are already force to contribute as much as $400 a month to health insurance as it is. My 60 year old Mother is in this boat.
In her case this is even more then her rent, fortunately she is in good health at the moment.
But once this Pandora's box is open, there is no going back and no telling where it will end up.
I haven't had a chance to see Sick-o yet but I am very familiar with health care problems having had done 5 years on cancer research at Stanford University medical center.
Then being on the other end stuck without health insurance after a Motor Cycle accident, if I didn't have $100,000 cash in the bank, I wouldn't have a leg right now!
Very few people reach 50 without some problems, cancer, high blood pressure or something, Why should then be penalized after putting in 30 years of hard work, and usually getting these problem from that hard work!
Also from past Michael Moore films his movies have contained all verified facts, maybe he leaves out some things, and surely is biased but nothing he shows is a Lie. I have personally verified some of the more unbelievable fact shown his movies.
If Fahrenheit 9/11 lied, he would be sued silly, and never be able to make another film again. If you doubt me, look at what happened to Dan Rather, after just one mistake about information related to George Bush. We have never heard from him again, one of the most respected reporters in the country.
>You'd be well-advised to avoid mentioning his films in any fact-based discussion, lest your argument will be completely discounted.
Only to people who have never seen is movies and choose to remain ignorant.
I'm sure you think Al Gore is lying also. If so you should move to New Orleans since that was a rare event, right?
And you have nothing to worry about since Jesus will come and save you and time now.
Smoking is or at least before they became addicted, was a choice.
Most "fat" people didn't decide ever to be fat. Much is from the bad diet pushed on us in our supermarkets and on TV, combined with lack of education about how to eat.
Also Stress is a major factor for weight gain, high blood pressure and for high cholesterol, heart disease, detached retinas, diabetes, varicose veins, blood clots and many many other problems.
Stress is something that most people don't know how to control in the USA, it starts in childhood at school here and continues later in life. Especially for the middle class is put under more and more pressure just to try to maintain a decedent life style.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to get a screw press to extract the oil, this is the same device used for most plant oils.
Also search for "oil extraction machinery" and "oil mill machinery"
I live in the Southern California Desert some 40 miles from the Mojave Desert, The climate is very similar to India where I had seen these Jatropha plants growing.
If you get a seed harvest, can you send me some?
John
It's not Toxic unless your planning on eating it, I am sure it no worse then Gasoline or Diesel which I don't recommend eating either.
As far as harvesting, you don't understand the India thinking. For them they view it as helping the poor to survive where using a machine would put them all out of work. I don't really believe that, I think they would just end up with better jobs maintaining and operating machines like we do here.
Anyhow Jatropha can be harvested using coffee harvesting machines that basically shake the trees till the fruit falls off.
Also anything that allow poor countries to produce something exportable would help there economies as a whole, assuming you believe in globalization. But you can't fight the inevitable.
> cheap labour to perform the back breaking work?
I don't see vegetarians complain that Mexicans who are living in horrible conditions pick the food they eat, just drove by 1000's of them on my way to work today, I really do feel for them.
But for me too work on this computer, someone need to grow and harvest the food for me since if I spend my time doing that, there will be no time to program.
Intelligence is not about computing power but about memory access.
yes Morse law does predict computers will have the computing power as much as a human brain in a few short years. Since processing power increases 66% per year, but memory throughput isn't keeping up as it's only increasing at 11% per year.
Granted some day there will be super intelligent machines, but for now they are just really fast idiots.
this.
By my estimates, it will be another 200 years to have computers be able to have equivalent performance to the Human brain in terms of memory performance.
They will also need to learn like we do and this will also take 20 years just to be as good as a clueless 20 year old.
I am sure we will have very good mimicking of intelligence well before 200 years, we probably could do it even now if enough money was thrown at the problem. But it wouldn't be Intelligent to the same depth and degree as we are. Well some of us are, there are a lot of really stupid people out there, usually working at call centers I find, we could probably replace them first.
I have been meaning to publish a paper on, as a Non-Academic does anyone have any ideas where I can publish this and make sure I can get proper credit before someone runs off with the ideas?
Back in 1996 I figure out that ping times are an excellent source for Random number, especially if your connected to the internet which usually thats where you'd want them.
Just start pinging several of your favorite sites, like Google etc.
Then take the least significant digits, scramble them a bit and presto, good random number.
It's almost impossible to attack the system to De-randomize the ping times.
Of the the things I don't see people mention about random numbers is, how many can you generate per second.
If you just need one ever now and then, there are may ways, but if you build a large system that relies on long random number heavily,
then it really comes down to how many random bits per second can you generate.
I was using this for some online gambling sites, and it was critical that the card shuffles an dice rolls didn't have any possible patterns someone could exploit, since where would be a lot of money at stake.
I spend several weeks in India last summer studying Jatropha.
My wife's father S.W. Mensinkai founded University of Agricultural Sciences in Dharwad, near Hubli in Karnataka India (8 hrs by train north of Bangalore). He is considers the father of plant genetics in India. They are doing genetic engineering of Jatropha there.
See photo's
http://www.dnull.com/~sokol/images6/index.html
One of the programs they are pushing is for farmer to plant Jatropha on the borders of other crops in the fields, turns out the bulls that wonder freely in India will not go near the stuff, so a row of these trees keeps them out of the farmers crops.
Very interesting work.
I brought back a hand full of seeds with me, and planted them, but they didn't take, maybe the Airport X-ray scanners killed them.
Anyhow;
Jatropha is related to the Castor bean plan that is responsible that the neurotoxin ricin is derived from.
It also have a toxin called curcin that is similar to ricin.
I don't know if burning Jatropha oil release this curcin toxin into the air?
But apparently when it's pressed to get the Oil out, the curcin remains in the "Cake" this is the solids left behind after the seeds have all the oils squeezed out.
From: http://www.intox.org/databank/documents/plant/jatropha/jhast.htm
-------------
2.5 Poisonous parts
All parts are considered toxic but in particular the seeds.
2.6 Main toxins
Contains a purgative oil and a phytotoxin or toxalbumin
(curcin) similar to ricin in Ricinis.
------------
Apparently Canola oil (Short for Canadian Oil)is a genetically modified Rape seed (in the mustard family) with the toxins removed.
So if Jatropha had it's toxins removed through genetic modification it could also be a valuable food product.
Later in 2006 I moved to Santa Barbara and it turns out the first company in the US to start producing Jatropha Oils and Bio-Diesel was here in Santa Barbara. http://www.biodieselindustries.com/ They were even doing a project with the local High School to grow Jatropha.
Also Jatropha Oil is being use on the Indian Railways for some time too. I guess the plan is to plant Jatropha trees along the tracks, it keep the animals off the tracks and also since labor is very cheap, they would use the same trains to harvest the tree's for oil to power the trains.
One of the projects I was thinking of was to develop an engine optimized to run on Jatropha Oil.
More importantly these three wheeled auto-rickshaws (called Tuck Tucks in Thailand) all use the exact same engines, so the idea is to make a direct drop in engine for rickshaws. The rickshaws there are Two-stroke gas engines and are a major source of pollution there spewing clouds of choking soot behind them. Maybe some day.
More good links:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2005/10/20/stories/2005102002021100.htm
http://www.biodieseltechnologiesindia.com/
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/04/tnt_starts_biod.html
Many of the arguments for reliability, susceptibility to hacking and single point of failure are not justifiable. Yes, sure if a company sets things up poorly there will be reliablity problems.
But take Slashdot for example, it is very similar to software as a service. We write, read, share, and search for information. It's been very resistant to hacking, denial of service and has an amazing level of up time and fast clean connections from almost anywhere on Earth.
The same can be said of Google, yahoo and AOL.
Techniques with redundancy like multiple server room locations (1000's of miles apart), multiple backbone and Internet providers, computer clusters, fail over and distributed software architectures can make up times very high.
The Internet is still relatively new, and here in the US we take reliable phone and power for granted, but for much of the world, the Internet is far more reliable then phones or power. I can personally vouch for that just from my last trips to China and India.
I think it safe to assume Internet connectivity and web sites will only get more reliable.
Now look at local PC software, that is far more susceptible to data lost from power glitches, disk failures, fire, water damage from firemen or sprinklers, viruses, sabotage, prying eyes, computer theft or just plain old fashion stupidity, as in "rm -rf " in the wrong directory.
Also Software as a service is priceless when doing collaboration with people around the country or world. Also when traveling it can make laptops see like an unnecessary hassle to lug around and constantly worry about theft, damage, airport security and customs duties extortion common in third world countries.
Sorry couldn't help myself, just read like "all 15 Oz books" like they were meaning book weighing 15 Ounces and not the Oz as content.
Good lord, yes, I know what NUMA stands for.
It's original design came out of members of the "PARALLEL Processing Connection" - PPC" that was run by Mitchell Loebel. That group used to meet at the Sun Micro Systems PAL1 headquarters building in Sunnyvale, Ca once a month, I was part of that organization for over 10 years. One of the PPC members was also a member of the IEEE committee for NUMA, David B. Gustavson, who also developed The Scalable Coherent Interface, SCI.
It's still a share memory system. Just not Symmetrical, so each processor can share different sections of the memory.
All of these shared memory schemes have to implement complex algorithms to keep the CPU caches current and prevent race conditions.
The Sun Fire V210, V240, V440, 4800, 6800, 6900, 12K, 15K, 20K, 25K were based on Cache coherent NUMA (ccNUMA).
Some of these supported up to 64 UltraSPARC processors.
I was a developer on Solaris 2.5
So it's not like I just fell off the apple cart.
I am talking about something around less than 0.2 nanoseconds Latency. Basically 1 cpu instruction of latency at 6ghz.
The Transputer send messages! not Registers at the cpu level!
This is a very large distinction because it allow you to parallelize all problems even those that can't be run in parallel in normal parallel architectures.
Yes I have used Transputer's, they would be considered loosely coupled with high speed links.
What I was working on was much more tightly coupled.
The Transputer is now replaced with Beowulf Clusters.
I was also thinking about this as early as 1996 myself, the company to do this starting in 2001.
Parallel processors on a single die (chip) is very different from Thinking Machines & beowulf clusters.
Up till now there were only 2 types of Parallel processing.
1.) loosely coupled. Thinking Machines & beowulf clusters for example are using this, these are interconnected with Ethernet or some other Network medium and send messages back and forth.
2.) Tightly coupled, this is SMP, NUMA, SNOOPY, basically shared memory system where each processor shares the same global memory space.
Each requires very different programming strategies and are limited to certain types of problems.
There is also a third form that is lesser know. This systolic arrays. An example of this is TimeLogic, and many DOD type projects.
This is usually done with a bunch of FPGA's and the math computations are done as a series of hardware pipelines without any CPU.
With the parallel core processor it's possible to make it like an SMP (share memory) type system, but you really get hammer with the memory bottleneck so after about 4 CPU's you don't really gain much.
What I had proposed with doing systolic array type of processing but with Simple but fast CPU's on one chip.
They would be connected with CPU registers that would pass data directly from one CPU to the next.
It's design would allow super tight coupling between each processor, so a programming problem wouldn't need to process a buffer at a time but could tackle problems that can't normally be broken up into parallel operations. For example a bignum math operation like multiplying 2 number that are 1024 bits long. Or large FFT, fast DVT, or matrix operations where each cpu could process part of a single operation that must be done serially, and can not be done using traditional parallel processing.
Specifically my interest was in video compression and image processing in real time. This is where DCT, motion vector searches Huffman coding and other operations that don't parallelize well would really get a boost using this type of processor.
I an not sure really what the point is, I guess I am just venting out of frustration. Also adding some information to anyone interested similar work I had done, showing this isn't a new idea.
I put $100,000 Cash and almost 2 years worth of work into this and got nothing, no one was even interested.
But then I see a Bunch of MIT weenies do it and they get all kinds of attention as something new and revolutionary 6 1/2 years later.
There is also a real chance they took the idea right off my web site or slashdot post or maybe even present at my talk and never even gave me some credit for the concepts. There design really looks like it was lifted straight off my paper.
So I guess at least I am exposing some plagiarisms.
I mean what the heck is the point of having an incredibly good idea and investing so much time and money into it just to watch someone else profit from it without so much as a thank you.
I was at least trying not to whine and complain in my post and keep it purely informative and provide links to my very similar earlier works.
It's was called Enumera www.enumera.com
I started to work with Chuck Moore, the author of the FORTH Language on a 7X7 array of very fast small processors.
From at talk I did, February 16, 2001
From http://www.dnull.com/~sokol/amorp/emtalk.ppt On this size Chip a 7x7 array (49 CPU's) with ram could be
build. Co-processors could also be added.
Each CPU's would be operating at 2400 MIPS x 49 for a total of 117 Billion operations per second.
The power consumption would be 1 watt 1.8 Volts a 500 mA.
With this level of computing power new applications that were unthinkable before, now become possible. Also mention earlier on Slashdot:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13
And earlier here:
http://www.colorforth.com/ 25x Multicomputer Chip
This eventually became IntellaSys after Enumera failed. IntellaSys CTO Chuck Moore to Present at In-Stat Spring Processor Forum; Scalable Embedded Array Platform for Implementing Asynchronous, Scalable Multicore Solutions Using Elegant VentureForth Programming to Be Discussed in Detail http://www.intellasys.net/products/24c18/SEAforth
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/i
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/i
Also for older info see:
Specifically look at the P21 / I21/ F21 chips...
http://www.enumera.com/chip/
http://www.ultratechnology.com/ml0.htm
http://www.ultratechnology.com/f21.html#f21
http://www.ultratechnology.com/store.htm#stamp
http://www.ultratechnology.com/cowboys.html#cm
It's hard to say from the article exactly what there doing. I didn't catch the part about ionic and fan together.
I would really like to see a diagram, patent, photo or anything that would provide more information about what they actually did.
But there images seem to be a flat surface. This can not be directly against the silicon but something like a Intel's P4 square copper heat spreader.
I don't see how ionic current could work between the fins of a heatsink. If this technology only work directly on the heat spreader of the CPU's then it's no where's near as effective as a heatsink against the CPU.
From comments on the bottom of the article. On 14-Aug-2007 by LearmSceince
But the surface of the chip doesn't contact the air. It contacts the metal heat sink! Heatsinks are all about increasing surface area while allowing air flow. Surface area of a thermal interface reduces the thermal resistance. I could see how an ionic current could break up that slow air layer on the surface, but I don't know if it will do better then some corrugation of the heatsink surfaces to add turbulence. Corrugations or grooves will also increase surface area, but I think the patents on that are long expired by now.
No, the electric charge is put into the air and onto the dust.
The air releases it ions into the metal, but the dust gets almost glued on there.
It really take water to get it off, a lot more then a little air flow will be required to remove it.
Also there really isn't that much airflow, especially when compared to a fan.
And not much turbulence when compared to a fan also, where did anyone come up with the idea that fans have laminar flow.
Laminar flow is very difficult to achieve.
Also turbulence is very easy to add to a heat sink, just add some corrugations or other patterns onto the surface of the fins.
If they are talking about a CPU acting a Anode with just a flat metal heat spreader and no heatsink
the heatsink and fan improves cooling 100x
I was doing a heatsink with Ionic cooling. vs a heatsink with or without a fan.
The fan wins hand down. The Ionic was better then just a bare heatsink.
The interest in the Ionic was that it's silent.
I had my heatsink as the anode, with -6KV on the cathode that was a fine wire tracing the fins about 1 inch away.
My heatsink was very large 3 inch fins, and 16 inches across. and 17 inches long.
The fin spacing was about 1/2 between fins.
In 2 weeks the system would be so clogged with dust it's cooling was failing.
Ionic air flow attract dust much much faster then a heatsink and fan.
It get as much dust in 2 weeks that a regular PC gets in 2 years!
It also still needs a heatsink!
"Innovative Ion Trap on a Semiconductor"
Nope, that link was something different. These using Ion's for quantum computing,
the parent article here and those other ones, were just using the air currents generated by a high voltage electric fields in air.
It's actually very crude technology.
I did RTFA. It's just a matter of semantics.
They are talking about a CPU with a heatsink and ionic wind cooling.
This is more or less the same as a heatsink with an Ionic Breeze pointed at it.
OR am I missing something?
As far as I can see, there vague article is more or less the same as those other articles and what I had already developed and tested in 2003 or so.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09
master0ne writes, "We (the folks over at InventGeek) have produced the first ionic cooling system for your high-end gaming system. This system produces absolutely no noise and in fact has no moving parts at all. While this is a proof of concept, it demonstrates that you can get the CFM you need to cool a system efficiently with no moving parts and no increase in power consumption." And another post
From Jan 3, 2007
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01
Iddo Genuth writes to mention The Future of Things online magazine is reporting that Kronos Advanced Technologies in cooperation with Intel and the University of Washington claims to have developed a new type of ultra-thin, silent cooling technology for processors. The piece covers many of the cooling technologies currently available, how their new corona discharge cooler works, and a short interview with several of the key team members. And my reply on that one.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2148
Below is a link to many of the prototypes I built. I don't have a photo of the ionic version, but it was just the desktop unit with the large aluminum heatsinks with a plastic duct/ shield was added and a set of fine wires was run across the bottom of the large aluminum heat sinks with -6000V DC on it.
The aluminum heat sinks were grounded. Here is another reply from Jonathan Walther Give John Sokol the credit (Score:3, Informative)
by Jonathan Walther (676089) Alter Relationship on Wednesday January 03, @09:00PM (#17452802)
Back in 2002 when John Sokol was designing the first, and still the most efficient silent computer, we discussed the ionic air cooling. I think it was Bill Drury who first mentioned it. We put it off as a possible future direction to go. It didn't seem like it would be nearly as productive a direction as the thermal ground technology John developed. Time has proven John right; his thermal plane and thermal ground patents will revolutionize the computer industry fairly soon now. As a director of Nisvara, I can't reveal more than that at this time. But if you want a silent computer with no moving parts and even lower power consumption than these "coronal discharge" guys are claiming, get in touch with John Sokol.
If you have have been reading science stories lately.
It might be life Jim..., physicists discover inorganic dust with life-like qualities
http://www.physorg.com/news105869123.html
The article states: Particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization, This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into helical structures. Under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.
I have a theory that has been called crackpot by many of my friends,
Maybe it's nutty, but I am putting it here in the event that someday if it's proven correct maybe I will get a little credit.
Let me add a few minor crackpot theory alterations, maybe it's possible for high temperature plasma based DNA, life to slowly adapt to cooler non-plasma organic life?
Possibly how life was formed. (my crackpot theory) Dec 30, 2006
1. All higher elements such as carbon an Oxygen had to be formed in the core of a star. These could only have been released in a super Nova.
2. Our planet, sun and solar system much have been formed from the remains of such a super Nova.
3. Within a star must be strata of gases, liquids and light solids like rocky material and heavy iron solids. These were created in the nuclear reactions and precipitate down withing the star and eventually settle into there own strata.
( I have since been told only plasma can exist, but I am not completely convinced. Either way there would still be strata, and now we learned that inorganic DNA like molecules can form within plasma )
4. All objects such as comets and asteroids must be composed of super nova debris. I would think each of the three types of objects comets *water" and smaller "water" asteroids are from similar strata while stony asteroids are from silicon rich layers and then heavy ones from Iron rich layers.
5. With in a star, nothing is really solid at such fantastic temperatures and pressure but everything must seem like a super heated ocean environment.
6. Like in the oceans we have solid methane gas that only stays solid because of the pressure. And we also have super heated water that stays liquid at +700C, and supports life at these temperatures.
7. Below the earth crust is far more life then at the surface, these are all extreme-o-files living off of other chemical processes such as sulfur reactions. These single celled organisms also live in very high temperatures and pressures.
8. Comets are full of amino acids. How did they get there? They must have been formed within the star itself?
9 The chemistry of a Red giant star and regular stars must contain oceans of liquid Hydrogen, methane and water at different strata. All at somewhere near 4000C (measured within a sunspot) possibly lower and at enormous pressure.
10. For the most part much of the chemistry at 0 to 50 C on at 1 atmosphere of pressure can work at much higher temperatures when under higher pressure.
11. The Volume of high temperature oceans within a sun are much much larger then can be found on any planet.
12. With increased volume this increases the probability of interesting rare chemistry occurring such as the type that created DNA. Also the stability over a very like time, 5 Billion years, would allow such reactions to occur and evolve.
13. The creation of DNA / and it's protein molecular engine, the single celled organism) is the only think I find incredible to have evolved on earth. That engine It's the most complex thing on this planet.
14 Like on earth appeared almost immediately after the surface cooled. This seems like life was trapped in
>$5-20 extra per month really that significant?
It's a slippery slope. $20 isn't much for us computer guys, but for someone working at in a retail store or supermarket or some other close to minimum wage job, it can be a lot for someone barely able to make ends meet.
Once they can legally charge more for some individuals, then it can and most likely will increase it. Why not $100 extra, $200, $500,eventually a $1000 extra.
If you earning $10K a month or more this is not much, but many people are earning only $2000 to $3000 per month they are already force to contribute as much as $400 a month to health insurance as it is. My 60 year old Mother is in this boat.
In her case this is even more then her rent, fortunately she is in good health at the moment.
But once this Pandora's box is open, there is no going back and no telling where it will end up.
I haven't had a chance to see Sick-o yet but I am very familiar with health care problems having had done 5 years on cancer research at Stanford University medical center.
Then being on the other end stuck without health insurance after a Motor Cycle accident, if I didn't have $100,000 cash in the bank, I wouldn't have a leg right now!
Very few people reach 50 without some problems, cancer, high blood pressure or something, Why should then be penalized after putting in 30 years of hard work, and usually getting these problem from that hard work!
Also from past Michael Moore films his movies have contained all verified facts, maybe he leaves out some things, and surely is biased but nothing he shows is a Lie. I have personally verified some of the more unbelievable fact shown his movies.
If Fahrenheit 9/11 lied, he would be sued silly, and never be able to make another film again.
If you doubt me, look at what happened to Dan Rather, after just one mistake about information related to George Bush. We have never heard from him again, one of the most respected reporters in the country.
>You'd be well-advised to avoid mentioning his films in any fact-based discussion, lest your argument will be completely discounted.
Only to people who have never seen is movies and choose to remain ignorant.
I'm sure you think Al Gore is lying also. If so you should move to New Orleans since that was a rare event, right?
And you have nothing to worry about since Jesus will come and save you and time now.
Smoking is or at least before they became addicted, was a choice.
Most "fat" people didn't decide ever to be fat. Much is from the bad diet pushed on us in our supermarkets and on TV, combined with lack of education about how to eat.
Also Stress is a major factor for weight gain, high blood pressure and for high cholesterol, heart disease, detached retinas, diabetes, varicose veins, blood clots and many many other problems.
Stress is something that most people don't know how to control in the USA, it starts in childhood at school here and continues later in life.
Especially for the middle class is put under more and more pressure just to try to maintain a decedent life style.