The fact that wind is local is, actually, not such a bad thing.
Most areas already have a lot of small power plants scattered around all over the place. As an example, in my state, power plants are scattered all around the state, through nearly all counties.
So... if those were all magically converted to wind, there would always be enough wind blowing somewhere, between some combination of the plants.
You may have to beef up transmission somewhat, but let's look at nuclear: One or two nuke plants in the state would probably require just as big of a transmission investment.
And the awesome part about wind? You send the few dead birds to the landfill, you don't get into intranational and international debates over who is willing to accept the waste, and who is willing to let it be transported THROUGH them to get to the destination, like you do with nuclear.
Hydro is pretty awesome... but if you think that the environmentalists freak out over putting solar panels on some ground, just try and get a big hydro dam built...
You're forgetting that the oil industries receive MASSIVE subsidies from the government. Not necessarily in outright funds, but in other ways. For example, look at how much we spend on the military to protect the oil company's interests in the Middle East.
When we invade Iraq to "stabilize the region" (code for "keep surrounding countries producing oil"), look at how much it costs. Even without including the Iraq war, look at the cost of keeping the "regular" military bases in the region.
If you add up all of the money that is spent on protecting oil interests in the Middle East, you'll find that for the cost of about 5-10 years worth of oil protection, we could have bought wind, solar, geo, and/or hydro to entirely replace our need for oil.
Besides... let's look at the economy. Everybody is worried about it. Instead of paying truly obscene amounts of money to those in power in the Middle East for oil, giving that money to American companies to produce energy in our own country would be such a massive boost to the economy that it would make the government's bailouts pale in comparison.
Not feasable... then you have to feed the "whack jobs" more energy than you get out. Even the lowly, inefficient photovoltaic cells are many times more efficient than that scheme...
Novell was fine for sharing files, but didn't really play much into the actual Internet scene. By 1995, Token Ring was, for nearly everyone, a thing of the past. Even BNC-based ethernet was almost entirely gone, in favor of twisted-pair. Switches were even the norm for anything but small installations. They were expensive, but available and not uncommon.
The Ciscos of the day, as you point out, were vastly overpriced. $3k would buy you something which could route a few megabits, but would be severely taxed by trying to do per-IP rate limiting. But, ISPs of any respect had more capable routers than that in place, in 1995 or 1996, I worked at a local ISP with an OC3 and a Cisco that never broke a sweat.
Commodity hardware, though, was already in place. I've routed nearly 10 megabits of torrent traffic on a P133, vmstat showed something like 2% system time. Hardware not much more modern than that can saturate a 100mbps line doing routing, NAT, and load-balancing.
But QoS wasn't commonly available, though. Even though Token Ring could prioritize clients, QoS didn't really happen on an IP level until 1998, when the ITU talked about it, and RFC2386 came out. The hardware was there, it was software that wasn't.
Early 90's computers...486DX2? Pentium 90? That's enough to route much more traffic than any of the nodes at that time could even conceive of, and can do QoS to boot.
Doesn't Gopher run on port 70, making it easy to prioritize over port 80 traffic? It would seem (although I could be completely wrong) that the biggest holdback wasn't hardware, just that QoS hadn't really been brought to fruition in time.
Yeah. If you have root passwords, a lot of companies like to play it safe - change the passwords while you're out to lunch, then give you the "news" when you get back.
I had that happen, like you, at one job of mine. And, like you, they got ahold of me a few weeks later to see if *I* could give *them* the root password to a router that they had forgotten about.
How dare you inject a useful, explanatory article into the armchair quarterbacking? I don't know where you think you are, but this is [i]Slashdot[/i], kid. Take that stuff somewhere else.
I don't think that's likely. In my state, the rate of autism has gone up twenty times in twenty years. That's not the sort of increase you see if some dudes start liking chicks who can't look them in the eyes during sex...
Yeah, people take *small* doses each day, and (as you know) have their blood checked regularly to make sure that they aren't taking too much. But go down a piece of bar bait, and see how long you stick around without a good dose of vitamin K....
Spring traps don't kill instantly at all. In a very good percentage of the cases, I either see the mouse struggling, or find evidence that they have struggled for some time.
But yeah... rolling around, having your skin pulled off of you isn't humane, either.
I think that one of the most humane methods (although most brutal) is the old foot-stomp. Properly done, their skull is crushed in a very small fraction of a second.
Yeah, I don't know if there really is a truly humane way to kill something.
One caution with the poisons: They are intended - and are very effective at - attracting animals and killing them. One thing that has ALWAYS astounded me is just how often I go to the vet for something, and someone comes in with a dog or cat that ate rat poison. I think 1 in 3 times is about right.
If you set out bait, put it in stations what will keep other animals out of them. And... use a coumadin-based poison. With coumadin, if an animal (or person) gets ahold of some, the antidote is quite simple, a shot of vitamin K, if you are able to do it in time. But there are other baits to which there are no antidotes.
Yeah, it's funny that once they got rid of the supposedly "bad" stuff in vaccinations (thimerosol), not only did autism rates not go down... they kept getting [i]higher[/i].
Obviously, something in our environment is making autism rates climb. But it doesn't look like it's the thimerosol. Even if it is from mercury (which I don't know of any data showing that it is), it seems to be mercury from some other source, not from thimerosol.
WD's white paper says that they will do it for 7 seconds, then go back to servicing requests, and save the error recovery for when they are again idle.
It's all about cost. Ask any engineer about tolerances and reliability, and their first question will be "How much can you spend?" Ask a marketer about how many you can sell, and he'll ask "How low can you price it?"
A few years ago, I put together yet another machine with a RAID array, it had 8 brand-new Seagate drives.
Within a month, one drive had died. Within the next month, two more of the drives had died. Guess what Seagate replaced them with? Refurbs.
Of the three refurbs, two died within two weeks. And another of the original.
I called Seagate, and asked them to replace the entire lot, as they were obviously from a bum lot. They agreed, and I was happy... until they sent me 8 more REFURBS.
Just for fun, I put them in a machine and gave it light duty. Within a month, FOUR of them had died.
At that point, I decided to never buy Seagate again. Every manufacturer can (and does) have bad lots, but giving me refurbs was particularly low-class.
Now, for SATA, I buy only WD RE or RE2 drives, and in buying them by the dozens for three years to run in RAID arrays, my failure rate has been lower than with any other IDE/SATA drives, I've only lost one or two. They're good enough that I install them on all of the desktops for my clients as well, and have yet to have one fail in that usage.
I can't comment on WD's service, as I haven't had a chance to test it - and I like that.
That's right, it's more secure if you don't have windows. Secure rooms already don't have windows, so it's a no-brainer.
Why don't they have windows? Anyone with line-of-sight to the window can shine a laser on it, and listen to the conversation by watching the deflection of the laser reflection, caused by sound waves vibrating the window.
I used to work 4/10s, starting at 4AM - so with an hour lunch, I ended the day at 3PM. It was nice, because I had early afternoons off every day. It was also nice having a three-day weekend every week.
The roughest part for me was the fact that I had to get up before 10AM.
One of the conditions mentioned is Tourette's Syndrome. We have some ideas about what that does to the brain, but only a few, there are things we don't really understand. And, more importantly, we have no idea *why* those things happen, or which gene (or combination of genes) creates the susceptibility to it.
If we could even identify more of the differences between a normal brain and a Tourettic brain, then perhaps we could trace that back to some of the responsible genes... which is practically the Holy Grail of Tourette's research.
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The fact that wind is local is, actually, not such a bad thing.
Most areas already have a lot of small power plants scattered around all over the place. As an example, in my state, power plants are scattered all around the state, through nearly all counties.
So... if those were all magically converted to wind, there would always be enough wind blowing somewhere, between some combination of the plants.
You may have to beef up transmission somewhat, but let's look at nuclear: One or two nuke plants in the state would probably require just as big of a transmission investment.
And the awesome part about wind? You send the few dead birds to the landfill, you don't get into intranational and international debates over who is willing to accept the waste, and who is willing to let it be transported THROUGH them to get to the destination, like you do with nuclear.
Hydro is pretty awesome... but if you think that the environmentalists freak out over putting solar panels on some ground, just try and get a big hydro dam built...
You're forgetting that the oil industries receive MASSIVE subsidies from the government. Not necessarily in outright funds, but in other ways. For example, look at how much we spend on the military to protect the oil company's interests in the Middle East.
When we invade Iraq to "stabilize the region" (code for "keep surrounding countries producing oil"), look at how much it costs. Even without including the Iraq war, look at the cost of keeping the "regular" military bases in the region.
If you add up all of the money that is spent on protecting oil interests in the Middle East, you'll find that for the cost of about 5-10 years worth of oil protection, we could have bought wind, solar, geo, and/or hydro to entirely replace our need for oil.
Besides... let's look at the economy. Everybody is worried about it. Instead of paying truly obscene amounts of money to those in power in the Middle East for oil, giving that money to American companies to produce energy in our own country would be such a massive boost to the economy that it would make the government's bailouts pale in comparison.
Not feasable... then you have to feed the "whack jobs" more energy than you get out. Even the lowly, inefficient photovoltaic cells are many times more efficient than that scheme...
Props for the simpsons reference!
Novell was fine for sharing files, but didn't really play much into the actual Internet scene. By 1995, Token Ring was, for nearly everyone, a thing of the past. Even BNC-based ethernet was almost entirely gone, in favor of twisted-pair. Switches were even the norm for anything but small installations. They were expensive, but available and not uncommon.
The Ciscos of the day, as you point out, were vastly overpriced. $3k would buy you something which could route a few megabits, but would be severely taxed by trying to do per-IP rate limiting. But, ISPs of any respect had more capable routers than that in place, in 1995 or 1996, I worked at a local ISP with an OC3 and a Cisco that never broke a sweat.
Commodity hardware, though, was already in place.
I've routed nearly 10 megabits of torrent traffic on a P133, vmstat showed something like 2% system time. Hardware not much more modern than that can saturate a 100mbps line doing routing, NAT, and load-balancing.
But QoS wasn't commonly available, though. Even though Token Ring could prioritize clients, QoS didn't really happen on an IP level until 1998, when the ITU talked about it, and RFC2386 came out. The hardware was there, it was software that wasn't.
Early 90's computers...486DX2? Pentium 90? That's enough to route much more traffic than any of the nodes at that time could even conceive of, and can do QoS to boot.
Doesn't Gopher run on port 70, making it easy to prioritize over port 80 traffic? It would seem (although I could be completely wrong) that the biggest holdback wasn't hardware, just that QoS hadn't really been brought to fruition in time.
Yeah. If you have root passwords, a lot of companies like to play it safe - change the passwords while you're out to lunch, then give you the "news" when you get back.
I had that happen, like you, at one job of mine. And, like you, they got ahold of me a few weeks later to see if *I* could give *them* the root password to a router that they had forgotten about.
if they want you to stay longer, it's because they need or want you. You have the advantage.
So, if they say "Stay four weeks instead of three, or we'll give you a bad rap", counter with "How about one week instead of three?"
I guess that makes it useless to the working time-travelor, then.
Doh!
Consider me shamed.
How dare you inject a useful, explanatory article into the armchair quarterbacking? I don't know where you think you are, but this is [i]Slashdot[/i], kid. Take that stuff somewhere else.
I don't think that's likely. In my state, the rate of autism has gone up twenty times in twenty years. That's not the sort of increase you see if some dudes start liking chicks who can't look them in the eyes during sex...
Yeah, people take *small* doses each day, and (as you know) have their blood checked regularly to make sure that they aren't taking too much. But go down a piece of bar bait, and see how long you stick around without a good dose of vitamin K....
Spring traps don't kill instantly at all. In a very good percentage of the cases, I either see the mouse struggling, or find evidence that they have struggled for some time.
But yeah... rolling around, having your skin pulled off of you isn't humane, either.
I think that one of the most humane methods (although most brutal) is the old foot-stomp. Properly done, their skull is crushed in a very small fraction of a second.
Yeah, I don't know if there really is a truly humane way to kill something.
One caution with the poisons: They are intended - and are very effective at - attracting animals and killing them. One thing that has ALWAYS astounded me is just how often I go to the vet for something, and someone comes in with a dog or cat that ate rat poison. I think 1 in 3 times is about right.
If you set out bait, put it in stations what will keep other animals out of them. And... use a coumadin-based poison. With coumadin, if an animal (or person) gets ahold of some, the antidote is quite simple, a shot of vitamin K, if you are able to do it in time. But there are other baits to which there are no antidotes.
Yeah, it's funny that once they got rid of the supposedly "bad" stuff in vaccinations (thimerosol), not only did autism rates not go down... they kept getting [i]higher[/i].
Obviously, something in our environment is making autism rates climb. But it doesn't look like it's the thimerosol. Even if it is from mercury (which I don't know of any data showing that it is), it seems to be mercury from some other source, not from thimerosol.
I got a flu shot at the fire department this year, and asked the guys if they'd like some computers. EVERY HEAD swung around to look at me wide-eyed.
Finally, one of them said "Yeah, we wish. The higher-ups just came through and took away all of the non-work computers." Ah, well.
WD's white paper says that they will do it for 7 seconds, then go back to servicing requests, and save the error recovery for when they are again idle.
Nope, it had lots of fans. When I replaced the drives with WD RE drives, everything was fine, and it's still running without one drive having failed.
Then I have a looooooot of installed desktops that shouldn't be working. :D
It's all about cost. Ask any engineer about tolerances and reliability, and their first question will be "How much can you spend?" Ask a marketer about how many you can sell, and he'll ask "How low can you price it?"
A few years ago, I put together yet another machine with a RAID array, it had 8 brand-new Seagate drives.
Within a month, one drive had died. Within the next month, two more of the drives had died. Guess what Seagate replaced them with? Refurbs.
Of the three refurbs, two died within two weeks. And another of the original.
I called Seagate, and asked them to replace the entire lot, as they were obviously from a bum lot. They agreed, and I was happy... until they sent me 8 more REFURBS.
Just for fun, I put them in a machine and gave it light duty. Within a month, FOUR of them had died.
At that point, I decided to never buy Seagate again. Every manufacturer can (and does) have bad lots, but giving me refurbs was particularly low-class.
Now, for SATA, I buy only WD RE or RE2 drives, and in buying them by the dozens for three years to run in RAID arrays, my failure rate has been lower than with any other IDE/SATA drives, I've only lost one or two. They're good enough that I install them on all of the desktops for my clients as well, and have yet to have one fail in that usage.
I can't comment on WD's service, as I haven't had a chance to test it - and I like that.
That's right, it's more secure if you don't have windows. Secure rooms already don't have windows, so it's a no-brainer.
Why don't they have windows? Anyone with line-of-sight to the window can shine a laser on it, and listen to the conversation by watching the deflection of the laser reflection, caused by sound waves vibrating the window.
Almost a decade ago, I recall folks being able to reconstruct data transfer a modem by simply watching the activity LED, as it blipped for every bit.
It may have been an ethernet hub/switch, I don't recall. But this is, in the most simple form, just an extension of that work.
And hey... your WAP can double as your room light!
I used to work 4/10s, starting at 4AM - so with an hour lunch, I ended the day at 3PM. It was nice, because I had early afternoons off every day. It was also nice having a three-day weekend every week.
The roughest part for me was the fact that I had to get up before 10AM.
One of the conditions mentioned is Tourette's Syndrome. We have some ideas about what that does to the brain, but only a few, there are things we don't really understand. And, more importantly, we have no idea *why* those things happen, or which gene (or combination of genes) creates the susceptibility to it.
If we could even identify more of the differences between a normal brain and a Tourettic brain, then perhaps we could trace that back to some of the responsible genes... which is practically the Holy Grail of Tourette's research.