My 2 words are RAM DRIVE. You think you can't justify 4Gb of RAM? Course you can.
Dedicate 2-3Gb of it to a ram drive and mount it as your root,/usr,/opt partition, whichever one you have all of your applications installed on. Copy the hard drive to the ram drive at bootup. DD can do it quickly if you just zap the whole partition across. I think there are mount options to tell the Linux filesystem buffer not to cache a particular filesystem.
"For 99.99% of all activites on space (except studies on the human) is better done by robots"
Can you show me the studies which give this conclusion?
Do you know how difficult it is to get a robot to recognise a random object and pick it up in the real world? Ignoring the AI side of it and using real people instead, do you know how difficult it is to set up realistic telepresence, visual, audio, force, touch feedback are all needed.
What is trivial for a human being is bleeding edge technology for a robot. This means that it takes a human a fraction of the time to accomplish a given task where the environment is variable. Robots are only "better" at highly repetetive tasks in a controlled environment.
Right now if they want to spend a few grand on the NICs. You can pick up a gigabit fiber NIC for $170 so while it is more expensive than copper it's not a significant cost.
As I understand it, they fibered the place in 88, CAT5 didn't exist until 93.
Just think, gigabit to the desktop or 10gig to the desktop and gigabytes of dirt cheap RAM. Hard disks would become mythical beasts.
Perhaps they'd rather not spend money repeatedly re-wiring the LAN as bandwidth requirements increase. After all, it's you who wants to connect to the network, why shouldn't you pay for it.
Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve
on
Fiber To The Dorm Room
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"It's unfortunate that they didn't install Cat5"
Sounds to me like someone had a fair bit of foresight.
Well, because the cable itself is only a small part of the cost. A much larger part of that cost is actually running the cable; lifting up floors, installing cable trays, routing cables etc. It's time consuming and expensive.
With fiber, you should only ever have to do it *once*. Then you simply upgrade the transmit/receive equipment at either end of the cable. With copper cable, you have to continually replace the wires themselves. CAT3, CAT5, CAT5e, CAT6 how many times do you want to re-run cables all over the place as bandwidth requirements increase?
The capital cost of fiber is more expensive in the short run but it saves money in the long run.
It sounds to me like they've taken a look at Razor or Pyzor and decided that it wasn't patented so they'd go right ahead and patent something very similar.
Don't talk bollocks. Not all of the parties have the same policies. You can quite clearly see from the following table which parties vote which way...
http://www.ffii.org.uk/votes/swpat/country/UK.ht ml
So not only do you vote for one of their opposition, you tell your current MEPs how you are going to vote and why...
The thing about the european parliament is that it is a proportional representation system which means that your vote *DOES* count. If you vote for a Green, it increases the numbers of Greens in the parliament.
It might also be worth bending your MEP's ear on what the point of the parliament is if the council of ministers can simply retract bills which have been ammended and then resubmit them with all of the ammendments removed. They may be more likely to apply what little power they do have.
With current battery technology, fully electric vehicles can equal the performance of a petrol vehicle, surpass it if you design for EV in the first place. That's now, today... The decision to scrap them when the underlying technology which makes them viable has matured to the point of usefulness is just bizarre... Unless...
Fuel cell technology is a good 10 years away. Guess who's pushing fuel cells? http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,128 2,49834, 00.html?tw=wn_story_related
Same bloke who invaded Iraq, second largest oilfields in the world. Nothing to do with oil... Honest Guv.
Of course, any actual evidence is going to be spectacularly hard to come by. But we can assume that any vested interests are going to push bloody hard to remain vested.
The capital cost of an electric vehicle is purely down to mass production. If they can get them into full production, the cost will be similar to that of an equivalent petrol vehicle but with significantly lower running costs. Hell, with only 900 manufactured, Toyota managed to get theirs down to just twice the cost of a petrol vehicle.
Especially as lithium based batteries weren't available at the time. New battery technologies have more than doubled the power available since these vehicles were introduced.
I believe that they've basically been "gotten to" by the oil companies who want you to continue filling up at their gas stations. Whether it's propane, lpg, hydrogen, ethanol or methanol they don't care as long as your money is going their way.
So buy your electricity from a green supplier.
on
Hybrid Fleet Vehicles
·
· Score: 1
Sure it comes from the same place now, but as the green supplier is committed to renewable energy, that's where *they* will be investing the money you give them.
250-400 mile ranges are possible using existing battery technology. You can buy vehicles now which will do that at motorway speeds. Pretty much in line with current petrol vehicles.
That said, the batteries are not your standard lead/acid ones and are still very expensive, but that's purely down to the manufacturing capacity.
Seriously, If I'm driving 800 miles I want a bed at the end of it. I've done 500 miles at a stretch and that was seriously painful.
"How exactly do you "refurbish" worn out batteries BTW?"
The box the cell is in can just be reused, the LiON, Li-Poly and Li-S are wound strips of cathode and anode with a membrane and electrolyte in between. You basically design the lot to be re-cyclable in the first place. Unwind the battery and re-use the components.
The only pictures I've been able to find on are in here: http://www.avestor.com/rtecontent/document/ 1998_Pr ogressinLithium.pdf
They'll work down to -40C. The charge time *will* still be an issue if you're doing seriously large milages over a short period, but they charge faster than existing batteries.
With a 700+ mile range, charging them overnight isn't going to be as big an issue. Certainly for commuting I'd only have to charge up every 2 weeks or so.
The guys pioneering them are here: http://www.sionpower.com/
This post was meant for battery power vehicles, but the tecnology applies to small devices as well. Battery technology is massively in advance of where they were 15 years ago. Viable battery powered vehicles are hear now. They're just still bloody expensive.
The current battery technologies are:
Lead acid: 200 year old technology. Give this a performance index of 1. It's cheap and simple.
NiCd: Heavy metals but good high current. Performance of 2x the lead acid. Performance 2.
NiMH: Getting rid of the heavy metals. Lighter as well. Performance of around 3x that of a lead acid battery.
LiON: Light, performance 5 x that of a lead acid battery.
They obviously get more expensive the more advanced they are. You can expect to get around 70-80miles out of a lead acid battery. Multiply that by the performance factors for the newer technologies.
New technologies, still up and coming. Used in small scale applications, mobile phones, laptops. Li-Poly. Lighter and can handle more cycles than LiON but not much more power.
Lithium Sulphur batteries (Li-S) promise to more than double the capacity of LiON batteries, 10X that of a lead acid battery. That's a 700-800 mile range on a single charge, not even Diesel vehicles get that. I think these will do the job of killing petrol vehicles. Superior performance, superior range.
Basically. You don't discard the batteries when they wear out. Trade them in at 100,000 miles and get a "new" or refurbished set.
This *is* all nifty technology but still expensive due to manufacturing capacity.
Lead acid: 200 year old technology. Give this a performance index of 1. It's cheap and simple.
NiCd: Heavy metals but good high current. Performance of 2x the lead acid. Performance 2.
NiMH: Getting rid of the heavy metals. Lighter as well. Performance of around 3x that of a lead acid battery.
LiON: Light, performance 5 x that of a lead acid battery.
They obviously get more expensive the more advanced they are. You can expect to get around 70-80miles out of a lead acid battery. Multiply that by the performance factors for the newer technologies.
New technologies, still up and coming. Used in small scale applications, mobile phones, laptops. Li-Poly. Lighter and can handle more cycles than LiON but not much more power.
Lithium Sulphur batteries (Li-S) promise to more than double the capacity of LiON batteries, 10X that of a lead acid battery. That's a 700-800 mile range on a single charge, not even Diesel vehicles get that. I think these will do the job of killing petrol vehicles. Superior performance, superior range.
Basically. You don't discard the batteries when they wear out. Trade them in at 100,000 miles and get a "new" or refurbished set.
This *is* all nifty technology but still expensive due to manufacturing capacity.
You say battery technology sucks, but there are electric vehicles on the road now with 250+ mile ranges from a single charge. That's with current NiMH technology. It doesn't suck that bad, I only get 240 miles before I have to fill up my petrol car. When LiON batteries are cost effective, that range will be boosted to around 400 miles.
The Solectria Force is an example and it's just a conversion from a petrol driven vehicle. A nicer example would be an ACP Tzero. 0-60 in 4 seconds, 290 mile range though that's a sportscar.
The batteries *are* very expensive at the moment, largely down to the lack of manufacturing capacity but they are not discarded when worn out. They are recyclable.
They last about 100,000 miles worth of charges, the NiMH ones anyway.
It's certainly not a panacea, they take 8-9 hours to recharge fully, which doesn't compare well to 2 mins at a filling station but it's worth it to get away from the requirement that you visit a filling station every week.
The technology is here, now and it works. It's been available for 8 years now. What's holding it up?
"The studies conducted clearly shows that Microsoft has a lower TCO than Linux in many areas."
As a Unix administrator, I can make Linux cost an absolute fortune simply by changing the way the systems are designed. I can make it hideously complex, unreliable and expensive to support.
Or, since I actually know what I'm doing, I can make it cost a tiny fraction, scale to thousands and make 90% better use of the hardware. It all depends if you know what you're doing. If you have a team of Windows bods, don't expect to make any savings at all just translating the windows system architecture directly over to Linux without making any changes.
"Linux stole ideas from Unix,"
You're giving the impression that those ideas were not given freely. They were.
To IBM, Linux and Open Source is simply an enabler, a tool to allow them to provide services.
Open source software is more akin to the pipes and tools which the plumber uses. You still pay him for his skills, time and effort. Are you saying that he shouldn't be able to design his own tools and give them to who he likes?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway... You are completely correct but...
/usr, /opt partition, whichever one you have all of your applications installed on. Copy the hard drive to the ram drive at bootup. DD can do it quickly if you just zap the whole partition across. I think there are mount options to tell the Linux filesystem buffer not to cache a particular filesystem.
My 2 words are RAM DRIVE. You think you can't justify 4Gb of RAM? Course you can.
Dedicate 2-3Gb of it to a ram drive and mount it as your root,
The difference in performance can be stunning.
"If we can put together cars with pre-programmed robots and operate nucelar plants"
Both of those situations are *highly* controlled environments. Nothing at all like the highly chaotic real world.
"For 99.99% of all activites on space (except studies on the human) is better done by robots"
Can you show me the studies which give this conclusion?
Do you know how difficult it is to get a robot to recognise a random object and pick it up in the real world? Ignoring the AI side of it and using real people instead, do you know how difficult it is to set up realistic telepresence, visual, audio, force, touch feedback are all needed.
What is trivial for a human being is bleeding edge technology for a robot. This means that it takes a human a fraction of the time to accomplish a given task where the environment is variable. Robots are only "better" at highly repetetive tasks in a controlled environment.
Right now if they want to spend a few grand on the NICs. You can pick up a gigabit fiber NIC for $170 so while it is more expensive than copper it's not a significant cost.
As I understand it, they fibered the place in 88, CAT5 didn't exist until 93.
Just think, gigabit to the desktop or 10gig to the desktop and gigabytes of dirt cheap RAM. Hard disks would become mythical beasts.
I suspect they did think it through.
Perhaps they'd rather not spend money repeatedly re-wiring the LAN as bandwidth requirements increase. After all, it's you who wants to connect to the network, why shouldn't you pay for it.
"It's unfortunate that they didn't install Cat5"
Sounds to me like someone had a fair bit of foresight.
Well, because the cable itself is only a small part of the cost. A much larger part of that cost is actually running the cable; lifting up floors, installing cable trays, routing cables etc. It's time consuming and expensive.
With fiber, you should only ever have to do it *once*. Then you simply upgrade the transmit/receive equipment at either end of the cable. With copper cable, you have to continually replace the wires themselves. CAT3, CAT5, CAT5e, CAT6 how many times do you want to re-run cables all over the place as bandwidth requirements increase?
The capital cost of fiber is more expensive in the short run but it saves money in the long run.
It sounds to me like they've taken a look at Razor or Pyzor and decided that it wasn't patented so they'd go right ahead and patent something very similar.
Don't talk bollocks. Not all of the parties have the same policies. You can quite clearly see from the following table which parties vote which way...
t ml
http://www.ffii.org.uk/votes/swpat/country/UK.h
So not only do you vote for one of their opposition, you tell your current MEPs how you are going to vote and why...
The thing about the european parliament is that it is a proportional representation system which means that your vote *DOES* count. If you vote for a Green, it increases the numbers of Greens in the parliament.
That is the whole point of the elections in June. If they're not answering to you, vote to replace them.
It might also be worth bending your MEP's ear on what the point of the parliament is if the council of ministers can simply retract bills which have been ammended and then resubmit them with all of the ammendments removed. They may be more likely to apply what little power they do have.
Just a reminder to people that you can't believe a word that a politician says.
Actions speak louder than words and you can find out here how they voted:
http://www.ffii.org.uk/uk_meps.html
It would be nice to see something similar for the other countries.
With current battery technology, fully electric vehicles can equal the performance of a petrol vehicle, surpass it if you design for EV in the first place. That's now, today... The decision to scrap them when the underlying technology which makes them viable has matured to the point of usefulness is just bizarre... Unless...
8 2,49834, 00.html?tw=wn_story_related
Fuel cell technology is a good 10 years away. Guess who's pushing fuel cells?
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,12
Same bloke who invaded Iraq, second largest oilfields in the world. Nothing to do with oil... Honest Guv.
Of course, any actual evidence is going to be spectacularly hard to come by. But we can assume that any vested interests are going to push bloody hard to remain vested.
The capital cost of an electric vehicle is purely down to mass production. If they can get them into full production, the cost will be similar to that of an equivalent petrol vehicle but with significantly lower running costs. Hell, with only 900 manufactured, Toyota managed to get theirs down to just twice the cost of a petrol vehicle.
Especially as lithium based batteries weren't available at the time. New battery technologies have more than doubled the power available since these vehicles were introduced.
I believe that they've basically been "gotten to" by the oil companies who want you to continue filling up at their gas stations. Whether it's propane, lpg, hydrogen, ethanol or methanol they don't care as long as your money is going their way.
Sure it comes from the same place now, but as the green supplier is committed to renewable energy, that's where *they* will be investing the money you give them.
250-400 mile ranges are possible using existing battery technology. You can buy vehicles now which will do that at motorway speeds. Pretty much in line with current petrol vehicles.
That said, the batteries are not your standard lead/acid ones and are still very expensive, but that's purely down to the manufacturing capacity.
Seriously, If I'm driving 800 miles I want a bed at the end of it. I've done 500 miles at a stretch and that was seriously painful.
/ 1998_Pr ogressinLithium.pdf
"How exactly do you "refurbish" worn out batteries BTW?"
The box the cell is in can just be reused, the LiON, Li-Poly and Li-S are wound strips of cathode and anode with a membrane and electrolyte in between. You basically design the lot to be re-cyclable in the first place. Unwind the battery and re-use the components.
The only pictures I've been able to find on are in here:
http://www.avestor.com/rtecontent/document
They do to a large part.
They'll work down to -40C. The charge time *will* still be an issue if you're doing seriously large milages over a short period, but they charge faster than existing batteries.
With a 700+ mile range, charging them overnight isn't going to be as big an issue. Certainly for commuting I'd only have to charge up every 2 weeks or so.
The guys pioneering them are here:
http://www.sionpower.com/
This post was meant for battery power vehicles, but the tecnology applies to small devices as well. Battery technology is massively in advance of where they were 15 years ago. Viable battery powered vehicles are hear now. They're just still bloody expensive.
The current battery technologies are:
Lead acid: 200 year old technology. Give this a performance index of 1. It's cheap and simple.
NiCd: Heavy metals but good high current. Performance of 2x the lead acid. Performance 2.
NiMH: Getting rid of the heavy metals. Lighter as well. Performance of around 3x that of a lead acid battery.
LiON: Light, performance 5 x that of a lead acid battery.
They obviously get more expensive the more advanced they are. You can expect to get around 70-80miles out of a lead acid battery. Multiply that by the performance factors for the newer technologies.
New technologies, still up and coming. Used in small scale applications, mobile phones, laptops.
Li-Poly. Lighter and can handle more cycles than LiON but not much more power.
Lithium Sulphur batteries (Li-S) promise to more than double the capacity of LiON batteries, 10X that of a lead acid battery. That's a 700-800 mile range on a single charge, not even Diesel vehicles get that. I think these will do the job of killing petrol vehicles. Superior performance, superior range.
Basically. You don't discard the batteries when they wear out. Trade them in at 100,000 miles and get a "new" or refurbished set.
This *is* all nifty technology but still expensive due to manufacturing capacity.
The current battery technologies are:
Lead acid: 200 year old technology. Give this a performance index of 1. It's cheap and simple.
NiCd: Heavy metals but good high current. Performance of 2x the lead acid. Performance 2.
NiMH: Getting rid of the heavy metals. Lighter as well. Performance of around 3x that of a lead acid battery.
LiON: Light, performance 5 x that of a lead acid battery.
They obviously get more expensive the more advanced they are. You can expect to get around 70-80miles out of a lead acid battery. Multiply that by the performance factors for the newer technologies.
New technologies, still up and coming. Used in small scale applications, mobile phones, laptops.
Li-Poly. Lighter and can handle more cycles than LiON but not much more power.
Lithium Sulphur batteries (Li-S) promise to more than double the capacity of LiON batteries, 10X that of a lead acid battery. That's a 700-800 mile range on a single charge, not even Diesel vehicles get that. I think these will do the job of killing petrol vehicles. Superior performance, superior range.
Basically. You don't discard the batteries when they wear out. Trade them in at 100,000 miles and get a "new" or refurbished set.
This *is* all nifty technology but still expensive due to manufacturing capacity.
You say battery technology sucks, but there are electric vehicles on the road now with 250+ mile ranges from a single charge. That's with current NiMH technology. It doesn't suck that bad, I only get 240 miles before I have to fill up my petrol car. When LiON batteries are cost effective, that range will be boosted to around 400 miles.
The Solectria Force is an example and it's just a conversion from a petrol driven vehicle. A nicer example would be an ACP Tzero. 0-60 in 4 seconds, 290 mile range though that's a sportscar.
The batteries *are* very expensive at the moment, largely down to the lack of manufacturing capacity but they are not discarded when worn out. They are recyclable.
They last about 100,000 miles worth of charges, the NiMH ones anyway.
It's certainly not a panacea, they take 8-9 hours to recharge fully, which doesn't compare well to 2 mins at a filling station but it's worth it to get away from the requirement that you visit a filling station every week.
The technology is here, now and it works. It's been available for 8 years now. What's holding it up?
True.
"The studies conducted clearly shows that Microsoft has a lower TCO than Linux in many areas."
As a Unix administrator, I can make Linux cost an absolute fortune simply by changing the way the systems are designed. I can make it hideously complex, unreliable and expensive to support.
Or, since I actually know what I'm doing, I can make it cost a tiny fraction, scale to thousands and make 90% better use of the hardware. It all depends if you know what you're doing. If you have a team of Windows bods, don't expect to make any savings at all just translating the windows system architecture directly over to Linux without making any changes.
"Linux stole ideas from Unix,"
You're giving the impression that those ideas were not given freely. They were.
To IBM, Linux and Open Source is simply an enabler, a tool to allow them to provide services.
Open source software is more akin to the pipes and tools which the plumber uses. You still pay him for his skills, time and effort. Are you saying that he shouldn't be able to design his own tools and give them to who he likes?