Copyright infringement is not theft. If you write something and someone makes a copy of it without your permission. You still have whatever you wrote. It has not been stolen from you.
I'll second your motion. Almost any RDBMS is simpler to manage than Oracle is. I've used Oracle, Informix, Postgresql, MS SQL server, mysql, etc etc, though not Ingres.
I honestly don't see the attraction Oracle has to companies. 99% of corporate databases are trivial, they could be implemented on text files or the dreaded spreadsheet and make no use at all of the features Oracle has. It's just that 1% which need Oracle and associated DBAs so why insist on Oracle for everything? It's wildly expensive.
"It said radius in the document. Did you read it?"
I did read it and it said "It is estimated that a "Power Tower" power plant would have to have a 2-mile wide field of mirrors". No mention of the word radius.
35% -> 40% overall conversion efficiency is around about what you get for a good solar thermal system. Molten sodium as the coolant allows much higher temperatures than 838K, but has disadvantages over molten salt.
You're assumptions are just that. Assumptions. Pretty wild ones at that. Your first assumption is that they're making the receiver bigger and hotter rather than having multiple receivers and it just gets worse from there. You're making assumptions about the paper's assumptions over insolation levels. You're making assumptions about the heat being lost as waste heat after it's used, the very fact you mention the Carnot efficiency assumes this (hint: it isn't lost).
"Plus you're just supporting my point more when you say they have to defocus the mirrors - that's lost energy right there."
Um, yes, so? It means they need a bigger plant. Point the mirrors at another receiver, run the coolant faster. Solar II was an experimental plant. Proved it's point. That point is, you can make the thermal receiver as hot as you want, you can store that heat and you can use it to generate *lots* of power whenever you like. You can do it efficiently and you can do it cheaply.
"Remember that solar panels right now are ~15-20% total efficiency - that is, straight from the solar flux to electricity."
Yeah, that's solar flux to DC. Which is damned near useless on a large scale. Invert it and lose 10-20%.
"though here suggests a 2-mile radius (25 km^2 or so) needed for, say, 200 MW"
Now you're assuming that the words "2 mile wide" is a circle, and that it's the radius and not the diameter of the circle (though that doesn't tie up with your 25km^2 either).
"Even being nice, and assuming that the power generation occurs 5 hours out of a day"
And making assumptions about the generation time.
Your "bottleneck" is irrelevant. Photoelectic cells which are 30%, 40%, 50% efficient are fairy stories, they don't exist. The cheap ones are 10-15%, the expensive ones are 15-20% and the one in a million NASA can get their hands on are 20-30%. The cheap photovoltaic cells are still several times the cost of a solar thermal system.
Look. Go an read the literature on the subject, then come back and argue the toss.
Power towers work better in cloudy situations than photovoltaic. Infrared penetrates clouds easily so you can generate under cloudy conditions as well. The mirrors are much cheaper to produce than PV panels, if it breaks, you put in a replacement. They reach efficiencies in excess of 40% (depending on the particular design of course).
BTW, the Solar I and II systems at Barstow were 10MW and the new ones being put up are 40MW. CESA 1 is a smaller test system in Spain but is still in the 7MW range.
Basically, Power Towers are cheaper, more efficient, scale better and are environmentally more friendly than photovoltaics. The only advantage I can see for photovoltaics is that they work on a small scale.
Here you go. Boeing seem to like them: http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/energy/ powerto wer.html
It's significantly more efficient than photovoltaic. The temperature at the heat exchanger surface is 838K and in fact they have to defocus many of the mirrors to stop the salt boiling, it can get much hotter. Look up "Power Towers" on Google. Solar II in Barstow, California.
The mirrors don't heat up significantly and you don't want to be anywhere near the focus points.
For quite a while now. Solar II in California generates electricity at night be storing the energy as heat during the day. It heats salt up to 500+C and stores it as a molten liquid in big tanks. It then generates power from the stored heat as required.
There are compressed air power stations which store energy in underground caverns, natural and man made. They can use the solar and wind power to compress the air for later generation on demand.
Real numbers, but it happens to be a motorbike, and one I specifically chose because it was efficient. I'd ignore the figures quoted by the EPA or manufacturers, they are only vague indications.
Ask people who actually own a vehicle what sort of milage they get and how they drive. Pure petrol cars get crap milage if stuck in traffic all day, if they are out on the motorway sitting at 55 all day it will be near the optimal. With the hybrids on the other hand it's the other way around, you'll probably get the highest mpg figures if it rarely uses the petrol engine, i.e. crawling about in urban traffic all day at 15mph. If you use it on the motorway it uses the petrol engine rather than the electric motor and so will reduce the efficiency.
BTW, there are now on the market, fully battery powered vehicles which can sit at motorway speeds with a range of 250+ miles and there are 4 person prototypes which can do 373 miles all on a single charge.
Nice thought, but naive. In the UK, gas (petrol) prices are $6/gallon and there have never been more SUVs on the road as there are now. People regularly fill up spending 80 ($150) or so, that's how much it costs to fill up a Rangerover.
SUVs are a *status symbol* which means, like perfume, the more it costs the more desirable it is.
We have 2 Solaris/Sendmail boxes as our mail gateway and about a thousand Exchange boxes(and admins to support them) on the internal network.
In this case, they also have 2 gateway machines:
rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de and rzcomm15.rz.tu-bs.de
Having said that, the spam processing itself can be slow, especially if the machines have to query external hosts or processes asking if a mail looks like spam.
If you're aiming for 100C or above you could be generating steam. Pipe said steam through a turbine attached to a generator. You could build your own today for peanuts out of some mirrors and an old car or lorry turbocharger.
Couldn't comment on the efficiency of a home grown system, but utility solar thermal systems have been more efficient (30% or so) at producing electricity than photovoltaics for a long time now, must be decades.
"immense pressure to develop better batteries for use by cars;"
The battery technology exists. It is simply expensive due to lack of manufacturing capacity.
The 80, 90 mile ranges you hear about for electic cars? Lead acid batteries. That's what... 200 year old technology?
NiMH, LiON, and even better LiS batteries are here, now, but are manufactured in quantities too small to make them feasable in a car. It's *purely* down to the manufacturing costs.
Hydrogen would be great if it wasn't so inefficient to produce.
The battery problem has been solved for vehicles. It was solved when NiMH batteries became available. The issue is the cost of manufacture and actually getting someone to build the things.
Seriously. These guys have viable vehicles:
http://www.solectria.com/products/accomp.html
249 miles on a single charge for their *in production* Solectria Force car, my petrol car does about 240 miles before I have to fill up. They have a prototype called the Solectria Sunrise which can do 373 miles on a single charge. That's almost a week's worth of commuting for me.
It's all down to demand and the cost of production, which will fall with mass production.
One which never wears out. Compress air up to 300 or more atmospheres. It's much much cheaper to buy a pressure vessel than it is to buy batteries which hold an equivalent amount of energy and far far more efficient than electrolysis. Most useful for stationary purposes, generators etc due to the size and weight of the pressure vessel. (in fact you're using heat to store the energy)
P.S. Battery powered cars have been able to run for 250, 300 miles for a good 7 years or so with a battery life of around 100,000 miles. That's with NiMH batteries. With lithium ion or even better, lithium sulphur batteries they should be able to travel further than a petrol driven car. (Google for Solectria Sunrise and Solectria Force)
P.P.S. why do Americans call petroleum, gas? It's a liquid at ambient temperatures...
There's a web page which lists various MEP's voting records on the issue of patentability of software.
It's on the FFII UK web site:
http://www.ffii.org.uk/analysis_uk.html
With the European elections coming up. It's a good time to have a word with your MEP. It might also be worth asking them why they exist at all if the council of ministers can ride roughshod over the will of the parliament.
You never know, it might sting them into action on the upcoming vote or replace them with MEPs who *will* vote the way you want them to.
He's opening up the possibility that Microsoft themselves could make use of that technology whereas that would be inconceivable if Linux itself were their competitor.
The plant produces 500 barrels per day, that's $20,500 per day or $7.5 million per year turnover. They are very cagey about the costs and payback period. This kind of thing has been possible for years, it just has never been economically feasable. It all depends on how much a plant costs to build, how much the waste costs and what the running costs are.
Definitely a good idea to see your waste as a resource though.
"The best way to explain this in bricks & mortar terms is your competition coming in and slapping their ads on or around your store. Especially without your permission!"
Bollocks it is. The spyware hasn't been installed on the LL bean web site, their web site doesn't have their competitors adverts installed on it.
The closest thing would be someone following you around handing you pamphlets pointing out their competitors nearby stores when you get near an LL bean store. A similar and perfectly legal practice which happens in real life is people standing outside a store and handing out pamphlets pointing out the competition.
The issue in this specific case is whether the competition are allowed to make use of their trademark in this way without their permission.
Battery vehicles are up to 250 - 350mile ranges
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
The problem isn't technology.
The Solectria Sunrise car had a range of in excess of 350 miles at 55mph using NiMH batteries in *1997*. They do a less development vehicle called the Solectria Force which you can buy now and which has a range of up to 250 miles on NiMH batteries which are good for up to 100,000 miles worth of charges.
Lithium ion batteries are available now and lithium sulphur batteries will be available in the near future with better characteristics still.
No, the problem is not the technology. It's with mass production.
Slashdot Mirror
100mW eirp is all that's allowed. This limits the maximum legal range to around 2, 2.5km.
Or I suppose there's the possibility of using different antennas for transmitting and receiving; Parabolic receiver and an omni transmitter.
Linux is an "enabler" in PHB speak.
. as p
e.g.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1240127,00
Copyright infringement is not theft. If you write something and someone makes a copy of it without your permission. You still have whatever you wrote. It has not been stolen from you.
I'll second your motion. Almost any RDBMS is simpler to manage than Oracle is. I've used Oracle, Informix, Postgresql, MS SQL server, mysql, etc etc, though not Ingres.
I honestly don't see the attraction Oracle has to companies. 99% of corporate databases are trivial, they could be implemented on text files or the dreaded spreadsheet and make no use at all of the features Oracle has. It's just that 1% which need Oracle and associated DBAs so why insist on Oracle for everything? It's wildly expensive.
"It said radius in the document. Did you read it?"
l .h tml
I did read it and it said "It is estimated that a "Power Tower" power plant would have to have a 2-mile wide field of mirrors". No mention of the word radius.
Do you want to read it again?
http://www.colby.edu/personal/t/thtieten/sol-ca
35% -> 40% overall conversion efficiency is around about what you get for a good solar thermal system. Molten sodium as the coolant allows much higher temperatures than 838K, but has disadvantages over molten salt.
You're assumptions are just that. Assumptions. Pretty wild ones at that. Your first assumption is that they're making the receiver bigger and hotter rather than having multiple receivers and it just gets worse from there. You're making assumptions about the paper's assumptions over insolation levels. You're making assumptions about the heat being lost as waste heat after it's used, the very fact you mention the Carnot efficiency assumes this (hint: it isn't lost).
"Plus you're just supporting my point more when you say they have to defocus the mirrors - that's lost energy right there."
Um, yes, so? It means they need a bigger plant. Point the mirrors at another receiver, run the coolant faster. Solar II was an experimental plant. Proved it's point. That point is, you can make the thermal receiver as hot as you want, you can store that heat and you can use it to generate *lots* of power whenever you like. You can do it efficiently and you can do it cheaply.
"Remember that solar panels right now are ~15-20% total efficiency - that is, straight from the solar flux to electricity."
Yeah, that's solar flux to DC. Which is damned near useless on a large scale. Invert it and lose 10-20%.
"though here suggests a 2-mile radius (25 km^2 or so) needed for, say, 200 MW"
Now you're assuming that the words "2 mile wide" is a circle, and that it's the radius and not the diameter of the circle (though that doesn't tie up with your 25km^2 either).
"Even being nice, and assuming that the power generation occurs 5 hours out of a day"
And making assumptions about the generation time.
Your "bottleneck" is irrelevant. Photoelectic cells which are 30%, 40%, 50% efficient are fairy stories, they don't exist. The cheap ones are 10-15%, the expensive ones are 15-20% and the one in a million NASA can get their hands on are 20-30%. The cheap photovoltaic cells are still several times the cost of a solar thermal system.
Look. Go an read the literature on the subject, then come back and argue the toss.
Umm, They *hope* to get it to produce 500 MW for 500 seconds. That's less than 10 mins. Hardly far along.
I've been hearing about fusion power being *just* over the next hurdle since I was born. White elephant.
Power towers work better in cloudy situations than photovoltaic. Infrared penetrates clouds easily so you can generate under cloudy conditions as well. The mirrors are much cheaper to produce than PV panels, if it breaks, you put in a replacement. They reach efficiencies in excess of 40% (depending on the particular design of course).
/ powerto wer.html
BTW, the Solar I and II systems at Barstow were 10MW and the new ones being put up are 40MW. CESA 1 is a smaller test system in Spain but is still in the 7MW range.
Basically, Power Towers are cheaper, more efficient, scale better and are environmentally more friendly than photovoltaics. The only advantage I can see for photovoltaics is that they work on a small scale.
Here you go. Boeing seem to like them:
http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/energy
The mirrors don't heat up significantly and you don't want to be anywhere near the focus points.
For quite a while now. Solar II in California generates electricity at night be storing the energy as heat during the day. It heats salt up to 500+C and stores it as a molten liquid in big tanks. It then generates power from the stored heat as required.
There are compressed air power stations which store energy in underground caverns, natural and man made. They can use the solar and wind power to compress the air for later generation on demand.
Both of these mechanisms are in use *now*.
Real numbers, but it happens to be a motorbike, and one I specifically chose because it was efficient. I'd ignore the figures quoted by the EPA or manufacturers, they are only vague indications.
Ask people who actually own a vehicle what sort of milage they get and how they drive. Pure petrol cars get crap milage if stuck in traffic all day, if they are out on the motorway sitting at 55 all day it will be near the optimal. With the hybrids on the other hand it's the other way around, you'll probably get the highest mpg figures if it rarely uses the petrol engine, i.e. crawling about in urban traffic all day at 15mph. If you use it on the motorway it uses the petrol engine rather than the electric motor and so will reduce the efficiency.
BTW, there are now on the market, fully battery powered vehicles which can sit at motorway speeds with a range of 250+ miles and there are 4 person prototypes which can do 373 miles all on a single charge.
"As gas prices go up demand for SUV's will drop."
Nice thought, but naive. In the UK, gas (petrol) prices are $6/gallon and there have never been more SUVs on the road as there are now. People regularly fill up spending 80 ($150) or so, that's how much it costs to fill up a Rangerover.
SUVs are a *status symbol* which means, like perfume, the more it costs the more desirable it is.
We have 2 Solaris/Sendmail boxes as our mail gateway and about a thousand Exchange boxes(and admins to support them) on the internal network.
In this case, they also have 2 gateway machines:
rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de and rzcomm15.rz.tu-bs.de
Having said that, the spam processing itself can be slow, especially if the machines have to query external hosts or processes asking if a mail looks like spam.
If you're aiming for 100C or above you could be generating steam. Pipe said steam through a turbine attached to a generator. You could build your own today for peanuts out of some mirrors and an old car or lorry turbocharger.
Couldn't comment on the efficiency of a home grown system, but utility solar thermal systems have been more efficient (30% or so) at producing electricity than photovoltaics for a long time now, must be decades.
"immense pressure to develop better batteries for use by cars;"
The battery technology exists. It is simply expensive due to lack of manufacturing capacity.
The 80, 90 mile ranges you hear about for electic cars? Lead acid batteries. That's what... 200 year old technology?
NiMH, LiON, and even better LiS batteries are here, now, but are manufactured in quantities too small to make them feasable in a car. It's *purely* down to the manufacturing costs.
Hydrogen would be great if it wasn't so inefficient to produce.
The battery problem has been solved for vehicles. It was solved when NiMH batteries became available. The issue is the cost of manufacture and actually getting someone to build the things.
Seriously. These guys have viable vehicles:
http://www.solectria.com/products/accomp.html
249 miles on a single charge for their *in production* Solectria Force car, my petrol car does about 240 miles before I have to fill up. They have a prototype called the Solectria Sunrise which can do 373 miles on a single charge. That's almost a week's worth of commuting for me.
It's all down to demand and the cost of production, which will fall with mass production.
One which never wears out. Compress air up to 300 or more atmospheres. It's much much cheaper to buy a pressure vessel than it is to buy batteries which hold an equivalent amount of energy and far far more efficient than electrolysis. Most useful for stationary purposes, generators etc due to the size and weight of the pressure vessel. (in fact you're using heat to store the energy)
P.S. Battery powered cars have been able to run for 250, 300 miles for a good 7 years or so with a battery life of around 100,000 miles. That's with NiMH batteries. With lithium ion or even better, lithium sulphur batteries they should be able to travel further than a petrol driven car. (Google for Solectria Sunrise and Solectria Force)
P.P.S. why do Americans call petroleum, gas? It's a liquid at ambient temperatures...
There's a web page which lists various MEP's voting records on the issue of patentability of software.
It's on the FFII UK web site:
http://www.ffii.org.uk/analysis_uk.html
With the European elections coming up. It's a good time to have a word with your MEP. It might also be worth asking them why they exist at all if the council of ministers can ride roughshod over the will of the parliament.
You never know, it might sting them into action on the upcoming vote or replace them with MEPs who *will* vote the way you want them to.
He's opening up the possibility that Microsoft themselves could make use of that technology whereas that would be inconceivable if Linux itself were their competitor.
It's an interesting development.
I suspect though that getting suitable waste to process is going to be the biggest problem.
Say $41 at the moment on the open market.
The plant produces 500 barrels per day, that's $20,500 per day or $7.5 million per year turnover. They are very cagey about the costs and payback period. This kind of thing has been possible for years, it just has never been economically feasable. It all depends on how much a plant costs to build, how much the waste costs and what the running costs are.
Definitely a good idea to see your waste as a resource though.
I.e. to cash in on the success of the original series. It doesn't have to be *good* to do that. It only has to have "Star Wars" in the title.
It'll serve it's purpose. Unless you are planning not to bother going to see it, which as geeks and nerds, I frankly don't believe.
That bloke is an example of the human society's triumph over darwinian evolution.
Hey, water's completely harmless isn't it, why not try drinking 10 litres of that.
"The best way to explain this in bricks & mortar terms is your competition coming in and slapping their ads on or around your store. Especially without your permission!"
Bollocks it is. The spyware hasn't been installed on the LL bean web site, their web site doesn't have their competitors adverts installed on it.
The closest thing would be someone following you around handing you pamphlets pointing out their competitors nearby stores when you get near an LL bean store. A similar and perfectly legal practice which happens in real life is people standing outside a store and handing out pamphlets pointing out the competition.
The issue in this specific case is whether the competition are allowed to make use of their trademark in this way without their permission.
The problem isn't technology.
The Solectria Sunrise car had a range of in excess of 350 miles at 55mph using NiMH batteries in *1997*. They do a less development vehicle called the Solectria Force which you can buy now and which has a range of up to 250 miles on NiMH batteries which are good for up to 100,000 miles worth of charges.
Lithium ion batteries are available now and lithium sulphur batteries will be available in the near future with better characteristics still.
No, the problem is not the technology. It's with mass production.