Yeah... I think we do... but you still need rain to top them up. And - if you modify your water table too much - everything over here gets a lot more salty all of a sudden. Something about Acid Sulphate Soils... Our habit of irrigating areas that were the bottom of the ocean 60 million years ago is coming around to bite us in the arse...
Re:Where's the need come from?
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. If it doesn't rain, increased dam storage doesn't do much for us.
Tanks are great..... But I believe they were actually illegal in the Brisbane metro area 10 years ago: they promoted mosquito breeding etc..... Pity
Re:Where's the need come from?
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
Australia is in the grip of one of the worst sustained droughts it has ever experienced - affecting most of the country except for the far north which is now flooding due to a monsoonal rainstorm last week. That doesn't help me though - I am on the wrong side of a mountain range to all that flood water - and it will take months for it to move south through all the river systems.
I live in Brisbane in the state of QLD - you need to use a bucket to do anything outside with water... water the garden, wash the car, etc.... You aren't even supposed to have a hose hooked up to your taps, let alone use it to do anything. This is called level 3 water restrictions.
We need sustained rainfall of 50mm (2 inches in the old imperial system) in a 24 hour period to produce some run-off to start filling up our dams. We haven't received rainfall such as this in approx 14 months. However, to make things worse, we have been suffering from the El Nino http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/elnino/story.ht m effect now for about 3 years.
Don't get me wrong - it still rains here. We had a storm 2 nights ago that dumped 70mm of rain in 1 hour on the city of Brisbane - the dam catchment is 50KM northwest of me and it hardly got a drop. Same goes for the storm that hit us on Thusday evening last week. Besides - all storms do around here is rip roofs off houses and bring down power lines. They don't fill up dams.
At the moment we have about 2 years of water left in Brisbane - the state government is building various water pipelines to move recycled water (treated sewage) back into the dams - to keep them topped up. These pipelines won't be finished for about 2 years, so things could get really interesting around about the time the dams actually do run out.
Bottom line - Australia has always had just enough rainfall and just enough dam capacity to deal with this sort of thing - but not anymore. Population density on the East coast from Mackay/Rockhampton all the way to Melbourne (3000KM) and west to Adelaide (another 1000KM or so) has been increasing steadily for the last 10 years or so - but water storage solutions haven't really grown at the same rate during that time - mainly due to environmental concerns and NIMBYism - not to mention the economics of building dams.
Australia needs to be smarter about water and think more about localised water storage and catchment concepts - re-cycling used water back into the dam system is an excellent first step.
Put it this way - if my house used Tanks for it's potable water supply - they would be over-flowing right now - and if the tanks were big enough EG: 2 x 10 000L, at no point in the last 3 years would I have run out of water for my house. There has been enough localised heavy rainfall (those damn storms I mentioned) to keep tanks like that basically over-flowing for the last 3 years. Just to put this in perspective, a small in-ground swimming pool is approx 60 000L in capacity.
As for the article - it has no technical details - so it remains to be seen if this is a real technology... But something like this would be really, really welcome right now.
I live in Brisbane, Australia - it can get a bit warm here in Summer. During the summer of 2004, on the weekend of the 21st and 22nd of Feburary, it sustained at 41 and 42 degrees centigrade on those 2 days respectively. Don't ask why I remember the dates - I just do. There were 2 PC's in the non air-conditioned part of the house. My brothers and mine. Mine was higher spec'd with more HDD's and "a single case fan". His had no case fan. His would freeze after running for 30 minutes when the temperature in the room was over about 38 degrees centigrade. Mine worked fine. Air-flow is the key.
I think the best thing to be done is to purcahse a half height rack - with at least one, possibly 2 shelves in it - and place the server/s in that. Make sure the AC is left on and that there is adequate air-flow through the rack and the noise should be OK - as long as the server in question isn't an Enterprise level device. If it is a full rack mount monster - with multiple high speed fans and 15 000 rpm HDD's - then you actually are going to need a dedicated space with dedicated cooling - and some sound proofing.
Just a note on closets - in Australia these are a relatively new idea and are generally referred to as "Built-ins" or "Built in Wardrobes" - and are only really found in bedrooms. Other "closet" like cupboards in a house will be referred to as a "linen cupboard" or "extra storage" or just as a "cupboard". If the "ex-residential unit" referred to in the post is more than about 10 years old, it probably won't have any sort of "built-ins" at all - and if it does - it will proabably be a "linen cupboard" style "closet" with fairly closely spaced shelves from top to bottom. This would required some modification to retro-fit a server and some adequate cooling - thus possibly needing to be restored back to original condition if the property is rented.
Also - the speed of Nework links in Australia generally precludes off-site hosting for "most" systems/applications - a business grade ADSL link running at 1.5MBit/sec (seriously, this is the most you can get in most places that even have DSL) is about $120 a month with 40GB of data include - capped at $999 a month if you exceed the 40GB (5c per MB for excess data). Let's not even discuss a 2Mb/2Mb SHDSL service - they start at about $350 a month and go up rapidly for any decent data allowance - if you happen to be near the 200 or so phone exchanges in the country that have a DSLAM that can do this (or is turned on).
Australia is small in comparison to the US and Europe - stating the obvious I know... But very relevant.
I work in IT for a Medium sized company - by Medium I mean 500 staff. I have 4 citrix servers, 1 file and print server and 1 database server and 1 exchange server. WIndows 2000 AD. I have an ISA server on the edge and a couple of PC's with server OS installed on it doing various little "things" inside the network.
We just got VMWARE ESX to try and get rid of the PC's.
The 3 main applications we use are Windows based... There is no alternative for 1 of them... we would have to write our own. We have no Linux skills internally - we would have to hire in or skillup. We have no money to spend on a large scale development project to give us the software we need to change over. We can't afford the duplicate hardware to allow the parallel running required to make the change over a smooth as possible.
Granted all this can be staggered BUT... I recently asked the owners of the company to give me $200 000 to put in a complete DR solution and they said no - without even considering it. Imagine asking for a million dollars to change the whole network over.... and they ask WHY? - and I say: Linux is a better philosophy for running a computer network, and we'll save money - HOW much? I don't know, but we will. HOW long will it take to see the savings? Years and years.
Somebody up the back is now mentioning the savings on license costs... Sure - if you were building a network for a brand new company this would be considerable - for an already establised MS shop, these costs are annoying yet manageable.
I am very impressed with Linux (the VMWARE ESX version anyway). I have played with Linux before and I knew there were things about it that were better than MS - but it's not until it's in production on enterprise level hardware that you really appreciate it's simplicity and robustness. And it doesn't crash - ever.
It's simple really - there are probably 200 companies in Australia that have 3000 staff or more (not counting government departments), of those 200 companies maybe half of them are doing something with Linux because they can AFFORD to - they have the budget and the staff.
All the rest of us struggle on with what we've got - and if what you've got works - and your $100 million a year in turn over company keeps making money - how do you justify the change?
A company in Australia is developing this type of technology for self-contained power generation in remote locations (and 3rd world countries/natural disaster areas). They are using a parabolic dish made from mirror polished bands of stainless steel. Stainless steel (while expensive) stands up to bad weather much better than glass mirrors - and by making the dish with bands (with gaps in between them) you reduce the effect that wind had on the dish.
They are making a dish that isn't affected by wind (except for wind that flattens buildings) doesn't get damaged by hail (unless it's bigger than a cricket ball) and is only 5% less efficient than the same size mirror dish. They don't have a website worth mentioning - but they are developing all this in conjunction with the CSIRO - so you may find something here (CSIRO) http://www.csiro.gov.au/ about it all. Look for Sterling engine power generation. The CSIRO did publish something recently in a subscription only publication about this.
In case you were wondering how I know - my brother works for the small electronics firm that came up with the parabolic dish idea. They have also come up with a sun tracking mechanism that costs $15 to manufacture.
Pity a 5KW generation system costs $25000 all up - but they expect it to last for 25 years or more.
All dollar figures here are Australian Pesos.
Oh yeah - they get around the "How do you generate electricity at night without sunlight light" issue, by using the dish to heat up 300KG (or so) of salt and graphite - which then acts as a heat battery. Apparently they can run the Stirling engine for 3 days or so after the Salt Cell gets to about 900 degrees centigrade.
What on Earth has a PhD in Computer Science got to do with anything?
I recently interviewed 2 people for a 1st level Helpdesk position. One of them had a Bachelor of Information technology (Data Networking). He was unable to come up with any tools to check IP connectivity on a LAN other than than ping, without me prompting him on whether he had heard of tracert.
The other person we interviewed was an 18 year old female that had just completed a Traineeship with the State Government in IT.
Needless to say, she got the job. The Uni graduate was useless.
Just because you have a PhD in Computer Science doesn't mean you know anything about computers. It tends to mean you know lots about how to play politics in an academic environment and write a Thesis to please said academics. I am generalising here, and I apologise if this insults any PhD's out there. But I am sure that won't stop you from having a go at me!
ROFLMAO - I have to agree on the "..get one of my old cd's and play it slightly faster." comment. That is so true.
Last year I purchased (actually - went halves in) a Kid Kenobi album - and I bought some Delta Goodrem for my wife. Before that - it was U2's All that you can't leave behind album - in 2001.
I admit that there is more to music, and I could probably find something if I dug a bit deeper - but I just don't have the time. Too many computer games to play.
....I haven't found any music really worth buying in the last couple of years. I have even stopped downloading music now. What's the point? It's all the same - stamped out of the same studio - with the same sound.
I am still listening to U2's The Joshua Tree (which I bought years ago) and Crowded House. The only thing lately I have heard that was interesting was Ben Harper - even then, only a couple of songs were good.
I mean, sure....Post Modernism is ok - but the same Hip Hop crap about some American cultural "issue" is getting really boring.
It's all the same, but I am supposed to keep forking out AU$30 per album. I don't think so.
In light of the previous Slasdot story regarding the most popular Linux distro - comments by Steve Jobs to this effect might change many a geeks opinion.
Or not, if Pixar's Linux farm is totally hacked specifically for number crunching (which it probably is). Oh well....
--
Got something to say? RantsRus.com - blogging for the disillusioned.
As someone that works in a Clinical Pharmacy environment, all I can say is Yee Haa!. This would be fantastic for a Clinical Pharmacist or even a Doctor.
There are currently Drug Reaction and Information Databases (EMIMS, Clinical Pharmacology, etc...) available for Palm Pilots, but you have to keep swapping memory cards.
A really useful approach would be to have a large selection of these types of information databases available in one device - this would reduce the time required to support Doctors with decision making on Drug combinations to treat patients. And would also improve the quality of care the patients would recieve.
Another cool use in a Hospital environment would be (if the holographic memory was cheap enough) to hand a Doctor a Handheld Device that has just had all the medical information for every patient they are about to see on rounds - zapped into it. Including X-Rays, Ultra-sounds, and everthing else that is on file for the patients.
The increase in information at your figertips, combined with having Clinical Pharmacists on your rounds with all of their information - would result in a marked increase in the quality of care the patient recieves.
Very cool
--
Got something to say? RantsRus.com - blogging for the disillusioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... I think we do... but you still need rain to top them up. And - if you modify your water table too much - everything over here gets a lot more salty all of a sudden. Something about Acid Sulphate Soils... Our habit of irrigating areas that were the bottom of the ocean 60 million years ago is coming around to bite us in the arse...
Agreed. If it doesn't rain, increased dam storage doesn't do much for us.
Tanks are great..... But I believe they were actually illegal in the Brisbane metro area 10 years ago: they promoted mosquito breeding etc..... Pity
I live in Brisbane in the state of QLD - you need to use a bucket to do anything outside with water... water the garden, wash the car, etc.... You aren't even supposed to have a hose hooked up to your taps, let alone use it to do anything. This is called level 3 water restrictions.
We need sustained rainfall of 50mm (2 inches in the old imperial system) in a 24 hour period to produce some run-off to start filling up our dams. We haven't received rainfall such as this in approx 14 months. However, to make things worse, we have been suffering from the El Nino http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/elnino/story.ht m effect now for about 3 years.
Don't get me wrong - it still rains here. We had a storm 2 nights ago that dumped 70mm of rain in 1 hour on the city of Brisbane - the dam catchment is 50KM northwest of me and it hardly got a drop. Same goes for the storm that hit us on Thusday evening last week. Besides - all storms do around here is rip roofs off houses and bring down power lines. They don't fill up dams.
At the moment we have about 2 years of water left in Brisbane - the state government is building various water pipelines to move recycled water (treated sewage) back into the dams - to keep them topped up. These pipelines won't be finished for about 2 years, so things could get really interesting around about the time the dams actually do run out.
Bottom line - Australia has always had just enough rainfall and just enough dam capacity to deal with this sort of thing - but not anymore. Population density on the East coast from Mackay/Rockhampton all the way to Melbourne (3000KM) and west to Adelaide (another 1000KM or so) has been increasing steadily for the last 10 years or so - but water storage solutions haven't really grown at the same rate during that time - mainly due to environmental concerns and NIMBYism - not to mention the economics of building dams.
Australia needs to be smarter about water and think more about localised water storage and catchment concepts - re-cycling used water back into the dam system is an excellent first step.
Put it this way - if my house used Tanks for it's potable water supply - they would be over-flowing right now - and if the tanks were big enough EG: 2 x 10 000L, at no point in the last 3 years would I have run out of water for my house. There has been enough localised heavy rainfall (those damn storms I mentioned) to keep tanks like that basically over-flowing for the last 3 years. Just to put this in perspective, a small in-ground swimming pool is approx 60 000L in capacity.
As for the article - it has no technical details - so it remains to be seen if this is a real technology... But something like this would be really, really welcome right now.
I live in Brisbane, Australia - it can get a bit warm here in Summer. During the summer of 2004, on the weekend of the 21st and 22nd of Feburary, it sustained at 41 and 42 degrees centigrade on those 2 days respectively. Don't ask why I remember the dates - I just do. There were 2 PC's in the non air-conditioned part of the house. My brothers and mine. Mine was higher spec'd with more HDD's and "a single case fan". His had no case fan. His would freeze after running for 30 minutes when the temperature in the room was over about 38 degrees centigrade. Mine worked fine. Air-flow is the key.
I think the best thing to be done is to purcahse a half height rack - with at least one, possibly 2 shelves in it - and place the server/s in that. Make sure the AC is left on and that there is adequate air-flow through the rack and the noise should be OK - as long as the server in question isn't an Enterprise level device. If it is a full rack mount monster - with multiple high speed fans and 15 000 rpm HDD's - then you actually are going to need a dedicated space with dedicated cooling - and some sound proofing.
Just a note on closets - in Australia these are a relatively new idea and are generally referred to as "Built-ins" or "Built in Wardrobes" - and are only really found in bedrooms. Other "closet" like cupboards in a house will be referred to as a "linen cupboard" or "extra storage" or just as a "cupboard". If the "ex-residential unit" referred to in the post is more than about 10 years old, it probably won't have any sort of "built-ins" at all - and if it does - it will proabably be a "linen cupboard" style "closet" with fairly closely spaced shelves from top to bottom. This would required some modification to retro-fit a server and some adequate cooling - thus possibly needing to be restored back to original condition if the property is rented.
Also - the speed of Nework links in Australia generally precludes off-site hosting for "most" systems/applications - a business grade ADSL link running at 1.5MBit/sec (seriously, this is the most you can get in most places that even have DSL) is about $120 a month with 40GB of data include - capped at $999 a month if you exceed the 40GB (5c per MB for excess data). Let's not even discuss a 2Mb/2Mb SHDSL service - they start at about $350 a month and go up rapidly for any decent data allowance - if you happen to be near the 200 or so phone exchanges in the country that have a DSLAM that can do this (or is turned on).
Australia is small in comparison to the US and Europe - stating the obvious I know... But very relevant.
I work in IT for a Medium sized company - by Medium I mean 500 staff. I have 4 citrix servers, 1 file and print server and 1 database server and 1 exchange server. WIndows 2000 AD. I have an ISA server on the edge and a couple of PC's with server OS installed on it doing various little "things" inside the network.
We just got VMWARE ESX to try and get rid of the PC's.
The 3 main applications we use are Windows based... There is no alternative for 1 of them... we would have to write our own. We have no Linux skills internally - we would have to hire in or skillup. We have no money to spend on a large scale development project to give us the software we need to change over. We can't afford the duplicate hardware to allow the parallel running required to make the change over a smooth as possible.
Granted all this can be staggered BUT... I recently asked the owners of the company to give me $200 000 to put in a complete DR solution and they said no - without even considering it. Imagine asking for a million dollars to change the whole network over.... and they ask WHY? - and I say: Linux is a better philosophy for running a computer network, and we'll save money - HOW much? I don't know, but we will. HOW long will it take to see the savings? Years and years.
Somebody up the back is now mentioning the savings on license costs... Sure - if you were building a network for a brand new company this would be considerable - for an already establised MS shop, these costs are annoying yet manageable.
I am very impressed with Linux (the VMWARE ESX version anyway). I have played with Linux before and I knew there were things about it that were better than MS - but it's not until it's in production on enterprise level hardware that you really appreciate it's simplicity and robustness. And it doesn't crash - ever.
It's simple really - there are probably 200 companies in Australia that have 3000 staff or more (not counting government departments), of those 200 companies maybe half of them are doing something with Linux because they can AFFORD to - they have the budget and the staff.
All the rest of us struggle on with what we've got - and if what you've got works - and your $100 million a year in turn over company keeps making money - how do you justify the change?
A company in Australia is developing this type of technology for self-contained power generation in remote locations (and 3rd world countries/natural disaster areas). They are using a parabolic dish made from mirror polished bands of stainless steel. Stainless steel (while expensive) stands up to bad weather much better than glass mirrors - and by making the dish with bands (with gaps in between them) you reduce the effect that wind had on the dish.
They are making a dish that isn't affected by wind (except for wind that flattens buildings) doesn't get damaged by hail (unless it's bigger than a cricket ball) and is only 5% less efficient than the same size mirror dish. They don't have a website worth mentioning - but they are developing all this in conjunction with the CSIRO - so you may find something here (CSIRO) http://www.csiro.gov.au/ about it all. Look for Sterling engine power generation. The CSIRO did publish something recently in a subscription only publication about this.
In case you were wondering how I know - my brother works for the small electronics firm that came up with the parabolic dish idea. They have also come up with a sun tracking mechanism that costs $15 to manufacture.
Pity a 5KW generation system costs $25000 all up - but they expect it to last for 25 years or more.
All dollar figures here are Australian Pesos.
Oh yeah - they get around the "How do you generate electricity at night without sunlight light" issue, by using the dish to heat up 300KG (or so) of salt and graphite - which then acts as a heat battery. Apparently they can run the Stirling engine for 3 days or so after the Salt Cell gets to about 900 degrees centigrade.
What on Earth has a PhD in Computer Science got to do with anything?
I recently interviewed 2 people for a 1st level Helpdesk position. One of them had a Bachelor of Information technology (Data Networking). He was unable to come up with any tools to check IP connectivity on a LAN other than than ping, without me prompting him on whether he had heard of tracert.
The other person we interviewed was an 18 year old female that had just completed a Traineeship with the State Government in IT.
Needless to say, she got the job. The Uni graduate was useless.
Just because you have a PhD in Computer Science doesn't mean you know anything about computers. It tends to mean you know lots about how to play politics in an academic environment and write a Thesis to please said academics. I am generalising here, and I apologise if this insults any PhD's out there. But I am sure that won't stop you from having a go at me!
As long as the Sniper rifle still has the red dot, I'll be happy!
Soon, you will learn the true power of the Dar Side of the RIAA!
ROFLMAO - I have to agree on the "..get one of my old cd's and play it slightly faster." comment. That is so true.
Last year I purchased (actually - went halves in) a Kid Kenobi album - and I bought some Delta Goodrem for my wife. Before that - it was U2's All that you can't leave behind album - in 2001.
I admit that there is more to music, and I could probably find something if I dug a bit deeper - but I just don't have the time. Too many computer games to play.
....I haven't found any music really worth buying in the last couple of years. I have even stopped downloading music now. What's the point? It's all the same - stamped out of the same studio - with the same sound.
I am still listening to U2's The Joshua Tree (which I bought years ago) and Crowded House. The only thing lately I have heard that was interesting was Ben Harper - even then, only a couple of songs were good.
I mean, sure....Post Modernism is ok - but the same Hip Hop crap about some American cultural "issue" is getting really boring.
It's all the same, but I am supposed to keep forking out AU$30 per album. I don't think so.
In light of the previous Slasdot story regarding the most popular Linux distro - comments by Steve Jobs to this effect might change many a geeks opinion.
Or not, if Pixar's Linux farm is totally hacked specifically for number crunching (which it probably is). Oh well....
--
Got something to say? RantsRus.com - blogging for the disillusioned.
As someone that works in a Clinical Pharmacy environment, all I can say is Yee Haa!. This would be fantastic for a Clinical Pharmacist or even a Doctor.
There are currently Drug Reaction and Information Databases (EMIMS, Clinical Pharmacology, etc...) available for Palm Pilots, but you have to keep swapping memory cards.
A really useful approach would be to have a large selection of these types of information databases available in one device - this would reduce the time required to support Doctors with decision making on Drug combinations to treat patients. And would also improve the quality of care the patients would recieve.
Another cool use in a Hospital environment would be (if the holographic memory was cheap enough) to hand a Doctor a Handheld Device that has just had all the medical information for every patient they are about to see on rounds - zapped into it. Including X-Rays, Ultra-sounds, and everthing else that is on file for the patients.
The increase in information at your figertips, combined with having Clinical Pharmacists on your rounds with all of their information - would result in a marked increase in the quality of care the patient recieves.
Very cool
--
Got something to say? RantsRus.com - blogging for the disillusioned.