I concur with the issue of dependability. So take the variability of the wind out of the equation. We need a mechanism to stockpile the wind energy that is compatible with the existing technology for deep water construction.
Hey! Why don't we use wind power to produce hydrogen! Then you could have either pipelines or giant tankers haul the hydrogen to the coastal cities. Given the environmental threat the petroleum spills pose, a hydrogen leak won't be as bad. More risk to sailors though, since asphyxiation is a possibility. Barring some chemical reaction that turns a component of the atmosphere toxic, it will have no long-term impact on the environment.
I'm not a fan of hydrogen; most people leave out the fact that you have to create it, which requires a power source. But it's pretty much an extension of our current processes to go from oil derrick to hydrogen-generating-windfarm in the ocean. You probably lose efficiency but you trade it for reliability. You'll need a certain stockpile of hydrogen but there's enough oceanic weather data to determine how long the 100year lull would last and what quantity of hydrogen is required to bridge the gap. Then add a 20% safety margin.
Fusion has been in labs for years. The Farnsworth fusor is a tabletop fusion device that's been around 40 years. They make excellent neutron sources, which is what this idea uses.
Really? Every engineer at my university, regardless of discipline, had to pass an "economics for engineers" course (IE420, I think it was). It was nothing *but* the different means of discussing ROI and everything that goes in it. Our final project was a full cradle-to-grave cost analysis of a project with two active options and the "do nothing" option. It had to factor in recycling/salvage, at least two funding options (50%/100% debt), and two different long term interest rate scenarios over a 25+ year life.
While most software engineers may never do a NPV analysis, I guarantee you that most civils will.
Plus you forgot to factor in inflation and the possibility that he financed his installation. Most people either forget inflation or they assume that inflation matches interest on the "do nothing option." Only in horrible times does inflation match interest so that's usually a fallacy, although it probably isn't unreasonable to assume that energy costs will increase at a rate higher than inflation. How much I leave to the experts. Since he probably financed the $36,000 installation, his ROI on the "do nothing option" will be the interest adjusted return on $36k minus the repayment schedule minus his total future cost adjusted power bill.
Y'know, there's not a lot the iPhone does that my Treo650, which came out a couple years before, couldn't do. It just did it with more shiny. iPhone had a 3.5mm headphone jack, not that many headphones could actually plug into it. WiFi is about the only major feature.
Of course, my Treo 650 had 3G support on Sprint long before the iPhone 3G was released so it arguably didn't need WiFi. Arguably.
Sure, there were differences in memory and the camera but that's what a couple of years advancement will do. I suppose if the Treo was supported by a high price point along with an expensive plan ($1,000/year for the iPhone service plan. Wow, I spent about half that.)
As it is the Treo supported BT DUN (well, on Sprint, if not all networks, those prats), MMS support, oh, and uh, copy paste. The service plan was also much, much cheaper.
Multitouch is nice, I confess, though the Treo's keyboard makes up to some extent, as does the ability to use various handwriting tools.
Where Apple won is that they didn't bow to the carriers and cripple the phones. I truly believe that 90% of the instability problems of the Treo650 was due to Palm supporting all the requests by different carriers to hack up the feature set (BT DUN here, non-standard email client there, custom voice dialers, etc, etc).
I give Steve Jobs props for sticking to his guns. When he's right it produces wonderful results. When he's wrong, well, he drags the whole company down because no one can change his mind.
Newton? Great idea but he should have put it on a shelf for couple more years until the tech caught up. That's how Palm originally won the PDA market, by building a fully functional PDA supported by the available tech.
iPhone is the same thing in reverse. The original Treos didn't have the technological support and they poisoned their fanbase with underperforming tech. Apple took the core concept of the treo (e.g. "smartphone") and made a great product.
I just don't see the iPhone as revolutionary, merely evolutionary.
The UK version is HSDPA (aka GSM). I can't see any reason why it would be different in Switzerland.
Historically Palm has always sold an unlocked GSM version without carrier subsidy. I detest the practice of carrier locking in the US but that's really a carrier subsidy issue more than a manufacturer issue where palm is concerned.
Bet you had a GSM Treo. My boss and I both got Treo650's within a month of each other, mine was the slightly older Sprint version compared to his ATT GSM. His had the disabled BT DUN and several other ATT-modified features.
His was unusuable for multiple reasons. First off, ATT's connection to the internet sucked. If he pulled an updated off ATT's website it nearly maxed out the bandwidth (Was that GPRS or HSPDA? I forget now). If he tried to hit our corporate email server it took 5-10 minutes. My phone, configured with his email account, would pull the same mail down in less than 30 seconds (he got a *lot* of mail.) His would crash when one of the ATT apps told him he had an SMS from his wife.
You can see the problems if you compare the number of updates for the Sprint software (6 last time I looked) vs. the ATT version (19, I think).
He finally got a blackjack. It played nicer but email still took forever to download and it wigged out every time he tried to look at email attachments. He generally didn't use it as anything but a phone.
I'm not going to say my 650 was perfect; I'd crash it about once a month when two 3rd party apps would fight for dominance. If I didn't like having a wiki tied into almost every app or the app that let me use the original Jot handwriting recognition I could have stopped the crashing.
I retired my 650 a few months ago for a Centro. I miss the 650's large battery but I love the Centro's size. My only real dislike of the Centro is the lack of text input (rectified by Tealscript). I can still crash the Centro, but they still get tracked down to 3rd party apps.
The Economist article is unequivocal: SSP would cost FIFTY CENTS per kWh. That's just awful, way worse than earth-based solar or wind, even backed up with 85 watts per 100W so that they are base-load capable.
I take it you ignored the part that talked about the military being the initial customer, since they routinely pay $1/kWh?
If 20% of the fuel used in Iraq is for generators and the cost savings is a fairly conservative $5/gallon equivalent (on prices of $5-20/gallon), that comes out to a cost reduction of 1.6M gallon/day x 20% x $5/gallon = $1.6M/day. There may be additional cost savings since you've reduced the supply tonnage by ~14%; I'm not sure if the Economist costs include ancillary costs, like security for fuel convoys.
This is not an immediate-results project so it wouldn't be live for Iraq. However the odds of the US *not* receiving benefit from this tech once it becomes available is low.
Depending on the actual costs by a full engineering study, this has the potential to be a double win, cutting costs for the military and advancing science.
Depending on the age of the existing hardware, I think the cost savings from "recycling" the existing generator set probably outweighs the improved efficiency from a high cost fuel cell. Especially when the hydrogen is produced by a high-temp geothermal fluke.
They can switch to fuel cells as their gen sets reach end of life.
I did not say "fuel cell." I said "convert to hydrogen." Oil fueled power plants either use steam turbines or diesel motors to spin the generators.
Fuelcells would replace both the generator and the turbine/engine. I'm saying leave the generator but convert the drive system to hydrogen.
If they run steam turbines that means swapping the burners on the boilers from oil to hydrogen. That's very little additional cost beyond the hydrogen storage since burners have to be replaced regularly anyway.
As for the diesel internal combustion engines, most of of the ones used in large power plants are factory capable of running on a mix of diesel and natural gas. Adding hydrogen support is not exactly trivial but isn't a huge expense if done during periodic engine teardown. The additional labor and material costs involved in equipping with the hydrogen-capable fittings would be negligible with only new compressors as the capital expense. At that point those generators would be primarily operating on hydrogen with a small percentage of pilot oil to manage combustion.
Ta-da. Fuel oil power plant converted to hydrogen with roughly 95% of the generator set left intact.
The geothermal-created hydrogen fuel would provide the safe baseload needed to deal with weather that's not friendly to wind and solar (like tropical storms that last days).
TFA says This is not the first time drillers have encountered magma; the depth of the hit and the setting are, however, thought to be unique.
I'll summarize. a) this is dacite as compared to basalt (aka this is closer to "continental" magma than "Hawaiian" magma). b) It's close to the surface (2.5km) and c) it's freaking hot.
"We were at about 2.5km which is pretty routine drilling depth," explained Mr Teplow.
"But that is half the depth of experimental projects in Europe and Australia where they are drilling very deep into hot granite - some 5-5.5km down - and getting 260C rock; and here we're getting 1,050C rock."
I don't feel like doing the math right now but the power generating options from a 1000C heat source is very, very, very good.
If the geologists figure out how to find shallow magma anywhere near a cross-connected power grid, you can product a ton of energy.
For a localized environment like Hawaii, they could make huge strides in cutting external fuel needs. I'm generally anti-hydrogen because of the losses between generation and transportation but it would be very feasible for Hawaii to use the excess power from a geothermal power plant to produce hydrogen that could be transported the relatively short distances between islands by boat to provide fuel to other islands. I'm not an EE, but it seems like converting their current fuel-oil generators to hydrogen would be a fairly inexpensive process.
They already have an electric car initiative which would further cut down the bulk of their fuel oil imports.
Steve Jobs was never a programmer or an engineer. Woz did all the coding and system design. At best he was a technician who assembled boards following Woz's directions.
Jobs is, to use a dilbertism, an idea rat, a concept guy and, I hate to say it, a visionary. A great idea rat, but still an idea rat. It's doubtable that he's a great manager because part of the reason he was ousted from Apple was that his ideas were grander than the company's ability to execute. The Newton was great but it was too soon so it was too big and too expensive. The Palm Pilot was the right time at the right price.
When he was ousted in '85 Apple traded at $2 a share. When he came back in '97 it traded at $5 a share. Even given inflation, it was worth more when he returned than when he left. The managers did not run it into the ground but they did not innovate.
Product companies need innovators to keep up demand. They also need managers to ensure things get built efficiently. They also need technical types so the innovative products that get built are functional.
Gates? Gates is a programmer but there's no indication he was anything exceptional as a programmer. Gates is an exceptional business strategist and given that he ramped up the size of MS far more than Jobs ever did at Apple, I'd say Gates was a pretty good, possibly exceptional, manager.
Gates was not, however, an innovator. He was a good enough business strategist that he could recognize them. And being a genius of business strategy, he developed the embrace-extend strategy that allowed MS to leech off of innovators without taking as much innovative risk.
Good managers don't need to be particularly good at what they manage. They do have to *understand* it.
The phrase "with the right management skills, you can manage anything" is misconstrued to be "with the right management skills and only management skills, you can manage anything." One of the definitions of "right" is "fitting or appropriate; suitable." One of the "right" skills is the ability to learn and comprehend.
By definition, someone with the "right" management skills will expend the time and effort required to learn what it is their people do, the underlying concepts, and the generally accepted best practices for that industry.
The best PMs I had at the engineering company couldn't build my system models or even directly interact with them but they understood what it was they did and the underlying logic of how they did it. They could tell if I was starting to drift from the project goals or overcomplicating the situation. They understood what the client's needs were as well as the constraints I worked under.
Your first post was possibly funny. Now you've proven you're either a troll or a bitter, jaded individual who was probably passed over for good reason.
It was actually a *mistake* that the only advancement path for most exceptional skilled workers was to become a manager that didn't use their exceptional skills. Project management has always been a specialized skillset. For some unknown reason, it was assumed that people who learned how to build things could also supervise other builders. I call shenanigans.
The military figured this out years ago. Commissioned officers make plans, non-coms implement the plan, and specialists do the work. Each butterbar junior officer goes through a fairly rigorous training course to give them the concepts and then they get to actually learn the job once they get assigned to their unit where their captain and sargeant finish up the training.
When the engineering company I used to work at introduced a "technical expert" path as well as a "project management" path I was overjoyed. Finally, the best do-ers could keep do-ing without being forced into managing. Plus, theoretically, the project managers would *finally* know how to manage.
None of that happened, unfortunately, so I jumped ship. Last I heard they were closing offices. The place I work at now does have various technical grades that provide a pretty wide salary band and it's doing fine.
I'm not a driver writer but I do quite a bit of optimizing of complex systems and what most people forget is that "optimized" is for a given set of conditions. If the conditions change, the customized configuration may be worse than the generic defaults.
There are some major differences in behavior between SSD and HDD so they are different optimization profiles. E.g. If you reduce the latency by ~15ms to near-bus-speed responses, on most computers (~2.5Ghz) that eliminates ~37.5 million wasted clock cycles that your background task manager expects to exist. Since most SSDs have slower write speed than HDDs you need to add a greater tolerance for write confirmations. With the read speed being so great, it would make sense to rearrange your command queue priority to slip a couple of reads in the middle of a large write.
I find this a little scary too: Microsoft also plans a certification program for SSDs
TFA:
"Microsoft also plans a certification program for SSDs so that the drives properly identify themselves to Windows 7 and prioritize data I/O for the SATA interface. "
While MS is known for embrace-extend-engulf, this is nothing to panic over. If the drive passes a string that identifies it as an SSD, Win7 (or any other OS) will use different disk control logic than they will for an HDD. All OSes will benefit if there's a clear way of identifying SSDs; MS, Linux, Apple, Sun, IBM, all of 'em. Change the preferred block size, alter garbage management, adjust caching to deal with 1 ms response times, (typically) fast reads,(typically) slow writes, etc.
Ask him if he remembers the days when people would show up to build a neighbor's barn without getting paid. Why did they do it? Well, some did it because someday they'd need a barn raised. Others did it because it was "just being neighborly."
Well, FOSS is a "barn" that everyone gets to use. And the "catch" at least with GPL, is that you can't sell a community raised "barn" to other people, you have to give it away.
But there are still a couple ways for barn builders to make money. Some people don't like to clean their own barn so there are maintenance contracts. Some people want custom barns, so they hire people to modify the barn. Some people will make things that work with the barn, like silos, and they sell the silo while giving away the barn.
Let's face it, it only happens because ICANN is a US organization. See if somebody in the UN/WTO member country of Dictatorstan said "hey, Kentucky's allowing people to register motor vehicles online. Registering motor vehicles in foreign countries is illegal for our people. Sue them and claim Kentucky.gov!" if the WHOIS would change that fast.
However, it is illegal to have certain kinds of gambling in Kentucky. This is really no different that running a college betting ring via the telephone number 1-800-Win-Bigg. The courts could sieze your distinctive "1-800-Win-Bigg" number as a an "asset".
FYI, as a former Kentuckian, we have a fairly good internet presence in the larger cities. You might be surprised how many large pipe circuits actually terminate here. I know of several dozen organizations with their own OC3s and at least two "private" OC12s in Louisville. I know of several data center companies and several large (Fortune 100) companies with data centers located in Louisville.
Landing on thrusters with significant gravity and atmosphere is hard. Since the gravity is much greater than lunar landings, it requires a lot of thrust. Then you've got the sudden boost in lift caused by direct ground effect. A big part of learning to land is to deal with the sudden increase in lift b/c the natural response is to power down aggressively, which tends to cause your vehicle to drop ~15' like a rock as you stall. Not fatal most of the time but very hard on vehicles.
Minor variations on the surface can result in incredibly complicated interactions like reflections, harmonics, and rotation. IIRC, some helicopters can literally have their rotors shattered if they land at the wrong speed b/c a harmonic is created. (I am not a pilot but I love helicopter sims) I've got no idea what the rocket equivalent is but I'm sure it probably exists. IIRC one of the x-prize vehicles had a similar failure with a rocket landing when the pilot flaked out.
Since the martian terrain is brocken rock and blown sand, the rockets are going to dig into the ground, making it a dynamic landing site. That requires a very complicated pilot, not to mention you have to worry more about rocket-propelled detritus. So I can see how it would be much safer to get the lander to the ground effect zone and just hover there. The rover has to be attached to the lander anyhow and adding ~5m of cabling and a winch is probably less complicated than writing an autopilot. Plus the rocket blast will be angled far enough out that the landing site will be mostly unaffected, aside from blown dust which is an everpresent issue on Mars.
There was a story several years ago about this. The region of Europe had experience a mini-ice age, aka a couple decades of unusually low temperatures, which caused reduced growth in the trees. Reduced growth means smaller rings. Smaller rings means finer grain and denser wood.
Well, our country is like 30x larger than yours so we can have 30x as many crappy places to live and still have the same ratio of good/crap.
Conversely, you can find almost any environment you like in the U.S.A. Like it hot and dry? Southwest. Hot and wet? Southeast. Tundra? Alaska. Sunrise on the ocean? Sunset on the Ocean? Rain forest? Get all three in Hawaii. Mountains? We've got a couple of ranges, take your pick. Valleys? Lots.
And as far as why we're not riddled with self-doubt when the environment tries to kill us? Simple, It failed. I'm in Kentucky, ambient temperature right now 88F (31C) and 57% humidity, last week it was 100F and closer to 65% humidity. About three years ago we saw ~3ft of snow (~1m) and back in ~94 we saw ~4ft of snow and ambient temperatures of -16F (-26C) according to the thermometer on my parents' back porch. My childhood involved snakes that are not only poisonous but actively chase other animals (the cottonmouth).
My friends who grew up in Arkansas and Texas have "that ain't nothing" stories about their childhoods. So the Americans who aren't self confident are huddled in a safe room, hopefully one that isn't infested by brown recluse spiders or toxic mold.
Unfortunately, those are the goobers who spend their whole time screaming to make the world a safer place for their clinically-conceived, neurosis-infused offspring and nerfing our odds of survival as a species.
My kids will play with snakes and bugs in the summer heat and do chores in the winter snow and they will be better for it.
I pointed out there was a real and rational reason why people tend to do things in private that has nothing to do with cultural/legal mores (shame & fear of repercussions) or personal attitudes (private nature). I didn't actually comment on the validity of the case or the likelihood of success.
I'm on the side of personal choice, albeit one tempered by the rights of others. E.g. "your right to throw a punch ends before my face starts." This admittedly tends to put more limits on extroverted activities in very public places but can be accomodated by signage to indicate expectations, e.g. differentiating between a "normal" public beach and a nude public beach.
In this case, that wouldn't apply unless these pornographers were projecting their wares onto the sides of buildings or on clouds.
By the same token, I'm all for "Joe Camel's Eatatorium & Tobacco Smokeatorium" where smoking is allowed in the entire restaurant because it's a private establishment. Public offices (meaning those actually operated by city/state/federal govt) would continue to have designated smoking-only sections since people *must* visit those offices rather than it being a choice of where to have dinner.
You forgot the 4th reason people crave privacy: safety.
People involved in the act tend to be focused on what they're doing, or at least distracted. That puts you at risk for outside threats and our instincts are to do risky things in safe environments.
Some part of the brain starts yelling "Hey, you are very exposed right now!" and it has a very visceral impact on the person depending on their mindset. The sensations range from a thrill (for the exhibitionist) to anxiety ("normal" people) all the way to psyche scarring shame (for the repressed).
Get an automatic transfer switch at the appliance level. Let's say you've got a window air conditioner unit. Get an $85 120v/30A transfer switch (http://www.pplmotorhomes.com/parts/rv-power-cords/automatic-transfer-switch.htm) hooked up to your solar-charged UPS and regular house voltage.
When the UPS dies, the ATS will switch to regular house power.
Slashdot Mirror
I concur with the issue of dependability. So take the variability of the wind out of the equation. We need a mechanism to stockpile the wind energy that is compatible with the existing technology for deep water construction.
Hey! Why don't we use wind power to produce hydrogen! Then you could have either pipelines or giant tankers haul the hydrogen to the coastal cities. Given the environmental threat the petroleum spills pose, a hydrogen leak won't be as bad. More risk to sailors though, since asphyxiation is a possibility. Barring some chemical reaction that turns a component of the atmosphere toxic, it will have no long-term impact on the environment.
I'm not a fan of hydrogen; most people leave out the fact that you have to create it, which requires a power source. But it's pretty much an extension of our current processes to go from oil derrick to hydrogen-generating-windfarm in the ocean. You probably lose efficiency but you trade it for reliability. You'll need a certain stockpile of hydrogen but there's enough oceanic weather data to determine how long the 100year lull would last and what quantity of hydrogen is required to bridge the gap. Then add a 20% safety margin.
Fusion has been in labs for years. The Farnsworth fusor is a tabletop fusion device that's been around 40 years. They make excellent neutron sources, which is what this idea uses.
Fusion net power production doesn't exist.
Really? Every engineer at my university, regardless of discipline, had to pass an "economics for engineers" course (IE420, I think it was). It was nothing *but* the different means of discussing ROI and everything that goes in it. Our final project was a full cradle-to-grave cost analysis of a project with two active options and the "do nothing" option. It had to factor in recycling/salvage, at least two funding options (50%/100% debt), and two different long term interest rate scenarios over a 25+ year life.
While most software engineers may never do a NPV analysis, I guarantee you that most civils will.
Plus you forgot to factor in inflation and the possibility that he financed his installation. Most people either forget inflation or they assume that inflation matches interest on the "do nothing option." Only in horrible times does inflation match interest so that's usually a fallacy, although it probably isn't unreasonable to assume that energy costs will increase at a rate higher than inflation. How much I leave to the experts. Since he probably financed the $36,000 installation, his ROI on the "do nothing option" will be the interest adjusted return on $36k minus the repayment schedule minus his total future cost adjusted power bill.
Y'know, there's not a lot the iPhone does that my Treo650, which came out a couple years before, couldn't do. It just did it with more shiny. iPhone had a 3.5mm headphone jack, not that many headphones could actually plug into it. WiFi is about the only major feature.
Of course, my Treo 650 had 3G support on Sprint long before the iPhone 3G was released so it arguably didn't need WiFi. Arguably.
Sure, there were differences in memory and the camera but that's what a couple of years advancement will do. I suppose if the Treo was supported by a high price point along with an expensive plan ($1,000/year for the iPhone service plan. Wow, I spent about half that.)
As it is the Treo supported BT DUN (well, on Sprint, if not all networks, those prats), MMS support, oh, and uh, copy paste. The service plan was also much, much cheaper.
Multitouch is nice, I confess, though the Treo's keyboard makes up to some extent, as does the ability to use various handwriting tools.
Where Apple won is that they didn't bow to the carriers and cripple the phones. I truly believe that 90% of the instability problems of the Treo650 was due to Palm supporting all the requests by different carriers to hack up the feature set (BT DUN here, non-standard email client there, custom voice dialers, etc, etc).
I give Steve Jobs props for sticking to his guns. When he's right it produces wonderful results. When he's wrong, well, he drags the whole company down because no one can change his mind.
Newton? Great idea but he should have put it on a shelf for couple more years until the tech caught up. That's how Palm originally won the PDA market, by building a fully functional PDA supported by the available tech.
iPhone is the same thing in reverse. The original Treos didn't have the technological support and they poisoned their fanbase with underperforming tech. Apple took the core concept of the treo (e.g. "smartphone") and made a great product.
I just don't see the iPhone as revolutionary, merely evolutionary.
The UK version is HSDPA (aka GSM). I can't see any reason why it would be different in Switzerland.
Historically Palm has always sold an unlocked GSM version without carrier subsidy. I detest the practice of carrier locking in the US but that's really a carrier subsidy issue more than a manufacturer issue where palm is concerned.
Bet you had a GSM Treo. My boss and I both got Treo650's within a month of each other, mine was the slightly older Sprint version compared to his ATT GSM. His had the disabled BT DUN and several other ATT-modified features.
His was unusuable for multiple reasons. First off, ATT's connection to the internet sucked. If he pulled an updated off ATT's website it nearly maxed out the bandwidth (Was that GPRS or HSPDA? I forget now). If he tried to hit our corporate email server it took 5-10 minutes. My phone, configured with his email account, would pull the same mail down in less than 30 seconds (he got a *lot* of mail.) His would crash when one of the ATT apps told him he had an SMS from his wife.
You can see the problems if you compare the number of updates for the Sprint software (6 last time I looked) vs. the ATT version (19, I think).
He finally got a blackjack. It played nicer but email still took forever to download and it wigged out every time he tried to look at email attachments. He generally didn't use it as anything but a phone.
I'm not going to say my 650 was perfect; I'd crash it about once a month when two 3rd party apps would fight for dominance. If I didn't like having a wiki tied into almost every app or the app that let me use the original Jot handwriting recognition I could have stopped the crashing.
I retired my 650 a few months ago for a Centro. I miss the 650's large battery but I love the Centro's size. My only real dislike of the Centro is the lack of text input (rectified by Tealscript). I can still crash the Centro, but they still get tracked down to 3rd party apps.
The Economist article is unequivocal: SSP would cost FIFTY CENTS per kWh. That's just awful, way worse than earth-based solar or wind, even backed up with 85 watts per 100W so that they are base-load capable.
I take it you ignored the part that talked about the military being the initial customer, since they routinely pay $1/kWh?
If 20% of the fuel used in Iraq is for generators and the cost savings is a fairly conservative $5/gallon equivalent (on prices of $5-20/gallon), that comes out to a cost reduction of 1.6M gallon/day x 20% x $5/gallon = $1.6M/day. There may be additional cost savings since you've reduced the supply tonnage by ~14%; I'm not sure if the Economist costs include ancillary costs, like security for fuel convoys.
This is not an immediate-results project so it wouldn't be live for Iraq. However the odds of the US *not* receiving benefit from this tech once it becomes available is low.
Depending on the actual costs by a full engineering study, this has the potential to be a double win, cutting costs for the military and advancing science.
Depending on the age of the existing hardware, I think the cost savings from "recycling" the existing generator set probably outweighs the improved efficiency from a high cost fuel cell. Especially when the hydrogen is produced by a high-temp geothermal fluke.
They can switch to fuel cells as their gen sets reach end of life.
I did not say "fuel cell." I said "convert to hydrogen." Oil fueled power plants either use steam turbines or diesel motors to spin the generators.
Fuelcells would replace both the generator and the turbine/engine. I'm saying leave the generator but convert the drive system to hydrogen.
If they run steam turbines that means swapping the burners on the boilers from oil to hydrogen. That's very little additional cost beyond the hydrogen storage since burners have to be replaced regularly anyway.
As for the diesel internal combustion engines, most of of the ones used in large power plants are factory capable of running on a mix of diesel and natural gas. Adding hydrogen support is not exactly trivial but isn't a huge expense if done during periodic engine teardown. The additional labor and material costs involved in equipping with the hydrogen-capable fittings would be negligible with only new compressors as the capital expense. At that point those generators would be primarily operating on hydrogen with a small percentage of pilot oil to manage combustion.
Ta-da. Fuel oil power plant converted to hydrogen with roughly 95% of the generator set left intact.
The geothermal-created hydrogen fuel would provide the safe baseload needed to deal with weather that's not friendly to wind and solar (like tropical storms that last days).
TFA says This is not the first time drillers have encountered magma; the depth of the hit and the setting are, however, thought to be unique.
I'll summarize. a) this is dacite as compared to basalt (aka this is closer to "continental" magma than "Hawaiian" magma). b) It's close to the surface (2.5km) and c) it's freaking hot.
"We were at about 2.5km which is pretty routine drilling depth," explained Mr Teplow.
"But that is half the depth of experimental projects in Europe and Australia where they are drilling very deep into hot granite - some 5-5.5km down - and getting 260C rock; and here we're getting 1,050C rock."
I don't feel like doing the math right now but the power generating options from a 1000C heat source is very, very, very good.
If the geologists figure out how to find shallow magma anywhere near a cross-connected power grid, you can product a ton of energy.
For a localized environment like Hawaii, they could make huge strides in cutting external fuel needs. I'm generally anti-hydrogen because of the losses between generation and transportation but it would be very feasible for Hawaii to use the excess power from a geothermal power plant to produce hydrogen that could be transported the relatively short distances between islands by boat to provide fuel to other islands. I'm not an EE, but it seems like converting their current fuel-oil generators to hydrogen would be a fairly inexpensive process.
They already have an electric car initiative which would further cut down the bulk of their fuel oil imports.
Yeah, I'm calling shenanigans again.
Steve Jobs was never a programmer or an engineer. Woz did all the coding and system design. At best he was a technician who assembled boards following Woz's directions.
Jobs is, to use a dilbertism, an idea rat, a concept guy and, I hate to say it, a visionary. A great idea rat, but still an idea rat. It's doubtable that he's a great manager because part of the reason he was ousted from Apple was that his ideas were grander than the company's ability to execute. The Newton was great but it was too soon so it was too big and too expensive. The Palm Pilot was the right time at the right price.
When he was ousted in '85 Apple traded at $2 a share. When he came back in '97 it traded at $5 a share. Even given inflation, it was worth more when he returned than when he left. The managers did not run it into the ground but they did not innovate.
Product companies need innovators to keep up demand. They also need managers to ensure things get built efficiently. They also need technical types so the innovative products that get built are functional.
Gates? Gates is a programmer but there's no indication he was anything exceptional as a programmer. Gates is an exceptional business strategist and given that he ramped up the size of MS far more than Jobs ever did at Apple, I'd say Gates was a pretty good, possibly exceptional, manager.
Gates was not, however, an innovator. He was a good enough business strategist that he could recognize them. And being a genius of business strategy, he developed the embrace-extend strategy that allowed MS to leech off of innovators without taking as much innovative risk.
Good managers don't need to be particularly good at what they manage. They do have to *understand* it.
The phrase "with the right management skills, you can manage anything" is misconstrued to be "with the right management skills and only management skills, you can manage anything." One of the definitions of "right" is "fitting or appropriate; suitable." One of the "right" skills is the ability to learn and comprehend.
By definition, someone with the "right" management skills will expend the time and effort required to learn what it is their people do, the underlying concepts, and the generally accepted best practices for that industry.
The best PMs I had at the engineering company couldn't build my system models or even directly interact with them but they understood what it was they did and the underlying logic of how they did it. They could tell if I was starting to drift from the project goals or overcomplicating the situation. They understood what the client's needs were as well as the constraints I worked under.
Your first post was possibly funny. Now you've proven you're either a troll or a bitter, jaded individual who was probably passed over for good reason.
It was actually a *mistake* that the only advancement path for most exceptional skilled workers was to become a manager that didn't use their exceptional skills. Project management has always been a specialized skillset. For some unknown reason, it was assumed that people who learned how to build things could also supervise other builders. I call shenanigans.
The military figured this out years ago. Commissioned officers make plans, non-coms implement the plan, and specialists do the work. Each butterbar junior officer goes through a fairly rigorous training course to give them the concepts and then they get to actually learn the job once they get assigned to their unit where their captain and sargeant finish up the training.
When the engineering company I used to work at introduced a "technical expert" path as well as a "project management" path I was overjoyed. Finally, the best do-ers could keep do-ing without being forced into managing. Plus, theoretically, the project managers would *finally* know how to manage.
None of that happened, unfortunately, so I jumped ship. Last I heard they were closing offices. The place I work at now does have various technical grades that provide a pretty wide salary band and it's doing fine.
I'm not a driver writer but I do quite a bit of optimizing of complex systems and what most people forget is that "optimized" is for a given set of conditions. If the conditions change, the customized configuration may be worse than the generic defaults.
There are some major differences in behavior between SSD and HDD so they are different optimization profiles. E.g. If you reduce the latency by ~15ms to near-bus-speed responses, on most computers (~2.5Ghz) that eliminates ~37.5 million wasted clock cycles that your background task manager expects to exist. Since most SSDs have slower write speed than HDDs you need to add a greater tolerance for write confirmations. With the read speed being so great, it would make sense to rearrange your command queue priority to slip a couple of reads in the middle of a large write.
TFA: "Microsoft also plans a certification program for SSDs so that the drives properly identify themselves to Windows 7 and prioritize data I/O for the SATA interface. "
While MS is known for embrace-extend-engulf, this is nothing to panic over. If the drive passes a string that identifies it as an SSD, Win7 (or any other OS) will use different disk control logic than they will for an HDD. All OSes will benefit if there's a clear way of identifying SSDs; MS, Linux, Apple, Sun, IBM, all of 'em. Change the preferred block size, alter garbage management, adjust caching to deal with 1 ms response times, (typically) fast reads,(typically) slow writes, etc.
You are right, you can sell GPL software. Mea Culpa.
I should have said "you can't make money selling GPL software" because anyone/everyone else can give it away.
In effect, you can't sell the software even if legally you can.
(Yet another analogy)
Ask him if he remembers the days when people would show up to build a neighbor's barn without getting paid. Why did they do it? Well, some did it because someday they'd need a barn raised. Others did it because it was "just being neighborly."
Well, FOSS is a "barn" that everyone gets to use. And the "catch" at least with GPL, is that you can't sell a community raised "barn" to other people, you have to give it away.
But there are still a couple ways for barn builders to make money. Some people don't like to clean their own barn so there are maintenance contracts. Some people want custom barns, so they hire people to modify the barn. Some people will make things that work with the barn, like silos, and they sell the silo while giving away the barn.
*-How many is N^2?
*-*-A lot more than N; a lot more than even N log N, but not nearly so much as N^N or 2^N or N!
You have much to learn, young padawan.
For values of N between 0 and 1 , N^2 is less than N.
For values of N between 0 and 10, N log N is less than N
For values of N between 1 and 2, N! is less than N
Let's face it, it only happens because ICANN is a US organization. See if somebody in the UN/WTO member country of Dictatorstan said "hey, Kentucky's allowing people to register motor vehicles online. Registering motor vehicles in foreign countries is illegal for our people. Sue them and claim Kentucky.gov!" if the WHOIS would change that fast.
However, it is illegal to have certain kinds of gambling in Kentucky. This is really no different that running a college betting ring via the telephone number 1-800-Win-Bigg. The courts could sieze your distinctive "1-800-Win-Bigg" number as a an "asset".
FYI, as a former Kentuckian, we have a fairly good internet presence in the larger cities. You might be surprised how many large pipe circuits actually terminate here. I know of several dozen organizations with their own OC3s and at least two "private" OC12s in Louisville. I know of several data center companies and several large (Fortune 100) companies with data centers located in Louisville.
Landing on thrusters with significant gravity and atmosphere is hard. Since the gravity is much greater than lunar landings, it requires a lot of thrust. Then you've got the sudden boost in lift caused by direct ground effect. A big part of learning to land is to deal with the sudden increase in lift b/c the natural response is to power down aggressively, which tends to cause your vehicle to drop ~15' like a rock as you stall. Not fatal most of the time but very hard on vehicles.
Minor variations on the surface can result in incredibly complicated interactions like reflections, harmonics, and rotation. IIRC, some helicopters can literally have their rotors shattered if they land at the wrong speed b/c a harmonic is created. (I am not a pilot but I love helicopter sims) I've got no idea what the rocket equivalent is but I'm sure it probably exists. IIRC one of the x-prize vehicles had a similar failure with a rocket landing when the pilot flaked out.
Since the martian terrain is brocken rock and blown sand, the rockets are going to dig into the ground, making it a dynamic landing site. That requires a very complicated pilot, not to mention you have to worry more about rocket-propelled detritus. So I can see how it would be much safer to get the lander to the ground effect zone and just hover there. The rover has to be attached to the lander anyhow and adding ~5m of cabling and a winch is probably less complicated than writing an autopilot. Plus the rocket blast will be angled far enough out that the landing site will be mostly unaffected, aside from blown dust which is an everpresent issue on Mars.
There was a story several years ago about this. The region of Europe had experience a mini-ice age, aka a couple decades of unusually low temperatures, which caused reduced growth in the trees. Reduced growth means smaller rings. Smaller rings means finer grain and denser wood.
Well, our country is like 30x larger than yours so we can have 30x as many crappy places to live and still have the same ratio of good/crap.
Conversely, you can find almost any environment you like in the U.S.A. Like it hot and dry? Southwest. Hot and wet? Southeast. Tundra? Alaska. Sunrise on the ocean? Sunset on the Ocean? Rain forest? Get all three in Hawaii. Mountains? We've got a couple of ranges, take your pick. Valleys? Lots.
And as far as why we're not riddled with self-doubt when the environment tries to kill us? Simple, It failed. I'm in Kentucky, ambient temperature right now 88F (31C) and 57% humidity, last week it was 100F and closer to 65% humidity. About three years ago we saw ~3ft of snow (~1m) and back in ~94 we saw ~4ft of snow and ambient temperatures of -16F (-26C) according to the thermometer on my parents' back porch. My childhood involved snakes that are not only poisonous but actively chase other animals (the cottonmouth).
My friends who grew up in Arkansas and Texas have "that ain't nothing" stories about their childhoods. So the Americans who aren't self confident are huddled in a safe room, hopefully one that isn't infested by brown recluse spiders or toxic mold.
Unfortunately, those are the goobers who spend their whole time screaming to make the world a safer place for their clinically-conceived, neurosis-infused offspring and nerfing our odds of survival as a species.
My kids will play with snakes and bugs in the summer heat and do chores in the winter snow and they will be better for it.
Sure you can. They even come in fruity flavors.
I pointed out there was a real and rational reason why people tend to do things in private that has nothing to do with cultural/legal mores (shame & fear of repercussions) or personal attitudes (private nature). I didn't actually comment on the validity of the case or the likelihood of success.
I'm on the side of personal choice, albeit one tempered by the rights of others. E.g. "your right to throw a punch ends before my face starts." This admittedly tends to put more limits on extroverted activities in very public places but can be accomodated by signage to indicate expectations, e.g. differentiating between a "normal" public beach and a nude public beach.
In this case, that wouldn't apply unless these pornographers were projecting their wares onto the sides of buildings or on clouds.
By the same token, I'm all for "Joe Camel's Eatatorium & Tobacco Smokeatorium" where smoking is allowed in the entire restaurant because it's a private establishment. Public offices (meaning those actually operated by city/state/federal govt) would continue to have designated smoking-only sections since people *must* visit those offices rather than it being a choice of where to have dinner.
You forgot the 4th reason people crave privacy: safety.
People involved in the act tend to be focused on what they're doing, or at least distracted. That puts you at risk for outside threats and our instincts are to do risky things in safe environments.
Some part of the brain starts yelling "Hey, you are very exposed right now!" and it has a very visceral impact on the person depending on their mindset. The sensations range from a thrill (for the exhibitionist) to anxiety ("normal" people) all the way to psyche scarring shame (for the repressed).
Get an automatic transfer switch at the appliance level. Let's say you've got a window air conditioner unit. Get an $85 120v/30A transfer switch (http://www.pplmotorhomes.com/parts/rv-power-cords/automatic-transfer-switch.htm) hooked up to your solar-charged UPS and regular house voltage.
When the UPS dies, the ATS will switch to regular house power.