Even in a world where diesel costs $40/gal, it would still be cheaper to use the electricity and water that this skyscraper requires to produce hydrogen, transport it out into the countryside, combine it with switchgrass to produce diesel, and then use that diesel to transport food back to the city.
You did notice that the plants in this agricultural skyscraper are grown with electric lights, right?
I mean, worst case scenario with global warming is that we spend a generation ramping up non-fossil power production, during which the price of electricity goes up right along with the price of transport fuels, probably faster even.
So, if you have energy to run this thing, you have energy to transport food.
True, to an extent. On the one hand, there is a limit to the amount of energy we will spend to extract oil at a loss. But also, from an energy generation perspective, oil dwarfs both coal and nuclear in the amount of energy produced globally. Running out of oil that can be extracted with net gain is a very real problem.
A salt-melting (or any other kind of process) plant would need to run 24/7 to be profitable
I'm not so sure about this. If the energy prices are low enough, I expect some type of business will pop up to take the place of the "toasters". Silicon or hydrogen production, or even something like fish or poultry farming and freezing, can be done almost anywhere, even with a periodic energy source such as excess wind power.
Health costs are not insignificant. Doctors, even those imported from the third world, have high salaries and correspondingly high energy requirements. The savings from fewer hospital (or even gym) visits could very well offset the food costs.
On the other hand, methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. So, even if you eat beans instead of meat, biking or walking is still likely ruining the environment one way or another.
30% is quite a bit. The vast majority of the average consumer's overall energy usage is not electricity alone. I suppose, if we assume that the average consumer doesn't already have these things, that there are several upgrades one can make to reduce energy usage:
transportation - smaller, more fuel-efficient or hybrid car; public transportation electric - laptop; fluorescent lights; new refrigerator/air conditioner/heat pump heat - programmable thermostat; instant or solar water heater; clothes line; more insulation/insulated windows
But you would have to use nearly everything I've listed in order to use 30% less overall energy than the average consumer. Some of them are quite expensive, and some do impact lifestyle. Unfortunately, at this point, the average consumer has no money left in his budget to upgrade to new energy-efficient gizmos. And even if he did, the prices of gasoline, coal, and natural gas are now falling instead of rising.
Oh well, as long as we're handing out free advice:
1) You work for Accenture.
2) I used a Linux-based, "high-end", "enterprise" data storage system to verify this.
3) I am perfectly healthy, and not in need of any vegetarian evangelism.
4) You can use the same Linux-based data storage system to verify this.
5) "Obscure" has several meanings. One of them is "closed". Another is "uncertain".
But, hey you're right; I might not have realized what your business model is. So since you work for one of the largest outsourcing firms in the world, and you're here on Slashdot complaining about not being able to find qualified workers, why don't you answer a question for us:
What was the nationality of the workers you hired?
Because, while I'd like to take you at face-value, and believe that you can't seem to find qualified Unix admins in one of the largest markets in the world, while offering high salaries at a prestigious firm, something isn't adding up.
Well, Massachusetts is an antiquated, dirty, overpopulated socialist police state. So, I can understand why few people would want to move there *permanently*.
But it is also one of the largest Linux markets on the planet, so if you really want a senior person, then all you have to do is offer more than your competitors, and recruit from them. And if you're really willing to do some training to get a less qualified person up to speed, then I'm sure you can attract someone from a smaller, lower-paying market.
But, ultimately, as far as I can tell, you work for a consultancy that purports to be a font of IT knowledge. Your entire business model is based on monopolizing information and specialized skills. You can't really expect to just hire people off the street right there in the same town who know as much (or more) as you do, right?
Regardless, Solaris was the obscure 20 year old OS I was referring to. Solaris is losing market share, and Sun has been teetering on the verge of collapse for some time. There are far more computers, admins and users running Linux than there are using Solaris. Cheers.
I read this article a few days ago in Inc. Magazine, and it reminded me of an important lesson that I learned the hard way, in the course of selling Linux to small businesses:
Benson had no luck until a prospect explained that the $200 software seemed too inexpensive to do what it claimed. "He raised the price to $2,500, and [it] started to sell like hotcakes," says Peter DiGiammarino, Compusearch's current CEO.
So I agree with you about adjusting expectations. I believe I'll be adjusting my salary expectations upwards.
Explain to your hiring manager that Linux skills are 99% interchangeable with with "Unix" skills and watch your costs go down and responses go up.
The largest, most cost-effective data storage company on the planet uses Linux boxes and commodity hardware. But I'll bet you're searching for people whose sole experience is with some obscure 20-year-old Unix OS in conjunction with some overpriced proprietary NAS device.
There are a few people out there crazy enough to be qualified for your position, but most of them aren't mind readers so it would help if you posted some kind of contact information at least:)
Okay, now I get it. This isn't "If people don't buy Windows 7, they'll buy Citrix", it's "If you don't buy Windows 7, your boss will make you use Citrix!"
Haha, no. It does get slower. But I suppose you could argue that it's not magic.
It's due to the fact that the lazy idiots in Redmond tend to update entire components of the OS every time there is a security patch or service pack. Memory usage goes up. Optimizations are lost. Unnecessary new code and features are foisted upon machines that simply don't need them.
Over the lifetime of a machine, the difference is significant and noticeable. You could argue that people should simply keep buying new machines every two years, but the fact is that my five-year-old laptop can no longer boot XP SP2 in less than ten minutes, but runs Linux like a champ. And in a down economy, there is simply no reason for anyone to continue buying new hardware to run the latest version of Microsoft bloatware.
You can disable the RAM cache, or set it to a low, fixed amount. In addition, iirc, on Linux the majority of Firefox's memory usage is pawned off on the local X11 server.
Linux has been doing thin clients better than Citrix for a long time, and for less.
Which means that any mini-black hole would very quickly leave the Earth, or have to lose enough momentum that it ceases to be a black hole.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. In fact, the interactions that are most likely to produce black holes are the ones in which all kinetic energy is converted to matter. So the resulting black hole would have little or no momentum at all. Black holes, as far as I know, do not require momentum to exist.
Additionally because blackholes may have charge, and the LHC collides positively charged protons, any created blackholes are most likely to be positively charged, they would be repelled by the earth's atom's nucleus where most mass is; and possibly just circulate through the collider like the other positively charged particles there.
This is certainly an astute observation. We can likely assume that, worst-case scenario, were any collider to create a long-lived black hole, it could be contained as long as the vacuum and superconducting magnets were maintained.
Also the mini-blackholes would only be blackholes along a narrow cone on the axis of travel; and would be normal particles perpendicular to it's axis of travel.
This is nonsensical to me. I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that the existence of a black hole is not subject to one's frame of reference.
Burning a human might produce 25,000 BTU, but if you're talking about body heat, your units are not correct and you're off by two orders of magnitude. It's more like 250 BTU/hr.
A few years back I thought about building an autonomous, self-replicating robot like this. My idea was that it would live in a museum, and people could feed it coins.
Besides the coins, everything else would come from the immediate environment. It would forage for biomass as fuel. Once it had gathered enough fuel and coins, it would reproduce.
It seemed like a feasible, if horribly complex, task. I thought it would make a nice open source project.
Do they think they're going to be creating matter?
They do, actually. That's how particle accelerators work. According to general relativity, energy is equivalent to matter, and matter can be created from the kinetic energy of rapidly moving particles.
I would estimate the probability of creating a black hole to be exactly 0.
Therefore, the demonstrated inaccuracy of your previous statement gives us all reason to adjust our faith in this proffered probability accordingly.
That's the second time this week...
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 2, Funny
This new phenomenon of people praising Windows ME on Slashdot is really beginning to worry me.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas because, like the glass of a greenhouse, it transmits light in the visible spectrum but reflects light in the infrared.
The majority of the light from the Sun is in the visible spectrum. The vast majority of energy lost from the Earth is in the form of infrared light.
CO2, and other greenhouse gases, allow visible light from the Sun to strike the Earth, but block the heat (infrared light) that is emitted from the Earth.
This is an important concept to understand before one goes around in public claiming that global warming is "BS".
For major components at least (xorg, kernel), version numbers in RedHat are fairly meaningless. RedHat developers are constantly backporting and patching in new features from more recent versions and only incrementing the build number.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the idiot is planning to use grow lights. It says so right in the article.
Even in a world where diesel costs $40/gal, it would still be cheaper to use the electricity and water that this skyscraper requires to produce hydrogen, transport it out into the countryside, combine it with switchgrass to produce diesel, and then use that diesel to transport food back to the city.
New York Fail
You did notice that the plants in this agricultural skyscraper are grown with electric lights, right?
I mean, worst case scenario with global warming is that we spend a generation ramping up non-fossil power production, during which the price of electricity goes up right along with the price of transport fuels, probably faster even.
So, if you have energy to run this thing, you have energy to transport food.
You can't see a lawyer's penchant for frivolous litigation having any impact on his job-finding?
True, to an extent. On the one hand, there is a limit to the amount of energy we will spend to extract oil at a loss. But also, from an energy generation perspective, oil dwarfs both coal and nuclear in the amount of energy produced globally. Running out of oil that can be extracted with net gain is a very real problem.
A salt-melting (or any other kind of process) plant would need to run 24/7 to be profitable
I'm not so sure about this. If the energy prices are low enough, I expect some type of business will pop up to take the place of the "toasters". Silicon or hydrogen production, or even something like fish or poultry farming and freezing, can be done almost anywhere, even with a periodic energy source such as excess wind power.
Heck, almost nothing except for humans even uses FIRE for energy, and that one's dead obvious.
Every animal oxidizes carbon for energy. It's not exactly the same, but it's very close.
I still don't get why we're so concerned with the others when so little has been done so far with that one.
Solar is utilized directly in significant amounts to feed and provide heat for the majority of the Earth's population.
Health costs are not insignificant. Doctors, even those imported from the third world, have high salaries and correspondingly high energy requirements. The savings from fewer hospital (or even gym) visits could very well offset the food costs.
On the other hand, methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. So, even if you eat beans instead of meat, biking or walking is still likely ruining the environment one way or another.
30% is quite a bit. The vast majority of the average consumer's overall energy usage is not electricity alone. I suppose, if we assume that the average consumer doesn't already have these things, that there are several upgrades one can make to reduce energy usage:
transportation - smaller, more fuel-efficient or hybrid car; public transportation
electric - laptop; fluorescent lights; new refrigerator/air conditioner/heat pump
heat - programmable thermostat; instant or solar water heater; clothes line; more insulation/insulated windows
But you would have to use nearly everything I've listed in order to use 30% less overall energy than the average consumer. Some of them are quite expensive, and some do impact lifestyle. Unfortunately, at this point, the average consumer has no money left in his budget to upgrade to new energy-efficient gizmos. And even if he did, the prices of gasoline, coal, and natural gas are now falling instead of rising.
Oh well, as long as we're handing out free advice:
1) You work for Accenture.
2) I used a Linux-based, "high-end", "enterprise" data storage system to verify this.
3) I am perfectly healthy, and not in need of any vegetarian evangelism.
4) You can use the same Linux-based data storage system to verify this.
5) "Obscure" has several meanings. One of them is "closed". Another is "uncertain".
But, hey you're right; I might not have realized what your business model is. So since you work for one of the largest outsourcing firms in the world, and you're here on Slashdot complaining about not being able to find qualified workers, why don't you answer a question for us:
What was the nationality of the workers you hired?
Because, while I'd like to take you at face-value, and believe that you can't seem to find qualified Unix admins in one of the largest markets in the world, while offering high salaries at a prestigious firm, something isn't adding up.
Well, Massachusetts is an antiquated, dirty, overpopulated socialist police state. So, I can understand why few people would want to move there *permanently*.
But it is also one of the largest Linux markets on the planet, so if you really want a senior person, then all you have to do is offer more than your competitors, and recruit from them. And if you're really willing to do some training to get a less qualified person up to speed, then I'm sure you can attract someone from a smaller, lower-paying market.
But, ultimately, as far as I can tell, you work for a consultancy that purports to be a font of IT knowledge. Your entire business model is based on monopolizing information and specialized skills. You can't really expect to just hire people off the street right there in the same town who know as much (or more) as you do, right?
Regardless, Solaris was the obscure 20 year old OS I was referring to. Solaris is losing market share, and Sun has been teetering on the verge of collapse for some time. There are far more computers, admins and users running Linux than there are using Solaris. Cheers.
I read this article a few days ago in Inc. Magazine, and it reminded me of an important lesson that I learned the hard way, in the course of selling Linux to small businesses:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/legacy-james-benson-1945-2008.html
So I agree with you about adjusting expectations. I believe I'll be adjusting my salary expectations upwards.
Explain to your hiring manager that Linux skills are 99% interchangeable with with "Unix" skills and watch your costs go down and responses go up.
The largest, most cost-effective data storage company on the planet uses Linux boxes and commodity hardware. But I'll bet you're searching for people whose sole experience is with some obscure 20-year-old Unix OS in conjunction with some overpriced proprietary NAS device.
There are a few people out there crazy enough to be qualified for your position, but most of them aren't mind readers so it would help if you posted some kind of contact information at least :)
Okay, now I get it. This isn't "If people don't buy Windows 7, they'll buy Citrix", it's "If you don't buy Windows 7, your boss will make you use Citrix!"
Haha, no. It does get slower. But I suppose you could argue that it's not magic.
It's due to the fact that the lazy idiots in Redmond tend to update entire components of the OS every time there is a security patch or service pack. Memory usage goes up. Optimizations are lost. Unnecessary new code and features are foisted upon machines that simply don't need them.
Over the lifetime of a machine, the difference is significant and noticeable. You could argue that people should simply keep buying new machines every two years, but the fact is that my five-year-old laptop can no longer boot XP SP2 in less than ten minutes, but runs Linux like a champ. And in a down economy, there is simply no reason for anyone to continue buying new hardware to run the latest version of Microsoft bloatware.
You can disable the RAM cache, or set it to a low, fixed amount. In addition, iirc, on Linux the majority of Firefox's memory usage is pawned off on the local X11 server.
Linux has been doing thin clients better than Citrix for a long time, and for less.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. In fact, the interactions that are most likely to produce black holes are the ones in which all kinetic energy is converted to matter. So the resulting black hole would have little or no momentum at all. Black holes, as far as I know, do not require momentum to exist.
This is certainly an astute observation. We can likely assume that, worst-case scenario, were any collider to create a long-lived black hole, it could be contained as long as the vacuum and superconducting magnets were maintained.
This is nonsensical to me. I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that the existence of a black hole is not subject to one's frame of reference.
Burning a human might produce 25,000 BTU, but if you're talking about body heat, your units are not correct and you're off by two orders of magnitude. It's more like 250 BTU/hr.
A few years back I thought about building an autonomous, self-replicating robot like this. My idea was that it would live in a museum, and people could feed it coins.
Besides the coins, everything else would come from the immediate environment. It would forage for biomass as fuel. Once it had gathered enough fuel and coins, it would reproduce.
It seemed like a feasible, if horribly complex, task. I thought it would make a nice open source project.
They do, actually. That's how particle accelerators work. According to general relativity, energy is equivalent to matter, and matter can be created from the kinetic energy of rapidly moving particles.
Therefore, the demonstrated inaccuracy of your previous statement gives us all reason to adjust our faith in this proffered probability accordingly.
This new phenomenon of people praising Windows ME on Slashdot is really beginning to worry me.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas because, like the glass of a greenhouse, it transmits light in the visible spectrum but reflects light in the infrared.
The majority of the light from the Sun is in the visible spectrum. The vast majority of energy lost from the Earth is in the form of infrared light.
CO2, and other greenhouse gases, allow visible light from the Sun to strike the Earth, but block the heat (infrared light) that is emitted from the Earth.
This is an important concept to understand before one goes around in public claiming that global warming is "BS".
hahahahaha, lemme make that a bit more realistic:
- 2 passenger
- small and safe
- 300 km (185 mile) range
- a/c and heat
- charge up at home and work
- under $25,000
For major components at least (xorg, kernel), version numbers in RedHat are fairly meaningless. RedHat developers are constantly backporting and patching in new features from more recent versions and only incrementing the build number.