That's a pretty interesting idea. Normally when we think of phase-change cooling it's liquid to gas and vice versa, but solid to liquid phase change is certainly an option too.
What I wonder about though, is whether in a conventional (atmospheric) application, you would end up with voids in the parafin (or other material with low melting point) as it heated and cooled. Obviously this would be a bad thing and could lead to overheating of the chips. I don't know much about the physical properties of parafin -- does it expand and contract as it heats and cools? If so then it seems like it could easily form voids around the chips.
I once worked with a liquid, some sort of long-chain polymer, that had a freezing point of around 40F. If you chilled the whole thing slightly below it's freezing point, that might be able to work in much the same way. Provided of course that it's a dielectric.
I should call 3M and see if they can find me a non-conductive, inert, non-volitale chemical to submerge a PC in. I'm sure they make one.
You should. But I'll save you the trouble.
It's called 3M Fluorinert, and now that it's come up in two separate discussions in two days, I now know more about the stuff than I ever wanted to. (Great use of company time, eh?)
This is the 3M page about it, they make a bunch of different varieties for various purposes. I believe what you'd want to use on a computer is the '77' variety. (I'm told that's what the Cray II used.) 3M Fluorinert Some people who will sell it to you in small quantities (3M wants you to buy 11 lbs.) And here's the obligatory Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert
Well, it was done by the Cray II, in about 1983 (okay, that was with Fluorinert, not vegetable oil, but anyway), so it's not exactly a new idea or anything.
I think that we're going to see more stuff like this in the future. I don't think vegetable oil is where it's going to be though -- there are a lot better liquids that you can use, which conduct heat far more effectively. I found a place within a few minutes of googling that is willing to sell anyone 1gal or 5gal jugs of light white mineral oil (a petroleum product) for relatively cheap, in various viscosities. I think that would make a lot more sense than using some sort of organic oil that's going to go bad.
And if you were going to use it in anything serious, you'd really want to get 3M Fluorinert. It's expensive as hell, but it's designed for exactly this purpose.
I think the biggest issue I take with Lanier's Luddite Revolution is that it doesn't consider human nature. Even if the proletriat's cost of living retreated more quickly than their income, so that their standard of living went up, it still would have a destabilizing effect on society if there is no clear path up the societal ladder.
American society is maintained, in part anyway, because there is a widespread perception that it is possible for a person to be a 'self-made man.' That is, no matter how poor or unskilled or stupid or whatever you are, it is possible -- however unlikely -- for you to own a 3-bedroom house and drive a Ford and have a wife and kids. And although we are becoming more cynical by the day and many of us would say that we don't believe in the 'american dream nonsense,' people act as though they are attempting to realize that dream all the time.
Also, there is a self-fulling prophecy at work here. When someone does manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fullfill the self-made-person fantasy, they normally receive a certain amount of notoriety for it (at least in extreme cases). This publicity helps to reinforce the idea that such a climb up the social ladder is possible, and keeps people at the bottom at work every day.
If you were -- perhaps through germline genetic engineering or biological/technological fusion -- to create an unbridgeable chasm between the 'haves' and 'have nots,' so that it was no longer possible for a low-class person to even imagine that they might one day be able to join the ranks of the well-to-do, you would remove a lot of of the reason why people at the bottom of society go to work every morning. It would destabilize society, and could easily result either in a revolution, or in the upper-class being required to use force in order to constantly suppress the threat of one.
The fact that they can buy a refrigerator or a big-screen TV isn't going to keep people from strapping blocks of C4 and nails to their chests, when they know that there are people in society that have riches -- vastly prolonged lives, for instance -- that they can barely dream about and will never have. There is a strong human tendency to despise anyone who has something that you cannot get, and which we keep in check only by collectively believing in the notion that anyone can achieve anything if they really try. If we made that notion -- fallacious as it may be -- completely implausible, we'd really be in trouble.
I thought that part of the essay was interesting, also.
I wasn't aware of this Tandem system, I'll have to look into it. I wonder what other non-file-based filesystems there were out there (would it be right to even call such a thing a filesystem?). I've never heard of one, although I have heard of the filesystem-as-a-database idea. The concept being that rather than UNIX's "everything is a file" concept, you'd have a world where "everything is a database entry." I'm not sure how this would work for I/O, and frankly it's difficult for me to think of a computer system that didn't use discrete files, but I think it's a worthwhile thing to consider.
Especially as computers get more powerful, the individual end user will have even more surplus performance to work with. In the past it would have been impractical to have every system do all of it's disk access through some sort of relational database, but as you have more and more surplus processing power and I/O bandwidth on the 'average user' desktop, previously impractical alternatives become possible.
It's unfortunate that Lanier was so pretentious in his presentation, because I think there are a few interesting ideas in the essay that would probably lead to interesting discussion, but I think the context drove a lot of people into an instantly negative response.
There are a couple of cool things in the article. Not particularly interesting things, and I'm not sure whether they really hold any water, intellectually, upon any sort of lengthy consideration, but I think people are giving it a bit of a kneekjerk response here on/.
He makes an interesting point about the idea of files and how entrenched that idea is. I would take this further and say that the whole idea of the desktop metaphor is very entrenched, although I don't think I'd go so far as to say that we'll necessarily still be using it in a thousand years.
Prior to sometime in the mid-1980s, there were influential voices in computer science opposing the idea of the file because it would lead to file incompatibility. Ted Nelson, the inventor of the idea of linked digital content, and Jef Raskin, initiator of the Macintosh project at Apple, both held the view that there should be a giant field of elemental data without file boundaries. Since UNIX, Windows, and even the Macintosh--as it came out the door after a political struggle--incorporated files, the idea of the file has become digitally entrenched.
We teach files to undergraduates as if we were teaching them about photons. Indeed, I can more readily imagine physicists asking us to abandon the photon in a hundred years than computer scientists abandoning the file in a thousand.
An exaggeration, to be sure, but it's still a decent point.
As he gets further and further down his conclusions become more and more farfetched, and I don't agree with his dislike of UNIX, either (frankly I find the commandline to be somewhat empowering, although I dislike the knowledge-cult attitude that it seems to generate sometimes).
I think he makes a relatively salient point as well about content protection:
The most attractive designs, from the point of view of either democratic ideals or the profit motive, would have intermediate qualities; they would leak, but only a little. A little leakage greatly reduces the economic motivation for piracy as well as the cost of promotion. A little leakage gives context to and therefore enhances the value of everything.
To my eye, Apple's iPod and iTMS system is a system which leaks "a little." There's some content protection (keeping you from moving the files from the iPod to a friend's computer) but it's nothing that can't be bypassed by a bright 12-year-old. As such, it succeeds in being commercially viable -- as totally open systems aren't -- without disempowering users to the extent that competitors systems do. They could have been a lot more thorough with the copy protection; they were not and it shows. Instead they did what they needed to do to get it out the door. I'm sure there are other examples of this around, but having just restored a music collection from an iPod yesterday, this was foremost in my mind.
At any rate, I think it would be wrong to dismiss Lanier out of hand. I don't know his history or reputation -- apparently it's not great -- and I'm not sure how I feel about his politics regarding ultra-privatization of everything. But there are some things worth discussing in there, among the pretentious academic language. We'd be doing ourselves a bit of a disservice if we didn't bother to bring them up at all.
I'd dare say as soon as they created a browser that could render HTML and graphics we had all these things.
No, I can tell you exactly when the problems began, and that was with the BLINK tag.
Everything before that was pretty tame -- it's when things started to move that it got really obnoxious. From blinking crap it was pretty much a straight downward progression to animated GIF crap, and then to Flash crap.
I feel like putting that into Babelfish and seeing what it would look like, translated into German and back or something. I think it would probably just blow a fuse somewhere.
How about Vonage? Or just switch to using your cell phone as your primary phone line, and just keep your landline (with the ringer turned off) for true emergencies when you need to dial 911.
At least if you use a cell phone, it's illegal for telemarketers to call you, under the same law that makes junk faxes illegal: 47 U.S.C. Section 227.
In particular, this section (b) Restrictions on Use of Automated Telephone Equipment (1) Prohibitions. It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States - (A) to make any call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice -... (iii) to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;
Won't help against individual prank callers, but telemarketers (almost all of whom use automatic dialers) are pretty much blocked. I suppose one could try making their operators hand-dial each number in order to call it, and try to avoid the 'automatic dialer' restriction on a technicality, but I don't think it would hold up for very long.
Although I can't say about the pet rock, there is a connection having to do with window glass. The production of window glass was revolutionized by a process in which the molten glass is floated and cools on top of liquid metal, usually either tin or lead, which was in part developed by Henry Bessemer. Bessemer began his career as an inventor with the steel process that bears his name, the original purpose of which was improving the steel in artillery for the British military. There is apparently some argument as to whether Bessemer invented the process or just bankrolled and commercialized it, although it's his name that I've always heard in connection to the process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bessemer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_glass
An indirect connection I admit, but I'm sure if you dug deeper that there are more.
As for folk music and Janet Jackson's nipple, I think the issue is less assigning credit than one of assigning blame...
While I can't comment on your personal experience, I think I can at least offer a different one, based on what I believe to be a fair comparison between OS X and KDE. (If anything it ought to be biased towards KDE.) I have OS X on a rather ancient Power Mac G4/400, and Kubuntu -- that's Ubuntu with the kde packages installed -- on a 3.2GHz HP workstation, connected through a KVM switch. There's no point in comparing speed or responsiveness, because the hardware is so unbalanced. KDE is as fast as you'd think it ought to be on that system. Ubuntu, except for the wireless card, was as easy to install as OS X.
(Offtopic for a moment: I think there is a serious demand for someone to market a boxed, Linux-compatible WL card. On a Mac, if you want wireless, you buy an Airport card, and it costs $99 or $120 or whatever the going rate is, and it's worth every damn penny, because there's only one, and you never have to worry about drivers or chipsets. I bought what I thought would be a Linux compatible WL card, only to bring it home and find out they changed the chipset and I have to use some ghetto ndiswrapper driver which forces me to reboot in order to change the network's ssid. If I could have just gone into a store, bought The Linux Wireless Card(TM), and had it work as flawlessly as the AP card in a Mac does, it would have been $100 well spent.)
Once I got the KDE interface configured the way I wanted it, it's pretty usable. So point to it for being much more customizable. (I've never really wanted to customize OS X very much, probably because I'm just used to it, so this isn't much of a loss to me.) There are a lot more little 'glitches' in KDE though. Example: right now all of my menus in the menubar, the Mac-style, application-specific one, are stuck on the right hand side. I never put them there. I have no idea how to get them back against the left side where they belong. And yet they remain, with no obvious fix. It's not a huge problem, I can still get to everything, but it's annoying. Also, I use a 1024x768 resolution display, and parts of the control center windows -- the Wireless one, if memory serves -- stick down below the bottom of my screen, and there's no way to resize them without seeing the bottom corner. Therefore I have to use hotkeys to activate the buttons (such as Administrator) that are down there. I hope there's no important information on that part of the window -- I'll never know, because I can't see it. That's just poor design.
On the whole I prefer KDE to Gnome, and either one of those to Windows, but if you can get used to OS X and live with an interface that basically doesn't want to be customized on any sort of basic level, I think it's by far the most polished and easiest to work with. Sure there are some Apple apps with arguably bizarre interfaces (can you say brushed steel), but I've never seen any of the obvious gaffes that KDE has displayed.
You're missing the point. You don't need to use any of those utilities during installation of Linux. Just the same way that you don't need to use the DOS commands 'DIR' or 'CD' in Windows' installation process.
I've had some problems with my Linux system, including nontrivial ones related to the WL card and a bunch of ongoing interface annoyances. However I can't make a single complaint about the installation procedure. I did a pretty simple install, but it wouldn't have been any trouble to do something much more exotic/customized.
The Windows installer from what I've heard is equally easy to use in the basic case, but there's no capability there for doing something even slightly outside of the 'average user setup' in a straightforward way.
Actually, in the last 20 years, the most likely reason for a machine to "go bad" is a hard drive failure. Separate partitions aren't going to help you much if your head don't move.
This is not my experience at all. I have known a lot of people who have reformatted their hard drives, and it wasn't as the result of a physical problem with the drive (bad sectors, etc.). In fact, pretty much anyone who is just reformatting is not going to be doing it as a result of a hardware problem, because a bad hardware problem is going to hose the drive.
Many Windows users I've met reformat annually, and I've even heard some admins recommend this as SOP, to the point where people think a low-level reformat is a basic maintence activity. It's also the path that a lot of helpdesks recommend when they can't figure out what else is wrong with your machine, or if it's just "acting weird." Back up your data, reformat and reinstall.
The only Windows machine I use is a corporate issued one, and so far the latest one hasn't had any problems (five months and counting, knock on wood...). However I have some family members who insist on using Windows, and they seem to just get 'clogged up' from stupid programs they install, viruses and spy/adware, spy/adware removers, antivirus programs, etc. Most people have no idea where to begin cleaning that stuff off, and the easiest way to go is just to reformat. Cleaning off a computer could take several hours of a skilled person's time, reformatting might take longer, but a user can do it themselves and they've nobody to blame but themselves if they lose a document because they didn't back it up.
Anyway, my point is just that I think people reformat drives (under Windows anyway) constantly, and it has nothing to do with hardware failure. It's mostly due to bad user practices and a poorly designed OS.
That's only because of the horribly inefficient way we 'burn' Uranium; if we did even the most basic, 50-year-old reprocessing of spent fuel, there would be more than enough nuclear fuel to last generations. And that's without fast plutonium breeders, which personally I think are one of the most brilliant inventions that nobody seems to care about (unless you're interested in building an atomic bomb). They really are like a car that you can fill full of water, drive 300 miles, and then pump out a tank full of gasoline.
Right now we use Uranium pretty much like we use oil: we put it in a power plant, split it into some waste components, extract a little energy from it, and throw away everything else. It's totally non-renewable, totally wasteful. It's nothing like the system that was envisioned for nuclear power back 50 years ago.
Frankly I think it's a mistake to build any new nuclear plants right now, when they would probably be of the old type. All we're doing is using up a finite resource (uranium) in a hideously inefficient way. It would be better for our civilization in the long run if we waited until we were really desparate and willing to break down the political barriers to the full fuel cycle before building new plants -- that way we wouldn't waste nuclear fuels in the same way that we wasted fossil ones.
Years from now, maybe generations from now, people are going to look back at the reactors currently operating for commercial power generation in the U.S. and cringe. The wasted potential energy in the fuels that they consume is just enormous, and some day, we're going to wish we hadn't squandered it.
Er, so where exactly are you saying that oil comes from, then? And more to the point, why does it matter whether it's a fossil fuel, or was produced as part of a purely inorganic geological process, or came from long-dead oil fairies, or was just planted here deep in the earth by God... if they're not making any more of it, then it's irreplacable and non-renewable, and we need to find a different source of energy.
That sounds like pretty interesting technology. Any chance of a link or reference? I wonder what's involved -- there has to be a catch, otherwise as the other poster pointed out, it would be more than cost effective to do the same for gold and the platinum-series metals.
Actually a lot of the spent fuel components could be reprocessed, it's only politics that keeps that from happening. In terms of a full fuel cycle, we only do about half of it. (I'm not sure about the French, they may do a more complete version, but to my knowledge even they don't do the Pu breeding.) There would be significantly less ultra-high level waste if all the fuel was reprocessed.
You can thank Jimmy Carter for the lack of fuel reprocessing in the U.S., he banned it by Executive Order, if memory serves...
Battery-electric cars aren't 100% either. It takes a lot more energy to charge a battery than you get back out of it. Although I'm not sure what the particular figures are for what the state-of-the-art is these days, many smaller battery systems dissapate a lot of energy as heat as they're charging. Enough so they have to have heatsinks or big air cooling systems.
And of course you have significant energy losses in production (a nontrivial portion of a generator's output actually goes back into that same generator, to energize it's coils), and distribution of electricity.
I'd be interested to see what the overall efficiency, source to tires, is for battery-electric versus hydrogen-electric vehicles. And of course the economic analysis, which might cause one to win out over the other regardless of potential efficiency.
Hydroelectric dams are not "clean." They are in reality far from it.
While they don't release toxic gasses into the atmosphere directly, the contribute to vast water pollution problems by blocking the natural flow and aeration of rivers. A quickly flowing river is like a sewage treatment plant -- you can dump quite a bit of organic waste into it upstream, and it will be clean by the time it runs into the ocean. However if you dam that river and make long stretches of it stagnant, the water flowing downstream of the dam will be much more polluted.
This is a significant problem in Maine, which has high amounts of organic waste from paper mills. This wouldn't be a big problem, and is not in excess of what could be handled by many rivers (e.g. the Androscoggin) except that hydropower projects have removed many rapids on the river and cause the pollution to remain. There are experiments to artifically aerate the water behind dams, just as you'd do in a fish tank, by pumping air down to the bottom and allowing it to bubble up, but they're not nearly as effective as rapids used to be. And of course you pretty much kill the native fish population overnight, if they are one of the species that swims upstream to spawn.
I can imagine in other areas that organophosphate pollution from fertilizers is a similar problem when you dam a river. Plus regular old sewage effluent can be problematic if the river isn't flowing quickly.
There is a public perception that dams are "clean energy" but in reality this isn't precisely true. There are huge ecological downsides to hydropower projects, which are not normally considered (and definitely weren't considered when many of them were constructed, in their defense). Arguing against nuclear power by saying "build more hydro dams!" isn't a particularly useful response.
To be perfectly honest, although nobody wants any sort of power generation facility in their back yard, I'd much prefer to have a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood, than to have my neighborhood be under 20' of polluted water.
I just did some research...my un-implemented idea about submerging a mobo in oil was a while ago, and at the time I was never able to find any supporting information on it. It seems now though that a lot of people had the same idea, and a few of them have even gotten it to work.
Also, I found the name of the material used in the Cray II's submersion cooling system. It's called Fluorinert FC-77, and it's made by 3M. Electrically inert, not toxic to the touch (unlike PCB based transformer oils), great heat transfer properties... too bad it's ridiculously expensive. The cheapest place that sells it in small quantities (3M wants you to buy 11 lbs.!) has it for $240 a liter. Apparently it's used in the cooling systems of some lasers. http://www.parallax-tech.com/fluorine.htm
I can't find a picture of a mineral oil cooled one (although there are references to a Slashdot story), but I think if I were going to do it, I'd definitely go for some sort of inorganic or synthetic liquid. Having a rancid vat of vegetable oil on my desk just doesn't appeal to me at all. These guys will sell you a 5gal jug of "odorless, tasteless, crystal clear, technical grade white mineral oil" for $54.45 (and they have 55gal drums available, if you want to go into business). They have a bunch of viscosities available, I just looked at the lowest one. http://www.steoil.com/catalog.asp?productgroup=70t
While I get your point, the fact that the machine shut down when the ambient air temperature reached 85 degrees F says nothing about the internal temperature of the machine.
If you were in a room where the only heat source was a big computer, and the temperature in the room started to rise appreciably, up to where it started to become uncomfortably warm (I consider 85F "uncomfortably warm") you had better bet that there are parts in the machine that are a LOT hotter than 85 degrees!
So really they were just using a very indirect method of temperature monitoring; or perhaps someone had determined that the mainframe's heat-dissipation equipment couldn't achieve break-even when the ambient temperature was above a certain level. Either way, there were parts in that machine that probably would have hurt your hands to touch.
I don't know whether computers today are hotter or cooler than machines with equivalent processing power in years past, but if they are hotter than it's at least in part to the dependence on air cooling and small form factors. The big iron in years past was physically larger (so smaller concentrations of heat) and often had plumbed-in cooling systems or at least dedicated HVAC systems. Now we expect a system to run at similar temperatures, in an unventilated closet.
Although we call it "water" cooling, there's no reason why you actually have to use water. Other than that it's cheap and easily available. You could alternately fill the system with some sort of nonconductive refrigerant, or even fill it with Freon and keep it pressurized, so that if there was a leak, the fluid would just boil off.
I had an idea a while back to get a big tub of nonconductive liquid and just submerge the whole motherboard in it. I never got around to actually trying it, but it's been in the back of my mind for a while. I think it might affect capacitances and inductances though, and I'm not sure what that would do to (for example) the timing circuits. I got the idea looking back at the old Cray IIs, in which the processor was submerged in some sort of coolant bath, and supposedly the coolant was designed to have a boiling point that would be reached by the hottest parts of the processor -- thereby taking away the heat through the state change. Plus, what I really wanted to immerse the parts in was fluorochemical transformer oils, and let's just say the MSDSs on them will really give you pause, if you ever want to have children, or live that long.
Aside from working with a lot of nasty chemicals, the technology to do direct liquid cooling (where the coolant touches the chips, not where you liquid cool a heatsink that touches the chip) isn't new. Here's a good article on it: http://www.electronics-cooling.com/Resources/EC_Ar ticles/MAY96/may96_04.htm
I think in a rackmount environment, what you'd want is a dual-loop system. A small loop, contained entirely in the case and permanently sealed, which draws heat away from the chips and takes it to a heat exchanger at the back of the case, which you hook up to the building chilled water supply. That way the only connections (big leakage points) you have are away from the chips, and the only water is back there as well. When you consider the space given over in a modern 1U case to air cooling and airflow, the space savings could be significant, especially if you also offloaded the power supply to the bottom of the rack (water cooled DC power supplies are common laboratory fixtures).
Although you have a point, I also think there's a market for more upgrades (water/air cooling, etc.) with people who's computers are off warranty, and want to get them up to par again.
Not many regular users would consider overclocking their brand new system, which hopefully runs everything fine out of the box, but a year or two later it starts to seem like a better and better idea. By then the warranty has expired, and maybe the computer has gotten handed down from Mom and Dad to Junior, and there aren't as many downsides to experimenting on it.
Actually I think the timing on this is good -- right as a new MS upgrade is set to come out and people start to think about the "buy or upgrade" decision.
turns almost al the electricity it uses into computing power
Um, and exactly what kind of output does this computing power take? So if I have a processor that puts out 90% "computing power" and 10% heat... that computing power is... what, exactly? More powerful output signals on the video card?
Oh, you mean there isn't such a thing, and pretty much all the energy used to compute gets turned into heat anyway?
Computers don't do any real work in the physics/engineering sense; in fact a good thermodynamic approximation of your 110W processor would be a big resistor (I think 1.31 ohms would do it at 12VDC). That it's doing anything useful other than converting electricity to heat is pretty subjective.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty interesting idea. Normally when we think of phase-change cooling it's liquid to gas and vice versa, but solid to liquid phase change is certainly an option too.
What I wonder about though, is whether in a conventional (atmospheric) application, you would end up with voids in the parafin (or other material with low melting point) as it heated and cooled. Obviously this would be a bad thing and could lead to overheating of the chips. I don't know much about the physical properties of parafin -- does it expand and contract as it heats and cools? If so then it seems like it could easily form voids around the chips.
I once worked with a liquid, some sort of long-chain polymer, that had a freezing point of around 40F. If you chilled the whole thing slightly below it's freezing point, that might be able to work in much the same way. Provided of course that it's a dielectric.
I should call 3M and see if they can find me a non-conductive, inert, non-volitale chemical to submerge a PC in. I'm sure they make one.
You should. But I'll save you the trouble.
It's called 3M Fluorinert, and now that it's come up in two separate discussions in two days, I now know more about the stuff than I ever wanted to. (Great use of company time, eh?)
This is the 3M page about it, they make a bunch of different varieties for various purposes. I believe what you'd want to use on a computer is the '77' variety. (I'm told that's what the Cray II used.) 3M Fluorinert
Some people who will sell it to you in small quantities (3M wants you to buy 11 lbs.)
And here's the obligatory Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert
Well, it was done by the Cray II, in about 1983 (okay, that was with Fluorinert, not vegetable oil, but anyway), so it's not exactly a new idea or anything.
4 2&cid=14422980 (This is the article about the new Corsair watercooling rig)
It's interesting that this came up as an article, because in another thread I'd been discussing it yesterday:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733
I think that we're going to see more stuff like this in the future. I don't think vegetable oil is where it's going to be though -- there are a lot better liquids that you can use, which conduct heat far more effectively. I found a place within a few minutes of googling that is willing to sell anyone 1gal or 5gal jugs of light white mineral oil (a petroleum product) for relatively cheap, in various viscosities. I think that would make a lot more sense than using some sort of organic oil that's going to go bad.
And if you were going to use it in anything serious, you'd really want to get 3M Fluorinert. It's expensive as hell, but it's designed for exactly this purpose.
I think the biggest issue I take with Lanier's Luddite Revolution is that it doesn't consider human nature. Even if the proletriat's cost of living retreated more quickly than their income, so that their standard of living went up, it still would have a destabilizing effect on society if there is no clear path up the societal ladder.
American society is maintained, in part anyway, because there is a widespread perception that it is possible for a person to be a 'self-made man.' That is, no matter how poor or unskilled or stupid or whatever you are, it is possible -- however unlikely -- for you to own a 3-bedroom house and drive a Ford and have a wife and kids. And although we are becoming more cynical by the day and many of us would say that we don't believe in the 'american dream nonsense,' people act as though they are attempting to realize that dream all the time.
Also, there is a self-fulling prophecy at work here. When someone does manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fullfill the self-made-person fantasy, they normally receive a certain amount of notoriety for it (at least in extreme cases). This publicity helps to reinforce the idea that such a climb up the social ladder is possible, and keeps people at the bottom at work every day.
If you were -- perhaps through germline genetic engineering or biological/technological fusion -- to create an unbridgeable chasm between the 'haves' and 'have nots,' so that it was no longer possible for a low-class person to even imagine that they might one day be able to join the ranks of the well-to-do, you would remove a lot of of the reason why people at the bottom of society go to work every morning. It would destabilize society, and could easily result either in a revolution, or in the upper-class being required to use force in order to constantly suppress the threat of one.
The fact that they can buy a refrigerator or a big-screen TV isn't going to keep people from strapping blocks of C4 and nails to their chests, when they know that there are people in society that have riches -- vastly prolonged lives, for instance -- that they can barely dream about and will never have. There is a strong human tendency to despise anyone who has something that you cannot get, and which we keep in check only by collectively believing in the notion that anyone can achieve anything if they really try. If we made that notion -- fallacious as it may be -- completely implausible, we'd really be in trouble.
I thought that part of the essay was interesting, also.
I wasn't aware of this Tandem system, I'll have to look into it. I wonder what other non-file-based filesystems there were out there (would it be right to even call such a thing a filesystem?). I've never heard of one, although I have heard of the filesystem-as-a-database idea. The concept being that rather than UNIX's "everything is a file" concept, you'd have a world where "everything is a database entry." I'm not sure how this would work for I/O, and frankly it's difficult for me to think of a computer system that didn't use discrete files, but I think it's a worthwhile thing to consider.
Especially as computers get more powerful, the individual end user will have even more surplus performance to work with. In the past it would have been impractical to have every system do all of it's disk access through some sort of relational database, but as you have more and more surplus processing power and I/O bandwidth on the 'average user' desktop, previously impractical alternatives become possible.
It's unfortunate that Lanier was so pretentious in his presentation, because I think there are a few interesting ideas in the essay that would probably lead to interesting discussion, but I think the context drove a lot of people into an instantly negative response.
He makes an interesting point about the idea of files and how entrenched that idea is. I would take this further and say that the whole idea of the desktop metaphor is very entrenched, although I don't think I'd go so far as to say that we'll necessarily still be using it in a thousand years.
An exaggeration, to be sure, but it's still a decent point.
As he gets further and further down his conclusions become more and more farfetched, and I don't agree with his dislike of UNIX, either (frankly I find the commandline to be somewhat empowering, although I dislike the knowledge-cult attitude that it seems to generate sometimes).
I think he makes a relatively salient point as well about content protection:
To my eye, Apple's iPod and iTMS system is a system which leaks "a little." There's some content protection (keeping you from moving the files from the iPod to a friend's computer) but it's nothing that can't be bypassed by a bright 12-year-old. As such, it succeeds in being commercially viable -- as totally open systems aren't -- without disempowering users to the extent that competitors systems do. They could have been a lot more thorough with the copy protection; they were not and it shows. Instead they did what they needed to do to get it out the door. I'm sure there are other examples of this around, but having just restored a music collection from an iPod yesterday, this was foremost in my mind.
At any rate, I think it would be wrong to dismiss Lanier out of hand. I don't know his history or reputation -- apparently it's not great -- and I'm not sure how I feel about his politics regarding ultra-privatization of everything. But there are some things worth discussing in there, among the pretentious academic language. We'd be doing ourselves a bit of a disservice if we didn't bother to bring them up at all.
I'd dare say as soon as they created a browser that could render HTML and graphics we had all these things.
No, I can tell you exactly when the problems began, and that was with the BLINK tag.
Everything before that was pretty tame -- it's when things started to move that it got really obnoxious. From blinking crap it was pretty much a straight downward progression to animated GIF crap, and then to Flash crap.
My hat off to you, sir.
I feel like putting that into Babelfish and seeing what it would look like, translated into German and back or something. I think it would probably just blow a fuse somewhere.
How about Vonage? Or just switch to using your cell phone as your primary phone line, and just keep your landline (with the ringer turned off) for true emergencies when you need to dial 911.
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At least if you use a cell phone, it's illegal for telemarketers to call you, under the same law that makes junk faxes illegal: 47 U.S.C. Section 227.
In particular, this section
(b) Restrictions on Use of Automated Telephone Equipment
(1) Prohibitions. It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States -
(A) to make any call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice -
(iii) to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;
Won't help against individual prank callers, but telemarketers (almost all of whom use automatic dialers) are pretty much blocked. I suppose one could try making their operators hand-dial each number in order to call it, and try to avoid the 'automatic dialer' restriction on a technicality, but I don't think it would hold up for very long.
Although I can't say about the pet rock, there is a connection having to do with window glass. The production of window glass was revolutionized by a process in which the molten glass is floated and cools on top of liquid metal, usually either tin or lead, which was in part developed by Henry Bessemer. Bessemer began his career as an inventor with the steel process that bears his name, the original purpose of which was improving the steel in artillery for the British military. There is apparently some argument as to whether Bessemer invented the process or just bankrolled and commercialized it, although it's his name that I've always heard in connection to the process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bessemer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_glass
An indirect connection I admit, but I'm sure if you dug deeper that there are more.
As for folk music and Janet Jackson's nipple, I think the issue is less assigning credit than one of assigning blame...
While I can't comment on your personal experience, I think I can at least offer a different one, based on what I believe to be a fair comparison between OS X and KDE. (If anything it ought to be biased towards KDE.) I have OS X on a rather ancient Power Mac G4/400, and Kubuntu -- that's Ubuntu with the kde packages installed -- on a 3.2GHz HP workstation, connected through a KVM switch. There's no point in comparing speed or responsiveness, because the hardware is so unbalanced. KDE is as fast as you'd think it ought to be on that system. Ubuntu, except for the wireless card, was as easy to install as OS X.
(Offtopic for a moment: I think there is a serious demand for someone to market a boxed, Linux-compatible WL card. On a Mac, if you want wireless, you buy an Airport card, and it costs $99 or $120 or whatever the going rate is, and it's worth every damn penny, because there's only one, and you never have to worry about drivers or chipsets. I bought what I thought would be a Linux compatible WL card, only to bring it home and find out they changed the chipset and I have to use some ghetto ndiswrapper driver which forces me to reboot in order to change the network's ssid. If I could have just gone into a store, bought The Linux Wireless Card(TM), and had it work as flawlessly as the AP card in a Mac does, it would have been $100 well spent.)
Once I got the KDE interface configured the way I wanted it, it's pretty usable. So point to it for being much more customizable. (I've never really wanted to customize OS X very much, probably because I'm just used to it, so this isn't much of a loss to me.) There are a lot more little 'glitches' in KDE though. Example: right now all of my menus in the menubar, the Mac-style, application-specific one, are stuck on the right hand side. I never put them there. I have no idea how to get them back against the left side where they belong. And yet they remain, with no obvious fix. It's not a huge problem, I can still get to everything, but it's annoying. Also, I use a 1024x768 resolution display, and parts of the control center windows -- the Wireless one, if memory serves -- stick down below the bottom of my screen, and there's no way to resize them without seeing the bottom corner. Therefore I have to use hotkeys to activate the buttons (such as Administrator) that are down there. I hope there's no important information on that part of the window -- I'll never know, because I can't see it. That's just poor design.
On the whole I prefer KDE to Gnome, and either one of those to Windows, but if you can get used to OS X and live with an interface that basically doesn't want to be customized on any sort of basic level, I think it's by far the most polished and easiest to work with. Sure there are some Apple apps with arguably bizarre interfaces (can you say brushed steel), but I've never seen any of the obvious gaffes that KDE has displayed.
You're missing the point. You don't need to use any of those utilities during installation of Linux. Just the same way that you don't need to use the DOS commands 'DIR' or 'CD' in Windows' installation process.
I've had some problems with my Linux system, including nontrivial ones related to the WL card and a bunch of ongoing interface annoyances. However I can't make a single complaint about the installation procedure. I did a pretty simple install, but it wouldn't have been any trouble to do something much more exotic/customized.
The Windows installer from what I've heard is equally easy to use in the basic case, but there's no capability there for doing something even slightly outside of the 'average user setup' in a straightforward way.
Actually, in the last 20 years, the most likely reason for a machine to "go bad" is a hard drive failure. Separate partitions aren't going to help you much if your head don't move.
This is not my experience at all. I have known a lot of people who have reformatted their hard drives, and it wasn't as the result of a physical problem with the drive (bad sectors, etc.). In fact, pretty much anyone who is just reformatting is not going to be doing it as a result of a hardware problem, because a bad hardware problem is going to hose the drive.
Many Windows users I've met reformat annually, and I've even heard some admins recommend this as SOP, to the point where people think a low-level reformat is a basic maintence activity. It's also the path that a lot of helpdesks recommend when they can't figure out what else is wrong with your machine, or if it's just "acting weird." Back up your data, reformat and reinstall.
The only Windows machine I use is a corporate issued one, and so far the latest one hasn't had any problems (five months and counting, knock on wood...). However I have some family members who insist on using Windows, and they seem to just get 'clogged up' from stupid programs they install, viruses and spy/adware, spy/adware removers, antivirus programs, etc. Most people have no idea where to begin cleaning that stuff off, and the easiest way to go is just to reformat. Cleaning off a computer could take several hours of a skilled person's time, reformatting might take longer, but a user can do it themselves and they've nobody to blame but themselves if they lose a document because they didn't back it up.
Anyway, my point is just that I think people reformat drives (under Windows anyway) constantly, and it has nothing to do with hardware failure. It's mostly due to bad user practices and a poorly designed OS.
But would it run Linux?
(Correct response -- if's a Segway, then yes, just slowly.)
That's only because of the horribly inefficient way we 'burn' Uranium; if we did even the most basic, 50-year-old reprocessing of spent fuel, there would be more than enough nuclear fuel to last generations. And that's without fast plutonium breeders, which personally I think are one of the most brilliant inventions that nobody seems to care about (unless you're interested in building an atomic bomb). They really are like a car that you can fill full of water, drive 300 miles, and then pump out a tank full of gasoline.
Right now we use Uranium pretty much like we use oil: we put it in a power plant, split it into some waste components, extract a little energy from it, and throw away everything else. It's totally non-renewable, totally wasteful. It's nothing like the system that was envisioned for nuclear power back 50 years ago.
Frankly I think it's a mistake to build any new nuclear plants right now, when they would probably be of the old type. All we're doing is using up a finite resource (uranium) in a hideously inefficient way. It would be better for our civilization in the long run if we waited until we were really desparate and willing to break down the political barriers to the full fuel cycle before building new plants -- that way we wouldn't waste nuclear fuels in the same way that we wasted fossil ones.
Years from now, maybe generations from now, people are going to look back at the reactors currently operating for commercial power generation in the U.S. and cringe. The wasted potential energy in the fuels that they consume is just enormous, and some day, we're going to wish we hadn't squandered it.
Er, so where exactly are you saying that oil comes from, then? And more to the point, why does it matter whether it's a fossil fuel, or was produced as part of a purely inorganic geological process, or came from long-dead oil fairies, or was just planted here deep in the earth by God ... if they're not making any more of it, then it's irreplacable and non-renewable, and we need to find a different source of energy.
That sounds like pretty interesting technology. Any chance of a link or reference? I wonder what's involved -- there has to be a catch, otherwise as the other poster pointed out, it would be more than cost effective to do the same for gold and the platinum-series metals.
Actually a lot of the spent fuel components could be reprocessed, it's only politics that keeps that from happening. In terms of a full fuel cycle, we only do about half of it. (I'm not sure about the French, they may do a more complete version, but to my knowledge even they don't do the Pu breeding.) There would be significantly less ultra-high level waste if all the fuel was reprocessed.
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You can thank Jimmy Carter for the lack of fuel reprocessing in the U.S., he banned it by Executive Order, if memory serves
Battery-electric cars aren't 100% either. It takes a lot more energy to charge a battery than you get back out of it. Although I'm not sure what the particular figures are for what the state-of-the-art is these days, many smaller battery systems dissapate a lot of energy as heat as they're charging. Enough so they have to have heatsinks or big air cooling systems.
And of course you have significant energy losses in production (a nontrivial portion of a generator's output actually goes back into that same generator, to energize it's coils), and distribution of electricity.
I'd be interested to see what the overall efficiency, source to tires, is for battery-electric versus hydrogen-electric vehicles. And of course the economic analysis, which might cause one to win out over the other regardless of potential efficiency.
Hydroelectric dams are not "clean." They are in reality far from it.
While they don't release toxic gasses into the atmosphere directly, the contribute to vast water pollution problems by blocking the natural flow and aeration of rivers. A quickly flowing river is like a sewage treatment plant -- you can dump quite a bit of organic waste into it upstream, and it will be clean by the time it runs into the ocean. However if you dam that river and make long stretches of it stagnant, the water flowing downstream of the dam will be much more polluted.
This is a significant problem in Maine, which has high amounts of organic waste from paper mills. This wouldn't be a big problem, and is not in excess of what could be handled by many rivers (e.g. the Androscoggin) except that hydropower projects have removed many rapids on the river and cause the pollution to remain. There are experiments to artifically aerate the water behind dams, just as you'd do in a fish tank, by pumping air down to the bottom and allowing it to bubble up, but they're not nearly as effective as rapids used to be. And of course you pretty much kill the native fish population overnight, if they are one of the species that swims upstream to spawn.
I can imagine in other areas that organophosphate pollution from fertilizers is a similar problem when you dam a river. Plus regular old sewage effluent can be problematic if the river isn't flowing quickly.
There is a public perception that dams are "clean energy" but in reality this isn't precisely true. There are huge ecological downsides to hydropower projects, which are not normally considered (and definitely weren't considered when many of them were constructed, in their defense). Arguing against nuclear power by saying "build more hydro dams!" isn't a particularly useful response.
To be perfectly honest, although nobody wants any sort of power generation facility in their back yard, I'd much prefer to have a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood, than to have my neighborhood be under 20' of polluted water.
I just did some research...my un-implemented idea about submerging a mobo in oil was a while ago, and at the time I was never able to find any supporting information on it. It seems now though that a lot of people had the same idea, and a few of them have even gotten it to work.
... too bad it's ridiculously expensive. The cheapest place that sells it in small quantities (3M wants you to buy 11 lbs.!) has it for $240 a liter. Apparently it's used in the cooling systems of some lasers.
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Also, I found the name of the material used in the Cray II's submersion cooling system. It's called Fluorinert FC-77, and it's made by 3M. Electrically inert, not toxic to the touch (unlike PCB based transformer oils), great heat transfer properties
http://www.parallax-tech.com/fluorine.htm
However there are people who have successfully cooled systems by submerging them in vegetable and sunflower oil:
http://www.hwspirit.com/reviews.php?read=16 Sunflower Oil
http://www.markusleonhardt.de/en/oelbilder.html German, Vegetable Oil (?), even submerges the PS
I can't find a picture of a mineral oil cooled one (although there are references to a Slashdot story), but I think if I were going to do it, I'd definitely go for some sort of inorganic or synthetic liquid. Having a rancid vat of vegetable oil on my desk just doesn't appeal to me at all.
These guys will sell you a 5gal jug of "odorless, tasteless, crystal clear, technical grade white mineral oil" for $54.45 (and they have 55gal drums available, if you want to go into business). They have a bunch of viscosities available, I just looked at the lowest one.
http://www.steoil.com/catalog.asp?productgroup=70
While I get your point, the fact that the machine shut down when the ambient air temperature reached 85 degrees F says nothing about the internal temperature of the machine.
If you were in a room where the only heat source was a big computer, and the temperature in the room started to rise appreciably, up to where it started to become uncomfortably warm (I consider 85F "uncomfortably warm") you had better bet that there are parts in the machine that are a LOT hotter than 85 degrees!
So really they were just using a very indirect method of temperature monitoring; or perhaps someone had determined that the mainframe's heat-dissipation equipment couldn't achieve break-even when the ambient temperature was above a certain level. Either way, there were parts in that machine that probably would have hurt your hands to touch.
I don't know whether computers today are hotter or cooler than machines with equivalent processing power in years past, but if they are hotter than it's at least in part to the dependence on air cooling and small form factors. The big iron in years past was physically larger (so smaller concentrations of heat) and often had plumbed-in cooling systems or at least dedicated HVAC systems. Now we expect a system to run at similar temperatures, in an unventilated closet.
Although we call it "water" cooling, there's no reason why you actually have to use water. Other than that it's cheap and easily available. You could alternately fill the system with some sort of nonconductive refrigerant, or even fill it with Freon and keep it pressurized, so that if there was a leak, the fluid would just boil off.
r ticles/MAY96/may96_04.htm
I had an idea a while back to get a big tub of nonconductive liquid and just submerge the whole motherboard in it. I never got around to actually trying it, but it's been in the back of my mind for a while. I think it might affect capacitances and inductances though, and I'm not sure what that would do to (for example) the timing circuits. I got the idea looking back at the old Cray IIs, in which the processor was submerged in some sort of coolant bath, and supposedly the coolant was designed to have a boiling point that would be reached by the hottest parts of the processor -- thereby taking away the heat through the state change. Plus, what I really wanted to immerse the parts in was fluorochemical transformer oils, and let's just say the MSDSs on them will really give you pause, if you ever want to have children, or live that long.
Aside from working with a lot of nasty chemicals, the technology to do direct liquid cooling (where the coolant touches the chips, not where you liquid cool a heatsink that touches the chip) isn't new. Here's a good article on it:
http://www.electronics-cooling.com/Resources/EC_A
I think in a rackmount environment, what you'd want is a dual-loop system. A small loop, contained entirely in the case and permanently sealed, which draws heat away from the chips and takes it to a heat exchanger at the back of the case, which you hook up to the building chilled water supply. That way the only connections (big leakage points) you have are away from the chips, and the only water is back there as well. When you consider the space given over in a modern 1U case to air cooling and airflow, the space savings could be significant, especially if you also offloaded the power supply to the bottom of the rack (water cooled DC power supplies are common laboratory fixtures).
Although you have a point, I also think there's a market for more upgrades (water/air cooling, etc.) with people who's computers are off warranty, and want to get them up to par again.
Not many regular users would consider overclocking their brand new system, which hopefully runs everything fine out of the box, but a year or two later it starts to seem like a better and better idea. By then the warranty has expired, and maybe the computer has gotten handed down from Mom and Dad to Junior, and there aren't as many downsides to experimenting on it.
Actually I think the timing on this is good -- right as a new MS upgrade is set to come out and people start to think about the "buy or upgrade" decision.
turns almost al the electricity it uses into computing power
... that computing power is ... what, exactly? More powerful output signals on the video card?
Um, and exactly what kind of output does this computing power take? So if I have a processor that puts out 90% "computing power" and 10% heat
Oh, you mean there isn't such a thing, and pretty much all the energy used to compute gets turned into heat anyway?
Computers don't do any real work in the physics/engineering sense; in fact a good thermodynamic approximation of your 110W processor would be a big resistor (I think 1.31 ohms would do it at 12VDC). That it's doing anything useful other than converting electricity to heat is pretty subjective.