With generation IV reactors there is already enough uranium and other actinides on hand to power a fleet of 100 gigawatt size reactors for 60,000 years.
It would be nice if you checked your facts.
With fuel reprocessing we're good for at least 50 years.
There isn't a single claim backed up and furthermore all the claims are false.
Generation IV reactors have been tested. There is enough uranium already mined to power a fleet of more than 100 gigawatt CIV reactors for more than 60,000 years. Is this what he means by temporary?
"better solutions within our grasp"? Boy - thats a good one with oil at $136 per barrel and Gas on the climb.
We're in trouble folks... serious trouble. All we need now is the water cut in the Ghawar field to head north. When this happens we'll lose perhaps as much as 5 million barrels of oil production per day. When the North Sea and Pemex's Canterall fields went into decline the rate was 15% per year. If Saudi Arabia follows this pattern then we'll start to lose 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. I personally expect this will happen within a few years.
Yup. You are 100% correct that ISP's like to charge extra for a static IP. Since I run statics I know exactly what you are saying.
I was on the phone with my Bank's security people last week and suggested they look into static IP's as a method to guard against identity theft. They have a HUGE exposure. Moving to statics for the general population would really help them from two standpoints.
1) They could implement a white list for their clients.
2) In the case of unauthorized access the IP can be given to the cops.
There are probably other advantages as well.
Now the thing is the ISP industry will not offer them for the reasons you pointed out. However we can urge to have legislation passed and then they have to offer them. Sometimes laws can be used to good advantage to make good things happen.
As for the issue of the ISP lumping torrents in with spam? Spam is on a separate port. Problem solved.
Perhaps I'll call my MP's office and offer to work on a committee to address some of these issues. I'd urge others to as well. It might take a while to figure out what might work and what might not, but addressing the issue is unlikely to be negative.
I think one thing that is totally clear is that an ISP who offers a connection to a spammer is totally irresponsible yet this happens and while they denied it they were quite happy to cash the cheques.
It is totally unbelievable that an ISP would not be able to monitor traffic on a certain port from a certain IP address and note that its spam.
Getting laws to force ISP's to shut down spammers would be a really good start. It might even solve most of the problems. As for enforcement? Well - we have the source IP addresses. If we have the law on the books and the enforcement people in place then this becomes transparent. All we need to do is simply advise the enforcement people of the issue.
A quiet call can be made to the management of the ISP. If the problem continues then the ISP faces a fine for non-compliance. Eventually they will get the message or they will no longer be in business.
A side affect of legislation like this is that when the plug gets pulled this will create an incentive for the owner of the infected computer to do something about their problem.
What of overseas spam? I figure if one country does something like then then maybe most countries will follow suit. As for the ones who don't? I don't know. Perhaps other measures can be found to contain that problem. I'm reminded of the incident where Telstra in Australia was black-listed. Telstra cleaned up its act rather quickly.
The thing is that at this point we are leaving it to the individual to protect themselves and for the most part the vast majority of the population simply is not up to speed in this area and never will be. Furthermore the problem is getting worse.
You know... we don't let people drive without a drivers license and insurance. The general public has to start taking some responsibility here.
I would suggest some measures we can use:
1) static IP's. Then we can easily track down infected machines and take them offline.
2) Laws that require people to assume some form of responsibility when they connect a computer to the net.
3) Perhaps some form of compulsory insurance policy.
4) Laws that require ISP's to disconnect spam bots and take some responsibility.
If we had people throwing garbage from the windows of their cars we'd probably urge more enforcement of anti-littering laws. But what if these people were spewing porn? If we had a trespass issue as bad as the spam issue then we'd urge more enforcement of laws already on the books.
In the case of spam, we don't have the laws we need for the most part.
There are people who are responsible. I should think we can figure out ways to encourage them to clean up their act. The thing is this is not harmless. Many of these spams are NOT suitable for children and many children have net access. It is not even possible for most parents to screen this.
Perhaps we need enforcement of some of the child pornography legislation. A for instance is that if some adult is so irresponsible as to discard their used porn rags in a school yard then I don't think ignorance would be considered a suitable defense. Yet that same individual who allows his computer to remain part of a botnet which dumps porn into computers children have access to is somehow innocent? I don't think so.
It would take only a few cases and the public would wise up real fast.
An ICE is a pump. It can be run as a pump and pump air into a pressure tank which can later be bled off. So an ICE actually can use regenerative techniques.
costs will decrease, but to you and me gasoline will always be the same price. As long as the energy can be controlled by a small group of despots we will only ever see our costs continue rising
Where pray tell do you get these crazy ideas?
Why don't you educate yourself and read some articles from here:
www.aspo-usa.com
The main reason the price of oil and gas is up is because we have a supply side constraint and too damn many people refuse to drive a reasonable car. Instead they sit 6 abreast in grid lock with their A/C cranked up and the Radio cranked up usually each by themselves in an SUV weighing in the TONS!
The USA burns about 22 million BOPD and could cut this easily by 1/3 if they just drove a reasonable car like say a small/mid sized diesel or a hybrid. This would immediately drop the price of oil to under $50 per barrel.
Even in a 3rd world you would need to hoist a 550 lbs weight up an 18 foot tower every hour in order to provide 5 watts for the hour. This is 1/200th of a kilowatt hour which is worth about 10 cents in the developed world. We can produce a kilowatt hour of power from nuclear sources for about 2 cents.
You can think of it this way as well. Every hour hoist a 55 gallon drum of water up an 18 foot tower and you will not get enough energy to run a single low energy compact flourescent bulb.
These numbers look right. 1 HP is 550 foot lbs per second. There are 745 watts in 1 HP.
If he uses 50 lbs over a 4 foot drop then this is 200 foot lbs per 4 hours or 50 foot lbs per hour. 50 / 3600 is 0.0139 HP * 745 = 10.34 watts. Given the mechanical efficiency of his generator this should power a small CFL or LED without issue.
Now the thing is that for an off grid house, something like this might make a great deal of sense. One can increase the height by using a block and tackle and increase the weight. If we say got to 550 LBS over a height of say 20 feet then we have 13.75 times the energy and this will produce 142 watts for 4 hours.
Off grid this could run enough lighting for the evening. It could power some low power appliances as well. 142 watts for 5 hours is worth about 5.68 cents at 10 cents per Kilowatt hour. This doesn't sound like much, but the issue is that it might only take a few minuets to hoist the weight with a block and tackle (or horse!).
Furthermore one can use say a windmill to provide the energy and lift it by hand only when needed.
Note that water stored in a large tank might make more sense than a mechanical system.
I don't think one would want to back pack this in on a camping trip.
Another energy store would be to pressurize air. One just needs efficient pumps.
I do have an NT machine. Its 4.0 and it was ok. I never bothered to install 2K. I do own it mind you. As for XP - why bother?
Everything I need to do, my 1998 Linux machine does, and it does it rather well. Recently we had a power failure. There is a 60 amp hour deep cycle Hawker battery behind the UPS and it died! When I rebooted the message was that Linux had been up for 670 days. IMHO this is not bad.
As for your "embedded box I brought in to be my always-on (5 watts!) server", I'm looking for one of those.
Any suggestions where I can get one and what to look for?:-)
I'm not a gamer. I'm an investor. I spend a lot of time in the browser doing research. I cannot imagine what life might be like on a windows machine running IE with a single head and probably a bad keyboard.
Me? Dual heads... IBM PC 101 keyboard... Web Servers in the background running OpenBSD. Firewall runs OpenBSD too.
I expect the account numbers and passwords of more than 1/3 of the people who use windows have been harvested. My Broker suggests I should buy windows. The exposure my broker has is unmeasurable. My broker is owned by a rather large Canadian Bank! Oh Boy!
Am I biased? Yes, you bet I am.
Am I in the market for another machine? Maybe. It should be the size of a package of cigarettes (no I don't smoke). It should have at least two (2) nics. I'd like solid state. I'd like edge connectors so that I can live connect another unit to it if I can think of a reason to do so. If it likes 12 volts then this will be perfect because any old deep cycle battery can then power the thing which means I can use it off grid. My Hawker battery cost over $400 bux. This drives a UPS which puts out 120 volts AC which goes into a switching power supply which puts out 5 & 12 volts DC. I think there are some optimizations which can take place here.
My point? Its in the details: the future is smaller and better and re-thought. Linux is part of this.
Why buy a dinosaur? What 40 years ago filled a huge room and what 10 years ago could be toted in the boot of your average car can now be put in a shirt pocket... well not quite. But I'm not going to be buying an empty P.O.S. box which is about 1.5 feet tall and 6 inches wide and over a foot deep with a dinosaur OS when I know what I'm looking for should fit easily into my briefcase.
Take these ideas to the marketing folks.
Oh... marketing folks. HP "lost" Carley. (thank gawd. She didn't look good even with her paint job) HP tried to flog a 33s. HP now has a 35S out. It fits into my shirt pocket.
It does not have 2 nics. Still I think it might be possible to use it as a web server. This is what I'm looking for.
Clearly the dinosaur is not dead yet but I think I see some of the path to the future.
Small and cheap and reliable and flexible. yes - it has to run Linux.
I am under the impression that water / ethanol bends are not acceptable for modern engines and can cause damage. I don't know why. Can anyone advise?
I do know that if we don't push ethanol past the Azeotrope that refining is much easier. Also I know that water was injected into fighter plane engines during WWII to add power.... but apparently this lead to an engine overhaul.
It would seem to me that water injection or water entrainment in the fuel is a good idea because it will reduce the maximum combustion temperature which will reduce NOx production. Also water is 17x more dense than steam so it seems to me that as the water flashes over to steam that combustion pressure will increase and this should increase power and efficiency.
Comments please?
One other thing. If the USA converts 100% of its corn crop to ethanol it gains 2 weeks of liquid fuel supply. However we look at it... any ethanol poured into a gas tank will deprive someone or something of food. It might be a pigs mouth that doesn't get fed, but it will be a mouth somewhere.
Cellulose -> ethanol probably makes sense. Higher alcohols would be better. So far we really don't have the technology for this however. We can use pyrolysis though. The big issue is that we are short ofhydrogen. Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
If we use paper as the feedstock, then carbon solids are 24%. Since liquid fuels are alkanes they have the chemical formula C(n)H(2n+2). Thus if we start with a tonne of dry plant material we'll end up with about 1/2 tonne of carbon (which we can burn to provide energy for the plant). If we wish to convert this carbon to an alkane we'll need on average a little more than 2 hydrogen atoms for each carbon atom. One way we can get this is using the Fischer Tropsch process. Another way is via nuclear driven steam electrolysis or high temperature steam disassociation.
However it is done... we need these plants NOW! Oil at $100 per barrel is the writing on the wall.
The world is most likely past the peak of production. This means USA oil imports are going to start to drop whether they like it or not!
It really doesn't matter what laws congress might pass because the laws of nature are what people are going to follow and this includes auto manufacturers. When we start to see fuel shortages I expect we'll see gas rationing soon after.
So if someone wants to drive a gas guzzler, then fine, but they won't be driving it far.
People might like to believe they live in a fairy tale world created by Hollywood but the reality is that they live in a real world. This will be a world with less oil production in very short order. As the USA dollar tanks we can expect to see more oil exporting countries refuse to accept it. The consequences are obvious.
I predict that by 2020 the USA will be consuming about 15 million Barrels of Oil Per Day (MBOPD).
At present the consumption is about 20 MBOPD. So this will be a 25% reduction.
I also predict that Mathew Simmons prediction of Oil costing most than $300 per barrel will also be correct.
The short of it is that this is too little too late and I will not be surprised to see gas rationing within the next 10 years.
Bold eh? Or should I just look out my window and look at the footsteps in the snow with regard to the Canadian Oil industry? The latest? PetroCanada enters into a deal with Libya. PetroCanada pick up 75% of the cost for 25% of the results. Tell me... Why would ANY company enter into a deal like this? Its just more of the footsteps in the snow.
I have questions. Before I get to them... my experience with compact fluorescents... GREAT! I'm on my 2nd set now. One just died two days ago and I have temporarily replaced it with one left over from my first set. The specific model of the 2nd set is: Panasonic EFT 15E28. I use three (3) in my office in a whirly bird.
The first problem was solved as follow. The light projects upwards through the whirly bird and the fans created an annoying flickering reflection off the ceiling. A trip to the hardware store and a small bottle of glass paint and 5 minutes fixed that issue. All that is required is to paint the upper 1/2 of the glass flutes of the whirly bird which houses the lamps. This makes the fixture more efficient anyways. Should I now expect an annoying patent lawsuit?
Second problem? There wasn't one.
I run my office lights 24x365 and have for over 15 years. My computers run 24x365 also and the reason is most are servers and I live in Calgary which needs heating anyways about 8 months of the year. I'd like to get greener servers. See below.
My lights draw 15 watts each so that is about 15*3*24 = 1080 = about 1 KWatt per day which costs me about $3 per month from which I can deduct heating costs. I'm in the office probably 8-10 hours per day and this is spread over about 12-16 hours a day so I figure its ok to leave the lights on.
The life of the bulbs is about 50,000 hours. This is correct. I installed my first set in about 1995 and replaced them when I installed the whirly bird in about 2000-2002. I don't recall exactly when I replaced them but I know it was after 1999 because I built my garage then and the same electrician hooked up my whirly bird. I know I installed the fist set before 1998 because I was in Malaysia and Australia in 1998 and I remember subtracting out the months overseas from the lives of the first set of bulbs. I can look up the bills.
This means that both the first set and the second set of CFL's ran about 5 years at 24x365 and that is 50,000 hours give or take and 2/3 of the 2nd set are still running with the 1/3 failure from 2 days ago. This is not even close to the 10,000 hours advertised. Its not even close to the horror stores I read before I decided to post this.
The light quality is excellent and the spectrum works well with my monitors. There is no discernable flicker and my eyes are very very sensitive to this so I know its not there.
---------------- This also introduces a nepherious issue. The CFL I need to replace. Well. I called Panasonic. Seems its not available in Calgary. Why? Calgary has over a million people. Why can't I find it here? Are the manufactures trying to dumb down the engineering so they can sell more? If this is the case then people in slashdot should post a story and lets get to its bottoms.
In the mean while I am faced with finding a replacement. I'd like the same CFL bulb actually. Then my office decoer matches. If they are going to improve it in a negative way I'd like the old product please.
----------------
Questions:
1) I'm interested in very low power green servers. I'm working with some associates and the objective is partially to be cost effective and wise and to come up with a robust solution that people can adopt. So far we have identifed an eden processor from WalMart... cost is $200 and power draw apparently 7 watts for the cpu. I don't know what the total system draw will be.
I'd like suggestions. IF these are in the form of something we can compile and publish then so much the better. What about solid state solutions? We're probably going to serve static web pages so even the CPU in a cell phone will probably handle the load. We'll look to feed a DSL which is limited to say 1 Mb/s
2) Ditto with firewall solutions.
I'd like to see new machines built like cartons of cigarettes from the 1940's and 1950's. They are about the right size. They are easy to carry. Each "package" can contain a useful assor
This idea has merit. Most people only use a handful of applications and they simply don't understand the bloat ware that they have been sold. It was only last week that a friend asked for some advise on what to do with regard to a "new" computer. After speaking with him for only a few minutes it became clear he doesn't know what a CPU is. He doesn't know about memory speeds and swapping. He's going to spend his hard earned cash on faith. I told him where he can get a gigahertz range machine for in the $100 range. I doubt he will do this. To me it makes more sense to spend under $100 and see if the machine does the job rather than spending in the $1000's.
People just don't know. So they get taken advantage of. What we have now is worse than the worst used car salesmen have been accused of.
Maybe its time for a light weight instant boot applications loader. Maybe a through house cleaning is in order.
Its going to be really interesting seeing if this idea comes to pass and if so how successful it is.
The purpose of the bug report is to see if its a problem with flakey hardware.
In order to track something like this down I'd have to set the machine up with a serial I/F to another machine and set it up on the net so that it can be properly debugged. I offered to do this. Theo declined. He simply said "no thanks".
I searched the OpenBSD archive of bug reports and found nothing related to the problem. Clearly there are problems however. Those cards work properly in other operating systems. The short of it is that if OpenBSD lacks driver support then I can't use it.
Very good point. I'm getting good discussion on my main post as well and I'm surprised it got mod'ed up.
So it appears the goose can fly but some of its legs are missing. Somehow we need to overcome the politics. I don't know what the solution is.
Would the issues be overcome with a different license orientated just to the driver layer? Writing drivers is thankless work. There are some who enjoy doing this of course and the work is vital. Its a pity their work can't be used because of politics. Surely a solution can be found or created.
I respect the licensing issues. I probably do not appreciate all of these issues. It would seem to me that a _portion_ of the device driver layer could be released under say a BSD style license. This would allow certain portions to be available to all including the GPL people. A BSD driver is available to GPL users. Its just that anyone can take the BSD portion and incorporate it into their own proprietary products. So what if they do? This would not preclude the GPL people from using it.
The only issue is that if proprietary modifications are made they will not necessarily be available to the GPL people. SO.. a few bits and pieces get lost. If a GPL developer wants to add something then whatever he adds cannot be subtracted from the what is available to the GPL community and this is what we want to accomplish anyways. By making it available to the BSD community, nothing is subtracted from the GPL community.
What I think happens is that GPL people gain the services of the BSD community because then BSD people can use it.
At issue is the bigger problem of hiding behind politics and re-inventing the wheel when it isn't necessary. All I'm talking about is a portion of the device driver layer anyways. Anyone wanting to contribute under GPL terms still can at the next higher level.
Furthermore... if you analyse it... any proprietary additions were never going to make it into the OSS community anyways. So at a driver level, I suppose a GPL developer can say you can't use it... but this doesn't stop anyone from reading it. After reading it they can follow in the footsteps anyways.
In this sense all the GPL does in my view is create a minor hurdle for a proprietary developer to overcome. Meanwhile OpenBSD is an excellent product and has a very dedicated group of developers and all I'm asking is if there is a way to pool some of the talents.
I posted this on another thread... I was thinking of a less ambition approach... just common driver bug handling layer.
I wonder if it is possible for all OSS software driver writers to coordinate their efforts and develop a common driver model for all OSS operating systems.
Personally I have written hardware drivers... many years ago I wrote in assembler video drivers for ega/vga cards. After months of digging and gobs of work my conclusion is this is a thankless job... but it is a critically important job and one that those who are involved with should take a great deal of pride in their contributions.
So I ask... is it feasible to create a common device driver layer so that problems solved for one OS can be solved for all?
I have the adaptec hardware manuals for the 2940 and other cards. Yes I have heard about bugginess.
I'm not a kernel guru and I've not written or even looked at drivers. It takes so much time to even get into this that for me I'd have to be granted another lifetime before I can get seriously involved.
One question that comes to mind is that I've personally never run into an issue with linux on similar h/w and with the same cards. Linux drivers are OSS so it would seem that any issues the linux and other *nix people might need to address are going to yield solutions for all operating systems.
If so, then for these pesky thankless driver issues perhaps a closer working relationship is in order. Perhaps driver writers could define a common group of functions which could be linked into all drivers regardless of the OS that hosts the driver. Again, since I don't write drivers I simply don't know. But why re-invent the wheel if it can be avoided. I would think an openBSD style license would be appropriate for such an undertaking.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant.
Mod parent up.
BTW
Solar Cycle #24 is about 14 months late already and still not in sight. Expect a cold decade or more.
With generation IV reactors there is already enough uranium and other actinides on hand to power a fleet of 100 gigawatt size reactors for 60,000 years.
It would be nice if you checked your facts.
With fuel reprocessing we're good for at least 50 years.
Typical rhetoric.
There isn't a single claim backed up and furthermore all the claims are false.
Generation IV reactors have been tested. There is enough uranium already mined to power a fleet of more than 100 gigawatt CIV reactors for more than 60,000 years. Is this what he means by temporary?
"better solutions within our grasp"? Boy - thats a good one with oil at $136 per barrel and Gas on the climb.
We're in trouble folks... serious trouble. All we need now is the water cut in the Ghawar field to head north. When this happens we'll lose perhaps as much as 5 million barrels of oil production per day. When the North Sea and Pemex's Canterall fields went into decline the rate was 15% per year. If Saudi Arabia follows this pattern then we'll start to lose 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. I personally expect this will happen within a few years.
So much for "no vision".
I have more than 100 matchbox SCSI external cases also with drives. They need a home.
Yup. You are 100% correct that ISP's like to charge extra for a static IP. Since I run statics I know exactly what you are saying.
I was on the phone with my Bank's security people last week and suggested they look into static IP's as a method to guard against identity theft. They have a HUGE exposure. Moving to statics for the general population would really help them from two standpoints.
1) They could implement a white list for their clients.
2) In the case of unauthorized access the IP can be given to the cops.
There are probably other advantages as well.
Now the thing is the ISP industry will not offer them for the reasons you pointed out. However we can urge to have legislation passed and then they have to offer them. Sometimes laws can be used to good advantage to make good things happen.
As for the issue of the ISP lumping torrents in with spam? Spam is on a separate port. Problem solved.
Perhaps I'll call my MP's office and offer to work on a committee to address some of these issues. I'd urge others to as well. It might take a while to figure out what might work and what might not, but addressing the issue is unlikely to be negative.
I think one thing that is totally clear is that an ISP who offers a connection to a spammer is totally irresponsible yet this happens and while they denied it they were quite happy to cash the cheques.
It is totally unbelievable that an ISP would not be able to monitor traffic on a certain port from a certain IP address and note that its spam.
Getting laws to force ISP's to shut down spammers would be a really good start. It might even solve most of the problems. As for enforcement? Well - we have the source IP addresses. If we have the law on the books and the enforcement people in place then this becomes transparent. All we need to do is simply advise the enforcement people of the issue.
A quiet call can be made to the management of the ISP. If the problem continues then the ISP faces a fine for non-compliance. Eventually they will get the message or they will no longer be in business.
A side affect of legislation like this is that when the plug gets pulled this will create an incentive for the owner of the infected computer to do something about their problem.
What of overseas spam? I figure if one country does something like then then maybe most countries will follow suit. As for the ones who don't? I don't know. Perhaps other measures can be found to contain that problem. I'm reminded of the incident where Telstra in Australia was black-listed. Telstra cleaned up its act rather quickly.
The thing is that at this point we are leaving it to the individual to protect themselves and for the most part the vast majority of the population simply is not up to speed in this area and never will be. Furthermore the problem is getting worse.
You know... we don't let people drive without a drivers license and insurance. The general public has to start taking some responsibility here.
I would suggest some measures we can use:
1) static IP's. Then we can easily track down infected machines and take them offline.
2) Laws that require people to assume some form of responsibility when they connect a computer to the net.
3) Perhaps some form of compulsory insurance policy.
4) Laws that require ISP's to disconnect spam bots and take some responsibility.
If we had people throwing garbage from the windows of their cars we'd probably urge more enforcement of anti-littering laws. But what if these people were spewing porn? If we had a trespass issue as bad as the spam issue then we'd urge more enforcement of laws already on the books.
In the case of spam, we don't have the laws we need for the most part.
There are people who are responsible. I should think we can figure out ways to encourage them to clean up their act. The thing is this is not harmless. Many of these spams are NOT suitable for children and many children have net access. It is not even possible for most parents to screen this.
Perhaps we need enforcement of some of the child pornography legislation. A for instance is that if some adult is so irresponsible as to discard their used porn rags in a school yard then I don't think ignorance would be considered a suitable defense. Yet that same individual who allows his computer to remain part of a botnet which dumps porn into computers children have access to is somehow innocent? I don't think so.
It would take only a few cases and the public would wise up real fast.
Sunlight comes in about 6000K. Does anyone know if there is any potential to use a chemical process to harness sunlight to disassociate water?
Also I was trying to figure out what the equivalent "voltage" of such a heat source would be.
Thanx.
An ICE is a pump. It can be run as a pump and pump air into a pressure tank which can later be bled off. So an ICE actually can use regenerative techniques.
costs will decrease, but to you and me gasoline will always be the same price. As long as the energy can be controlled by a small group of despots we will only ever see our costs continue rising
Where pray tell do you get these crazy ideas?
Why don't you educate yourself and read some articles from here:
www.aspo-usa.com
The main reason the price of oil and gas is up is because we have a supply side constraint and too damn many people refuse to drive a reasonable car. Instead they sit 6 abreast in grid lock with their A/C cranked up and the Radio cranked up usually each by themselves in an SUV weighing in the TONS!
The USA burns about 22 million BOPD and could cut this easily by 1/3 if they just drove a reasonable car like say a small/mid sized diesel or a hybrid. This would immediately drop the price of oil to under $50 per barrel.
Even in a 3rd world you would need to hoist a 550 lbs weight up an 18 foot tower every hour in order to provide 5 watts for the hour. This is 1/200th of a kilowatt hour which is worth about 10 cents in the developed world. We can produce a kilowatt hour of power from nuclear sources for about 2 cents.
You can think of it this way as well. Every hour hoist a 55 gallon drum of water up an 18 foot tower and you will not get enough energy to run a single low energy compact flourescent bulb.
Whoops. Wrong.
I'm replying to my own email. Sorry!
550 lbs over an hour will yield the numbers I posted. 55 LBS will yield 1/10 of the above.
He doesn't have 10.34 watts. He has (50/550)/3600 = 2.5253E-5 HP * 745 = 0.019 watts.
This won't provide much light.
550 lbs dropping 20 feet in 1 hour is (550/550)*20/3600*745 = 4 watts for an hour.
These numbers look right. 1 HP is 550 foot lbs per second. There are 745 watts in 1 HP.
If he uses 50 lbs over a 4 foot drop then this is 200 foot lbs per 4 hours or 50 foot lbs per hour. 50 / 3600 is 0.0139 HP * 745 = 10.34 watts. Given the mechanical efficiency of his generator this should power a small CFL or LED without issue.
Now the thing is that for an off grid house, something like this might make a great deal of sense. One can increase the height by using a block and tackle and increase the weight. If we say got to 550 LBS over a height of say 20 feet then we have 13.75 times the energy and this will produce 142 watts for 4 hours.
Off grid this could run enough lighting for the evening. It could power some low power appliances as well. 142 watts for 5 hours is worth about 5.68 cents at 10 cents per Kilowatt hour. This doesn't sound like much, but the issue is that it might only take a few minuets to hoist the weight with a block and tackle (or horse!).
Furthermore one can use say a windmill to provide the energy and lift it by hand only when needed.
Note that water stored in a large tank might make more sense than a mechanical system.
I don't think one would want to back pack this in on a camping trip.
Another energy store would be to pressurize air. One just needs efficient pumps.
I do have an NT machine. Its 4.0 and it was ok. I never bothered to install 2K. I do own it mind you. As for XP - why bother?
:-)
Everything I need to do, my 1998 Linux machine does, and it does it rather well. Recently we had a power failure. There is a 60 amp hour deep cycle Hawker battery behind the UPS and it died! When I rebooted the message was that Linux had been up for 670 days. IMHO this is not bad.
As for your "embedded box I brought in to be my always-on (5 watts!) server", I'm looking for one of those.
Any suggestions where I can get one and what to look for?
I'm not a gamer. I'm an investor. I spend a lot of time in the browser doing research. I cannot imagine what life might be like on a windows machine running IE with a single head and probably a bad keyboard.
Me? Dual heads... IBM PC 101 keyboard... Web Servers in the background running OpenBSD. Firewall runs OpenBSD too.
I expect the account numbers and passwords of more than 1/3 of the people who use windows have been harvested. My Broker suggests I should buy windows. The exposure my broker has is unmeasurable. My broker is owned by a rather large Canadian Bank! Oh Boy!
Am I biased? Yes, you bet I am.
Am I in the market for another machine? Maybe. It should be the size of a package of cigarettes (no I don't smoke). It should have at least two (2) nics. I'd like solid state. I'd like edge connectors so that I can live connect another unit to it if I can think of a reason to do so. If it likes 12 volts then this will be perfect because any old deep cycle battery can then power the thing which means I can use it off grid. My Hawker battery cost over $400 bux. This drives a UPS which puts out 120 volts AC which goes into a switching power supply which puts out 5 & 12 volts DC. I think there are some optimizations which can take place here.
My point? Its in the details: the future is smaller and better and re-thought. Linux is part of this.
Why buy a dinosaur? What 40 years ago filled a huge room and what 10 years ago could be toted in the boot of your average car can now be put in a shirt pocket... well not quite. But I'm not going to be buying an empty P.O.S. box which is about 1.5 feet tall and 6 inches wide and over a foot deep with a dinosaur OS when I know what I'm looking for should fit easily into my briefcase.
Take these ideas to the marketing folks.
Oh... marketing folks. HP "lost" Carley. (thank gawd. She didn't look good even with her paint job) HP tried to flog a 33s. HP now has a 35S out. It fits into my shirt pocket.
It does not have 2 nics. Still I think it might be possible to use it as a web server. This is what I'm looking for.
Clearly the dinosaur is not dead yet but I think I see some of the path to the future.
Small and cheap and reliable and flexible. yes - it has to run Linux.
My 2 sense.
Take a look at the Thecus N2100. For $360 or less it appears to have similar capabilities.
Comments please?
I am under the impression that water / ethanol bends are not acceptable for modern engines and can cause damage. I don't know why. Can anyone advise?
I do know that if we don't push ethanol past the Azeotrope that refining is much easier. Also I know that water was injected into fighter plane engines during WWII to add power.... but apparently this lead to an engine overhaul.
It would seem to me that water injection or water entrainment in the fuel is a good idea because it will reduce the maximum combustion temperature which will reduce NOx production. Also water is 17x more dense than steam so it seems to me that as the water flashes over to steam that combustion pressure will increase and this should increase power and efficiency.
Comments please?
One other thing. If the USA converts 100% of its corn crop to ethanol it gains 2 weeks of liquid fuel supply. However we look at it... any ethanol poured into a gas tank will deprive someone or something of food. It might be a pigs mouth that doesn't get fed, but it will be a mouth somewhere.
Cellulose -> ethanol probably makes sense. Higher alcohols would be better. So far we really don't have the technology for this however. We can use pyrolysis though. The big issue is that we are short ofhydrogen. Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
If we use paper as the feedstock, then carbon solids are 24%. Since liquid fuels are alkanes they have the chemical formula C(n)H(2n+2). Thus if we start with a tonne of dry plant material we'll end up with about 1/2 tonne of carbon (which we can burn to provide energy for the plant). If we wish to convert this carbon to an alkane we'll need on average a little more than 2 hydrogen atoms for each carbon atom. One way we can get this is using the Fischer Tropsch process. Another way is via nuclear driven steam electrolysis or high temperature steam disassociation.
However it is done... we need these plants NOW! Oil at $100 per barrel is the writing on the wall.
The world is most likely past the peak of production. This means USA oil imports are going to start to drop whether they like it or not!
It really doesn't matter what laws congress might pass because the laws of nature are what people are going to follow and this includes auto manufacturers. When we start to see fuel shortages I expect we'll see gas rationing soon after.
So if someone wants to drive a gas guzzler, then fine, but they won't be driving it far.
People might like to believe they live in a fairy tale world created by Hollywood but the reality is that they live in a real world. This will be a world with less oil production in very short order. As the USA dollar tanks we can expect to see more oil exporting countries refuse to accept it. The consequences are obvious.
I predict that by 2020 the USA will be consuming about 15 million Barrels of Oil Per Day (MBOPD).
At present the consumption is about 20 MBOPD. So this will be a 25% reduction.
I also predict that Mathew Simmons prediction of Oil costing most than $300 per barrel will also be correct.
The short of it is that this is too little too late and I will not be surprised to see gas rationing within the next 10 years.
Bold eh? Or should I just look out my window and look at the footsteps in the snow with regard to the Canadian Oil industry? The latest? PetroCanada enters into a deal with Libya. PetroCanada pick up 75% of the cost for 25% of the results. Tell me... Why would ANY company enter into a deal like this? Its just more of the footsteps in the snow.
I have questions. Before I get to them... my experience with compact fluorescents... GREAT! I'm on my 2nd set now. One just died two days ago and I have temporarily replaced it with one left over from my first set. The specific model of the 2nd set is: Panasonic EFT 15E28. I use three (3) in my office in a whirly bird.
The first problem was solved as follow. The light projects upwards through the whirly bird and the fans created an annoying flickering reflection off the ceiling. A trip to the hardware store and a small bottle of glass paint and 5 minutes fixed that issue. All that is required is to paint the upper 1/2 of the glass flutes of the whirly bird which houses the lamps. This makes the fixture more efficient anyways. Should I now expect an annoying patent lawsuit?
Second problem? There wasn't one.
I run my office lights 24x365 and have for over 15 years. My computers run 24x365 also and the reason is most are servers and I live in Calgary which needs heating anyways about 8 months of the year. I'd like to get greener servers. See below.
My lights draw 15 watts each so that is about 15*3*24 = 1080 = about 1 KWatt per day which costs me about $3 per month from which I can deduct heating costs. I'm in the office probably 8-10 hours per day and this is spread over about 12-16 hours a day so I figure its ok to leave the lights on.
The life of the bulbs is about 50,000 hours. This is correct. I installed my first set in about 1995 and replaced them when I installed the whirly bird in about 2000-2002. I don't recall exactly when I replaced them but I know it was after 1999 because I built my garage then and the same electrician hooked up my whirly bird. I know I installed the fist set before 1998 because I was in Malaysia and Australia in 1998 and I remember subtracting out the months overseas from the lives of the first set of bulbs. I can look up the bills.
This means that both the first set and the second set of CFL's ran about 5 years at 24x365 and that is 50,000 hours give or take and 2/3 of the 2nd set are still running with the 1/3 failure from 2 days ago. This is not even close to the 10,000 hours advertised. Its not even close to the horror stores I read before I decided to post this.
The light quality is excellent and the spectrum works well with my monitors. There is no discernable flicker and my eyes are very very sensitive to this so I know its not there.
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This also introduces a nepherious issue. The CFL I need to replace. Well. I called Panasonic. Seems its not available in Calgary. Why? Calgary has over a million people. Why can't I find it here? Are the manufactures trying to dumb down the engineering so they can sell more? If this is the case then people in slashdot should post a story and lets get to its bottoms.
In the mean while I am faced with finding a replacement. I'd like the same CFL bulb actually. Then my office decoer matches. If they are going to improve it in a negative way I'd like the old product please.
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Questions:
1) I'm interested in very low power green servers. I'm working with some associates and the objective is partially to be cost effective and wise and to come up with a robust solution that people can adopt. So far we have identifed an eden processor from WalMart... cost is $200 and power draw apparently 7 watts for the cpu. I don't know what the total system draw will be.
I'd like suggestions. IF these are in the form of something we can compile and publish then so much the better. What about solid state solutions? We're probably going to serve static web pages so even the CPU in a cell phone will probably handle the load. We'll look to feed a DSL which is limited to say 1 Mb/s
2) Ditto with firewall solutions.
I'd like to see new machines built like cartons of cigarettes from the 1940's and 1950's. They are about the right size. They are easy to carry. Each "package" can contain a useful assor
This idea has merit. Most people only use a handful of applications and they simply don't understand the bloat ware that they have been sold. It was only last week that a friend asked for some advise on what to do with regard to a "new" computer. After speaking with him for only a few minutes it became clear he doesn't know what a CPU is. He doesn't know about memory speeds and swapping. He's going to spend his hard earned cash on faith. I told him where he can get a gigahertz range machine for in the $100 range. I doubt he will do this. To me it makes more sense to spend under $100 and see if the machine does the job rather than spending in the $1000's.
People just don't know. So they get taken advantage of. What we have now is worse than the worst used car salesmen have been accused of.
Maybe its time for a light weight instant boot applications loader. Maybe a through house cleaning is in order.
Its going to be really interesting seeing if this idea comes to pass and if so how successful it is.
The purpose of the bug report is to see if its a problem with flakey hardware.
In order to track something like this down I'd have to set the machine up with a serial I/F to another machine and set it up on the net so that it can be properly debugged. I offered to do this. Theo declined. He simply said "no thanks".
I searched the OpenBSD archive of bug reports and found nothing related to the problem. Clearly there are problems however. Those cards work properly in other operating systems. The short of it is that if OpenBSD lacks driver support then I can't use it.
your link is borken.
Very good point. I'm getting good discussion on my main post as well and I'm surprised it got mod'ed up.
So it appears the goose can fly but some of its legs are missing. Somehow we need to overcome the politics. I don't know what the solution is.
Would the issues be overcome with a different license orientated just to the driver layer? Writing drivers is thankless work. There are some who enjoy doing this of course and the work is vital. Its a pity their work can't be used because of politics. Surely a solution can be found or created.
I respect the licensing issues. I probably do not appreciate all of these issues. It would seem to me that a _portion_ of the device driver layer could be released under say a BSD style license. This would allow certain portions to be available to all including the GPL people. A BSD driver is available to GPL users. Its just that anyone can take the BSD portion and incorporate it into their own proprietary products. So what if they do? This would not preclude the GPL people from using it.
The only issue is that if proprietary modifications are made they will not necessarily be available to the GPL people. SO.. a few bits and pieces get lost. If a GPL developer wants to add something then whatever he adds cannot be subtracted from the what is available to the GPL community and this is what we want to accomplish anyways. By making it available to the BSD community, nothing is subtracted from the GPL community.
What I think happens is that GPL people gain the services of the BSD community because then BSD people can use it.
At issue is the bigger problem of hiding behind politics and re-inventing the wheel when it isn't necessary. All I'm talking about is a portion of the device driver layer anyways. Anyone wanting to contribute under GPL terms still can at the next higher level.
Furthermore... if you analyse it... any proprietary additions were never going to make it into the OSS community anyways. So at a driver level, I suppose a GPL developer can say you can't use it... but this doesn't stop anyone from reading it. After reading it they can follow in the footsteps anyways.
In this sense all the GPL does in my view is create a minor hurdle for a proprietary developer to overcome. Meanwhile OpenBSD is an excellent product and has a very dedicated group of developers and all I'm asking is if there is a way to pool some of the talents.
I posted this on another thread... I was thinking of a less ambition approach... just common driver bug handling layer.
I wonder if it is possible for all OSS software driver writers to coordinate their efforts and develop a common driver model for all OSS operating systems.
Personally I have written hardware drivers... many years ago I wrote in assembler video drivers for ega/vga cards. After months of digging and gobs of work my conclusion is this is a thankless job... but it is a critically important job and one that those who are involved with should take a great deal of pride in their contributions.
So I ask... is it feasible to create a common device driver layer so that problems solved for one OS can be solved for all?
I have the adaptec hardware manuals for the 2940 and other cards. Yes I have heard about bugginess.
I'm not a kernel guru and I've not written or even looked at drivers. It takes so much time to even get into this that for me I'd have to be granted another lifetime before I can get seriously involved.
One question that comes to mind is that I've personally never run into an issue with linux on similar h/w and with the same cards. Linux drivers are OSS so it would seem that any issues the linux and other *nix people might need to address are going to yield solutions for all operating systems.
If so, then for these pesky thankless driver issues perhaps a closer working relationship is in order. Perhaps driver writers could define a common group of functions which could be linked into all drivers regardless of the OS that hosts the driver. Again, since I don't write drivers I simply don't know. But why re-invent the wheel if it can be avoided. I would think an openBSD style license would be appropriate for such an undertaking.
Oh what a perfect webserver. I wonder it it supports ECC memory and if it will run OpenBSD.
Where do I get it? WOW.