I write/maintain scheduling software, and one thing I have learned is that, in order to max their productivity, the docs multiple book several appointments at a time.
This is only necessarily true if 100% of a doctor's work requires a time slot.
The truth is that it need not be the case. There are a lot of things that can be done at almost any time: email, telephone calls, paperwork, evaluating test results, journal reading, and so on. If they actually end up with a few spare minutes when somebody skips an appointment or doesn't take so long, other work could fill in.
According to a very interesting article in the New York Times on Jan 4 called "Remedy for Waiting", some clinics have redone their scheduling to serve the same number of people with the same doctors without the standard technique of massive overbooking. The article is now in the for-pay archives, so I can't quote from it, but it made a convincing case that it was doable. People were stunned when they could get an appointment the same week and actually be seen on time.
I agree with the original poster in this thread; the #1 thing I want is knowing that I don't have to wait six months to see a doctor, and where I don't have to spend two hours reading copies of "People" from the late 70s.
My post said that most local businesses and a lot of national business aren't of the nature where adveritising on the national scale doesn't make sense. When was the last time you saw a superbowl ad for a plumber?
True, but irrelevant. Spam is cheap, and cost shifting makes it even cheaper. I get two or three spams a day for businesses in Argentina; I've never even been to Argentina. Why? Because it's more expensive to carefully target your email than it is to just send out a few million extra and live with the decreased response rate.
I don't like spam as much as the next guy, but to think that you'll ever get thousands a day? Get real.
Ten years ago, I got zero. Five years ago, I got one or two. Today, I get maybe 30 a day, despite extensive technological and social measures to reduce spam. Since you seem to have the answers, care to tell me what the maximum number I'll get is? Don't forget to include the fact that only a small percentage of potential internet users are currently on the net.
You're right that it won't be thousands a day, because I'll abandon email entirely at that point. But Moore's law makes spamming ever cheaper and Metcalfe's law makes it ever more useful. Pretending that spamming won't get worse is just sticking your head in the sand.
Free speech means that you can say whatever you want, not that you can say it however you want.
Ah, right. The 'fire in crowded theatre' approach.
Hardly. Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is a content restriction. Method restrictions are different.
Suppose I go buy a massive PA system and set it up outside your house. Then I and some pals start shouting about our great new MLM scheme. Around the clock. For days.
If you call the cops, they will come by and ask me to stop. If I don't, they'll arrest me pronto. This would even apply if I was making political speeches or reading poetry. Why doesn't the constitution protect me? Because the cops are rightly suppressing a public nuisance. The content is entirely irrelevant; it's all about the method.
So as the original poster wrote, "Free speech means that you can say whatever you want, not that you can say it however you want." If you think it should be otherwise, let me know where you live so I can drop by and tatoo my messages on your forehead.
I'm also not quite sure what the original poster wants, but when a box in a cabinet gets so unhappy that it's not controllable via the network, I use APC's MasterSwitch, which is basically and eight-plug power strip with an ethernet jack and the ability to turn the outlets on and off individually.
I have also heard interesting things about the watchdog cards that have Linux drivers in the kernel, although I've never used them myself.
Both these solutions strike me as ugly, but I guess it beats driving to a colloc in the middle of the night.
I would much rather have spam in my inbox than a mailbox full of coupons and credit card applications killing trees and filling our landfills.
Hey, and once this television thing catches on, they'll take all those commercials off the radio and take the ads out of newspapers, right?
If we could shift all snail-mail, telephone, and junk-fax advertising to e-mail, I'd honestly have to think about it. But the truth is, it's not a choice of junk mail versus junk email. Your USPS mailbox is already doomed; it's a choice between saving our electronic inboxes or letting 'em fill up with crap too.
I also do not understand your almost cultlike hatred of spam. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I would much rather stand up for a cause that acutally *means something*.
It depends on what you define as "mean something". For me and for those I know that care about spam, there are indeed deeper issues involved:
Nipping a problem in the bud - You may thing spamming is a small problem now, but as I have discussed elsewhere, it will grow radically if left alone. Ignoring it is like ignoring a breeding pair of cockroaches in your kitchen.
Keeping up the neighborhood - I've been using the Internet for more than a decade; many of the most dedicated spam-fighters are old fogies like me, who are reluctant to let something we've worked on go to the dogs. The FTC found that more than half of all spam was promoting schemes that were just plain illegal. Why allow that in the neighborhood?
Freedom of speech - To me, the preservation of freedom of speech is about nurturing a workable marketplace of ideas. Spam destroys the signal-to-noise ratio, burying interesting, important, or useful ideas in a mound of garbage.
Freedom of association - The freedom to associate with those that I choose is important to me. There is no way to get spammers to leave me alone; indeed, they spend extraordinary amounts of effort to circumvent the technical and legal barriers. Why should I have to spend more and more time and money just so I can communicate easily with the people I choose?
Fighting theft and parasites - Most spam involves stolen resources. Large ISPs spend millions fighting abuse and many millions more for hardware and bandwith to handle what still gets through, costs that hurt us all. Why shouldn't we try to stop theft?
Shifting power back to citizens - Starting from a nation of rugged individualists, a lot of power has ended up in the hands of corporations. Especially worrying is the concentration of media control into a small number of very large companies. The internet has the potential to undo that if it isn't wrecked by short-sighted marketroid greed.
This is not to say that soup kitchens are not worthy, and I do contribute to them. But the worthiness of ameliorating the pain of poverty doesn't automatically make other positive actions meaningless.
If you want to gripe at somebody about the poor state of the world, gripe at the large number of people who do nothing. Or better, gripe at the large number of parasites and dirtbags who are a drain on us all. Like, say, spammers.
Spam is relatively unobtrusive and can easily be deleted costing the recipient nothing more than a few k of bandwidth and several moments of inconvenience.
This is true for one spam a day. Is it true for ten? A hundred? A thousand?
Spamming a million people costs the sender less than a small newspaper ad. How many ads did your local newspapers carry this week? And how many newspapers are their in the world? (Yeah, the world. I receive two or three spams a day for shit in Argentina. I've never even been to Argentina.)
Sure, you don't get that much now. But the only reason we all get so little spam is that people who spam get booted off the Internet. If the DMA, in conjunction with goofballs such as yourself, manages to make spam legitimate, then you will get that much spam.
Thanks to the DMA and their ilk, 90% of my paper mail is garbage, and that's with them paying 100% of the cost. With email, the recipient pays a good chunk of the cost, even without the theft of services that 95% of spam involve. So what percentage of your inbox will be crap?
And then, having made normal email useless, the marketroids will be competing for ways to "cut through the clutter". A spam won't be a few k anymore; it will be a few hundred. I'm already starting to see 'em with 50k of imbedded GIFs; flash animations won't be far behind.
That makes it a little harder to ignore, eh, bucko?
I wouldn't throw out my current servers, but I would certainly favor boxes that were otherwise equal but used less power. Why?
1) Why be wasteful? Just because you can afford to do something doesn't mean you should. I pay about 5% more to use 100% renewable power. (Before the latest crisis, I paid 20% less.)
2) It's cheaper. Even under moderate assumptions, you could save a couple thousand dollars a year for a medium-sized commercial web site. That money would be much better spent on more hardware. Or more beer.
3) It's cooler. Not in the sense of hipness, but in terms of temperature. If the Register's numbers for a dual-Itanium server power consumption are to be believed, a couple of those babies would put out more heat as a hair dryer or a space heater.
Judging by Athalon's heat output, the heat output of typical CPUs scales 1:1 with speed. A lot of server rooms I enter are already running a little warm; imagine what it will be like after a round of upgrades to faster and hotter boxes.
Maybe you can afford to pay for the electricity, but can you afford to pay for a massive upgrade to your air conditioning?
For those interested in the evolution of social behavior, this stuff is fascinating. And it lends itself to all sorts of cool simulations, so there's a high geek enjoyment factor in it all.
But perhaps someone here could answer the question of: in the real world are the heating demands of spooling server in and out of an idle state worse or better than leaving it on?
Agreed; some hard data on this would be great.
The problem with load balancers is that if you've built them right they're always busy and every node in the clusted is always doing something, say @ 25-35% capacity. Else you've wasted your cluster dollars if you have a whole node doing nothing for a period of time.
That's not necessarily true when you consider issues of peak load versus off-peak load. Suppose you have a site that on the peak day at the peak time, you serve a million hits per hour. Suppose further that to allow for surges, you never want to hit more than 75% utilization. And further suppose that each box can serve 70 hits/second, or 250,000 per hour.
For peak load then, you'd need 6 boxes. But looking at stats for the biggest site I can easily check, the least busy hour is only 44% of the traffic of the busiest hour. Under these assumptions, during slack time you could put three servers into some low-power idle state and take them out of the load balancing set. And likely you'd keep a warm spare in the cabinet, which could also be idling except when needed during a failover.
At the very least, this would save a fair bit of power. As others have pointed out, stopping and starting disk drives can increase the MTBF for drives. But being able to stop some of your drives for many hours a day could well increase their calendar lifespan, as well as reducing the risk of simultaneous failure.
---
Of course, the software for this doesn't exist yet, but there's at least a plausible reason to have it. A back-of-envelope calculation suggests that the power bill for a setup like this would be in the $2000/yr price range at $0.10/kwh. But wholesale power prices are much higher in California now than that; at $0.30/kwh, then a 30% power reduction over 3 years would be $5400 bucks, which is not chump change.
Good article in last weeks Economist on the subject. Those ignorant politicians didn't understand deregulation, and were more interested in appeasing lobby groups, and screwed it all up.
Living in San Francisco, I can assure you that the politicians aren't the only ones who don't get it. Most people here have heard of this whole "market economy" thing, but only in the way people in Indiana have heard of communism: they may not know much about it, but they know it's bad and dangerous and all right-thinking people should be against it.
I used a SkyTel pager for a few years. The technology was fine, but the customer service sucked so hard that you could just call their 800 number, put the phone handset in a bell jar, and create a laboratory-grade vacuum in under a minute. I may have received a bill that was correct once, but if so, it was by accident.
I eventually just got a PCS cellphone, and pretty much ignore the cellphone part. It's cheaper and it seems to work just as well.
I also hear good things about the blackberry but I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet.
The original OS was on Sun 3 hardware. NeXT's boxes came later:)
Oooh, good point. Although that was only in development and only in house, right? By 0.8 or so, they were producing cubes, and I don't remember any mention of Sun hardware at that point.
If it was easy to build large powerplants, someone would have done so, since the wholesale electricity prices in California have been high for quite a while now, and it has been obvious to many for years that demand was outpacing supply.
I was actually asking for evidence for the specific claim that environmental regulations are the reason that no new plants have been built.
My impression is that the main reason that nobody built plants for ages was that a) for quite a while, there was suffcient supply, and b) by the time the need was obvious, deregulation was in the air, making it impossible to forcast the ROI on the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build a power plant.
The fact that new power plants are now in the works (and have been for at least a couple of years) without major concessions on environmental regulations further suggests that the environmental regulations aren't the main problem.
Why should he have an opinion on everything!? The community is what makes/. unique.
He "isn't sure how he feels about this" because the issue is subtle, involving balancing a variety of reasonable but competing needs.
A lot of people on Slashdot, though, entirely miss subtlety. It was H. L. Mencken who said, "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." On a bad day, that might as well be Slashdot's motto.
While there is additional government power regulation risk, I think the expense of
environmental regulations (particularly the impact statements) are keeping new plants from being built.
Got some evidence for this? The deregulation battle dragged on for years. Several new power plants have been approved since deregulation was finally settled, and except for one recent approval for a peaker plant near SFO, I'm not aware of a case where they lowered environmental regs. But since they take years to build, I don't think any of them have come on line.
Significant environmental de-regulation of power plants is the only real solution. Better do it carefully though.
That doesn't clearly follow. Studying the environmental impact is one barrier to entry, but it's not a huge one. Building and running a power plant is a huge affair, and the environmental work is just one of many expenses.
--
Note also that lowering environmental standards may not save money overall; it can just shift costs from the people who use the power to other people. Increasing particulate emissions may save on hardware to remove it, but it increases health care costs. Why should I increase my risk of bronchitis so some bozo can fill his 4500 sq ft house with 500W halogen lamps?
Hell, I moved to California partly because of the environment. I even pay (slightly) extra for environmentally friendly power. It may be a reasonable thing for society to say "fuck the environment, I want cheap power", but that's not what voters here generally say. If citizens are willing to pay the costs of a clean environment, what's the problem?
I don't think security through temporary obscrutiny [sic] is the way to go though.
Giving vendors a little jump on the crackers makes some sense. When a bug is announced, it's nice to have patches ready, too, and a whole mess of people ship BIND.
I'd be worried, though, that this would allow coverups; to prevent that from the start, they should make the mailing list archives automatically available after, say, 30 days.
Information control is usually harmful in the long run, but it can be helpful in the short run.
oh great! i was wondering when you wackos where gonna pop up on this thread. people like you
are the reason CA and some of the other western states like WA are in the mess their in now.
Wow! Having opinions entirely unconstrained by facts is so much easier, isn't it?
The problem here in California is with a half-assed 'deregulation', which the utilities practially wrote. It has very little to do with environmental laws. Go pick up any recent edition of, say, The Economist.
25% of the CO2? ok... so what? CO2 keeps us from freezing our asses off! 100% of the worlds freedom/economy/security/consumers/productivity/sc ience/FOOD hell why we only putting out 25%? seems a bit low to me, i think we should work on it!
Have you every actually left the country, pal? I've lived on four continents so far, and it's more complex than you think.
We hardly have 100% of the freedom or the security. For a first-world country, we have an extraordinary amount of crime and violence. We have about 5% of the consumers. The US may produce a lot of good science, but have you peeked in a faculty room lately? The percentage of native-born Americans is actually pretty small.
wish you chicken littles would just go hide in the corner till the world ends. [...] after all if your right it will be next week.
Try living in India or China for a month and then tell me what you think of environmental regulations, chief. In Delhi, many change shirts after lunch, as the air makes the shirts too grubby to look good for an entire day. In Xi'an, many people wear breathing masks in public.
I dunno about you, but I see a clear "night" on the internet.
I just looked at logs for a site that draws 15 megabits/sec at peak, and less than half that during off times. In a load-balanced configuration, that suggests you can put a lot of capacity to sleep when you don't need it.
We have about 50,000 sq ft and it's the raised floor cooling, AC, lights that suck current.
Note that if your computers use less power, you need less cooling.
In a commercial environment you can't get away with an SLA that says "we'll power down your
servers at random which will create 30% greater latency".
In load balancing situations, you could probably boot idle boxes out of the set. As utilization increases, you wake idle boxes up and bring 'em back in. It could be accomplished with little or no latency.
And suppose you offer a discount in exchange? A quick back-of-envelope calculation suggests that these kind of tricks would save a couple thousand dollars a year for cabinet of hardware in an California coloc.
How about instead of worrying about buggy APM support on servers, companies start to lobby
California's government for some hard regulatory changes so power companies can actually start building new power plants there?
Please. The environmental regs are a small part of the problem. Deregulation dragged on for so long and was such a a half-assed mess that nobody would have built a power plant out here even if they could have belched coal smoke all over a wildlife refuge. Why risk a few hundred million bucks if you have no idea what your ROI will be?
And they were smart to wait, too. Now that the faux deregulation has blown up, people are muttering about seizing the power plants. Or at least limiting them to 'fair' profit levels. Great way to attract investment, eh?
The real solution is a dereg where retail prices aren't fixed by the government. Even here in California, not many people even bother to conserve power. Why? Because supply vs. demand doesn't matter.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, spinning down drives in ANY machine is a BAD idea.
Yeah, yeah. But that doesn't explain why you can't do other laptop tricks, like dropping processor speed during idle times.
There not meant to. If a server is in a position where it can go into a power saving mode, then someone has not done a good job on the server farm.
This just isn't true. I dunno about you folks, but even with the nominally 24x7 web sites I work on, the difference between lowest and peak is more than 2x. So if you have a load balanced configuration, it's plausible that half the servers could leave the active set and sleep at nights. And in an office setting, the peak-to-valley gap should be even higher.
As many posters mention, stopping a running hard drive is asking for trouble. But it would be nice if all processors could drop speed when idle, which apparently works well in laptops. And in power saving modes, it would seem to make sense to gently drop a disk drive's rotational speed. If it never stops and the spin-up to full speed is very gradual, this might extend disk lifetimes rather than reducing them.
Your post clearly indicated contempt for jobs in general and bagels in specific. I read that as including contempt for the people serving bagels. If that's not the case, I apologize.
Regardless my point still stands; all positive-sum work can be done sincerely, well, and with pride. When I worked at McDonald's, I felt that way. When I worked in a factory, I felt that way. And now that I make software, I still feel that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I write/maintain scheduling software, and one thing I have learned is that, in order to max their productivity, the docs multiple book several appointments at a time.
This is only necessarily true if 100% of a doctor's work requires a time slot.
The truth is that it need not be the case. There are a lot of things that can be done at almost any time: email, telephone calls, paperwork, evaluating test results, journal reading, and so on. If they actually end up with a few spare minutes when somebody skips an appointment or doesn't take so long, other work could fill in.
According to a very interesting article in the New York Times on Jan 4 called "Remedy for Waiting", some clinics have redone their scheduling to serve the same number of people with the same doctors without the standard technique of massive overbooking. The article is now in the for-pay archives, so I can't quote from it, but it made a convincing case that it was doable. People were stunned when they could get an appointment the same week and actually be seen on time.
I agree with the original poster in this thread; the #1 thing I want is knowing that I don't have to wait six months to see a doctor, and where I don't have to spend two hours reading copies of "People" from the late 70s.
My post said that most local businesses and a lot of national business aren't of the nature where adveritising on the national scale doesn't make sense. When was the last time you saw a superbowl ad for a plumber?
True, but irrelevant. Spam is cheap, and cost shifting makes it even cheaper. I get two or three spams a day for businesses in Argentina; I've never even been to Argentina. Why? Because it's more expensive to carefully target your email than it is to just send out a few million extra and live with the decreased response rate.
I don't like spam as much as the next guy, but to think that you'll ever get thousands a day? Get real.
Ten years ago, I got zero. Five years ago, I got one or two. Today, I get maybe 30 a day, despite extensive technological and social measures to reduce spam. Since you seem to have the answers, care to tell me what the maximum number I'll get is? Don't forget to include the fact that only a small percentage of potential internet users are currently on the net.
You're right that it won't be thousands a day, because I'll abandon email entirely at that point. But Moore's law makes spamming ever cheaper and Metcalfe's law makes it ever more useful. Pretending that spamming won't get worse is just sticking your head in the sand.
Hardly. Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is a content restriction. Method restrictions are different.
Suppose I go buy a massive PA system and set it up outside your house. Then I and some pals start shouting about our great new MLM scheme. Around the clock. For days.
If you call the cops, they will come by and ask me to stop. If I don't, they'll arrest me pronto. This would even apply if I was making political speeches or reading poetry. Why doesn't the constitution protect me? Because the cops are rightly suppressing a public nuisance. The content is entirely irrelevant; it's all about the method.
So as the original poster wrote, "Free speech means that you can say whatever you want, not that you can say it however you want." If you think it should be otherwise, let me know where you live so I can drop by and tatoo my messages on your forehead.
I'm also not quite sure what the original poster wants, but when a box in a cabinet gets so unhappy that it's not controllable via the network, I use APC's MasterSwitch, which is basically and eight-plug power strip with an ethernet jack and the ability to turn the outlets on and off individually.
I have also heard interesting things about the watchdog cards that have Linux drivers in the kernel, although I've never used them myself.
Both these solutions strike me as ugly, but I guess it beats driving to a colloc in the middle of the night.
I would much rather have spam in my inbox than a mailbox full of coupons and credit card applications killing trees and filling our landfills.
Hey, and once this television thing catches on, they'll take all those commercials off the radio and take the ads out of newspapers, right?
If we could shift all snail-mail, telephone, and junk-fax advertising to e-mail, I'd honestly have to think about it. But the truth is, it's not a choice of junk mail versus junk email. Your USPS mailbox is already doomed; it's a choice between saving our electronic inboxes or letting 'em fill up with crap too.
It depends on what you define as "mean something". For me and for those I know that care about spam, there are indeed deeper issues involved:
This is not to say that soup kitchens are not worthy, and I do contribute to them. But the worthiness of ameliorating the pain of poverty doesn't automatically make other positive actions meaningless.
If you want to gripe at somebody about the poor state of the world, gripe at the large number of people who do nothing. Or better, gripe at the large number of parasites and dirtbags who are a drain on us all. Like, say, spammers.
Spam is relatively unobtrusive and can easily be deleted costing the recipient nothing more than a few k of bandwidth and several moments of inconvenience.
This is true for one spam a day. Is it true for ten? A hundred? A thousand?
Spamming a million people costs the sender less than a small newspaper ad. How many ads did your local newspapers carry this week? And how many newspapers are their in the world? (Yeah, the world. I receive two or three spams a day for shit in Argentina. I've never even been to Argentina.)
Sure, you don't get that much now. But the only reason we all get so little spam is that people who spam get booted off the Internet. If the DMA, in conjunction with goofballs such as yourself, manages to make spam legitimate, then you will get that much spam.
Thanks to the DMA and their ilk, 90% of my paper mail is garbage, and that's with them paying 100% of the cost. With email, the recipient pays a good chunk of the cost, even without the theft of services that 95% of spam involve. So what percentage of your inbox will be crap?
And then, having made normal email useless, the marketroids will be competing for ways to "cut through the clutter". A spam won't be a few k anymore; it will be a few hundred. I'm already starting to see 'em with 50k of imbedded GIFs; flash animations won't be far behind.
That makes it a little harder to ignore, eh, bucko?
You are now in violation of Godwin's Law. We will come to collect you shortly.
I wouldn't throw out my current servers, but I would certainly favor boxes that were otherwise equal but used less power. Why?
1) Why be wasteful? Just because you can afford to do something doesn't mean you should. I pay about 5% more to use 100% renewable power. (Before the latest crisis, I paid 20% less.)
2) It's cheaper. Even under moderate assumptions, you could save a couple thousand dollars a year for a medium-sized commercial web site. That money would be much better spent on more hardware. Or more beer.
3) It's cooler. Not in the sense of hipness, but in terms of temperature. If the Register's numbers for a dual-Itanium server power consumption are to be believed, a couple of those babies would put out more heat as a hair dryer or a space heater.
Judging by Athalon's heat output, the heat output of typical CPUs scales 1:1 with speed. A lot of server rooms I enter are already running a little warm; imagine what it will be like after a round of upgrades to faster and hotter boxes.
Maybe you can afford to pay for the electricity, but can you afford to pay for a massive upgrade to your air conditioning?
I'm not sure this is pro-cooperative. Oh well.
If you know you will be playing only one round, it is indeed not pro-cooperation.
The game becomes much more interesting when you play the game over and over with the same partner. Then cooperation can pay off.
There is a a vast literature on the topic; the original work on the iterated prisoner's dilemma was done by Robert Axelrod at the Univeristy of Michigan. He has also has a web site for his book The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration.
For those interested in the evolution of social behavior, this stuff is fascinating. And it lends itself to all sorts of cool simulations, so there's a high geek enjoyment factor in it all.
But perhaps someone here could answer the question of: in the real world are the heating demands of spooling server in and out of an idle state worse or better than leaving it on?
Agreed; some hard data on this would be great.
The problem with load balancers is that if you've built them right they're always busy and every node in the clusted is always doing something, say @ 25-35% capacity. Else you've wasted your cluster dollars if you have a whole node doing nothing for a period of time.
That's not necessarily true when you consider issues of peak load versus off-peak load. Suppose you have a site that on the peak day at the peak time, you serve a million hits per hour. Suppose further that to allow for surges, you never want to hit more than 75% utilization. And further suppose that each box can serve 70 hits/second, or 250,000 per hour.
For peak load then, you'd need 6 boxes. But looking at stats for the biggest site I can easily check, the least busy hour is only 44% of the traffic of the busiest hour. Under these assumptions, during slack time you could put three servers into some low-power idle state and take them out of the load balancing set. And likely you'd keep a warm spare in the cabinet, which could also be idling except when needed during a failover.
At the very least, this would save a fair bit of power. As others have pointed out, stopping and starting disk drives can increase the MTBF for drives. But being able to stop some of your drives for many hours a day could well increase their calendar lifespan, as well as reducing the risk of simultaneous failure.
---
Of course, the software for this doesn't exist yet, but there's at least a plausible reason to have it. A back-of-envelope calculation suggests that the power bill for a setup like this would be in the $2000/yr price range at $0.10/kwh. But wholesale power prices are much higher in California now than that; at $0.30/kwh, then a 30% power reduction over 3 years would be $5400 bucks, which is not chump change.
Good article in last weeks Economist on the subject. Those ignorant politicians didn't understand deregulation, and were more interested in appeasing lobby groups, and screwed it all up.
Living in San Francisco, I can assure you that the politicians aren't the only ones who don't get it. Most people here have heard of this whole "market economy" thing, but only in the way people in Indiana have heard of communism: they may not know much about it, but they know it's bad and dangerous and all right-thinking people should be against it.
If you need proof, look no further than the bursting of the Internet bubble, which strikes me a much more authentic California product than cheese.
I used a SkyTel pager for a few years. The technology was fine, but the customer service sucked so hard that you could just call their 800 number, put the phone handset in a bell jar, and create a laboratory-grade vacuum in under a minute. I may have received a bill that was correct once, but if so, it was by accident.
I eventually just got a PCS cellphone, and pretty much ignore the cellphone part. It's cheaper and it seems to work just as well.
I also hear good things about the blackberry but I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet.
The original OS was on Sun 3 hardware. NeXT's boxes came later :)
Oooh, good point. Although that was only in development and only in house, right? By 0.8 or so, they were producing cubes, and I don't remember any mention of Sun hardware at that point.
If it was easy to build large powerplants, someone would have done so, since the wholesale electricity prices in California have been high for quite a while now, and it has been obvious to many for years that demand was outpacing supply.
I was actually asking for evidence for the specific claim that environmental regulations are the reason that no new plants have been built.
My impression is that the main reason that nobody built plants for ages was that a) for quite a while, there was suffcient supply, and b) by the time the need was obvious, deregulation was in the air, making it impossible to forcast the ROI on the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build a power plant.
The fact that new power plants are now in the works (and have been for at least a couple of years) without major concessions on environmental regulations further suggests that the environmental regulations aren't the main problem.
Why should he have an opinion on everything!? The community is what makes /. unique.
He "isn't sure how he feels about this" because the issue is subtle, involving balancing a variety of reasonable but competing needs.
A lot of people on Slashdot, though, entirely miss subtlety. It was H. L. Mencken who said, "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." On a bad day, that might as well be Slashdot's motto.
While there is additional government power regulation risk, I think the expense of
environmental regulations (particularly the impact statements) are keeping new plants from being built.
Got some evidence for this? The deregulation battle dragged on for years. Several new power plants have been approved since deregulation was finally settled, and except for one recent approval for a peaker plant near SFO, I'm not aware of a case where they lowered environmental regs. But since they take years to build, I don't think any of them have come on line.
Significant environmental de-regulation of power plants is the only real solution. Better do it carefully though.
That doesn't clearly follow. Studying the environmental impact is one barrier to entry, but it's not a huge one. Building and running a power plant is a huge affair, and the environmental work is just one of many expenses.
--
Note also that lowering environmental standards may not save money overall; it can just shift costs from the people who use the power to other people. Increasing particulate emissions may save on hardware to remove it, but it increases health care costs. Why should I increase my risk of bronchitis so some bozo can fill his 4500 sq ft house with 500W halogen lamps?
Hell, I moved to California partly because of the environment. I even pay (slightly) extra for environmentally friendly power. It may be a reasonable thing for society to say "fuck the environment, I want cheap power", but that's not what voters here generally say. If citizens are willing to pay the costs of a clean environment, what's the problem?
I don't think security through temporary obscrutiny [sic] is the way to go though.
Giving vendors a little jump on the crackers makes some sense. When a bug is announced, it's nice to have patches ready, too, and a whole mess of people ship BIND.
I'd be worried, though, that this would allow coverups; to prevent that from the start, they should make the mailing list archives automatically available after, say, 30 days.
Information control is usually harmful in the long run, but it can be helpful in the short run.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I'm sure a lot of readers do.
Wow, that is Slashdot in a nutshell, isn't it?
oh great! i was wondering when you wackos where gonna pop up on this thread. people like you
c ience/FOOD hell why we only putting out 25%? seems a bit low to me, i think we should work on it!
are the reason CA and some of the other western states like WA are in the mess their in now.
Wow! Having opinions entirely unconstrained by facts is so much easier, isn't it?
The problem here in California is with a half-assed 'deregulation', which the utilities practially wrote. It has very little to do with environmental laws. Go pick up any recent edition of, say, The Economist.
25% of the CO2? ok... so what? CO2 keeps us from freezing our asses off! 100% of the worlds freedom/economy/security/consumers/productivity/s
Have you every actually left the country, pal? I've lived on four continents so far, and it's more complex than you think.
We hardly have 100% of the freedom or the security. For a first-world country, we have an extraordinary amount of crime and violence. We have about 5% of the consumers. The US may produce a lot of good science, but have you peeked in a faculty room lately? The percentage of native-born Americans is actually pretty small.
wish you chicken littles would just go hide in the corner till the world ends. [...] after all if your right it will be next week.
Try living in India or China for a month and then tell me what you think of environmental regulations, chief. In Delhi, many change shirts after lunch, as the air makes the shirts too grubby to look good for an entire day. In Xi'an, many people wear breathing masks in public.
Pray tell, when is "night" on the Internet?
I dunno about you, but I see a clear "night" on the internet.
I just looked at logs for a site that draws 15 megabits/sec at peak, and less than half that during off times. In a load-balanced configuration, that suggests you can put a lot of capacity to sleep when you don't need it.
We have about 50,000 sq ft and it's the raised floor cooling, AC, lights that suck current.
Note that if your computers use less power, you need less cooling.
In a commercial environment you can't get away with an SLA that says "we'll power down your
servers at random which will create 30% greater latency".
In load balancing situations, you could probably boot idle boxes out of the set. As utilization increases, you wake idle boxes up and bring 'em back in. It could be accomplished with little or no latency.
And suppose you offer a discount in exchange? A quick back-of-envelope calculation suggests that these kind of tricks would save a couple thousand dollars a year for cabinet of hardware in an California coloc.
How about instead of worrying about buggy APM support on servers, companies start to lobby
California's government for some hard regulatory changes so power companies can actually start building new power plants there?
Please. The environmental regs are a small part of the problem. Deregulation dragged on for so long and was such a a half-assed mess that nobody would have built a power plant out here even if they could have belched coal smoke all over a wildlife refuge. Why risk a few hundred million bucks if you have no idea what your ROI will be?
And they were smart to wait, too. Now that the faux deregulation has blown up, people are muttering about seizing the power plants. Or at least limiting them to 'fair' profit levels. Great way to attract investment, eh?
The real solution is a dereg where retail prices aren't fixed by the government. Even here in California, not many people even bother to conserve power. Why? Because supply vs. demand doesn't matter.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, spinning down drives in ANY machine is a BAD idea.
Yeah, yeah. But that doesn't explain why you can't do other laptop tricks, like dropping processor speed during idle times.
There not meant to. If a server is in a position where it can go into a power saving mode, then someone has not done a good job on the server farm.
This just isn't true. I dunno about you folks, but even with the nominally 24x7 web sites I work on, the difference between lowest and peak is more than 2x. So if you have a load balanced configuration, it's plausible that half the servers could leave the active set and sleep at nights. And in an office setting, the peak-to-valley gap should be even higher.
As many posters mention, stopping a running hard drive is asking for trouble. But it would be nice if all processors could drop speed when idle, which apparently works well in laptops. And in power saving modes, it would seem to make sense to gently drop a disk drive's rotational speed. If it never stops and the spin-up to full speed is very gradual, this might extend disk lifetimes rather than reducing them.
Your post clearly indicated contempt for jobs in general and bagels in specific. I read that as including contempt for the people serving bagels. If that's not the case, I apologize.
Regardless my point still stands; all positive-sum work can be done sincerely, well, and with pride. When I worked at McDonald's, I felt that way. When I worked in a factory, I felt that way. And now that I make software, I still feel that way.