You don't understand. With VMWare you can cluster the hosts, but for vmotion and fault tolerance to work all members of the cluster have the same cpu's or at least cpu's that can work with EVC to mask off advanced functionality so that they all appear to be the same CPU's. This will potentially get you to 6 9's reliability if your software is sufficiently robust (and currently if it can fit into a single vCPU). The guests run on this cluster and move around between the hosts and in the case of FT actually run on two hosts simultaneously. Retiring one of the Intel server's isn't a big deal because you just buy a newer Intel server that's compatible with EVC and move the guests to that new host. That was kind of my point, there are practical technology limitations that can make a single vendor solution the best option. A good example is if they are currently using Outlook with forms based routing, to switch to an alternate messaging platform might exceed the cost of the messaging platform by several orders of magnitude based on developer costs. Is that an ideal situation to be in? Of course not, but to assume that all single source contracts are inherently bad or illegal is just stupid.
It depends. A perfectly reasonable RFP could include things that only lead to one technology being considered. For instance I have a VMWare cluster that uses Intel 5500 and 5600 CPU's, if I needed additional capacity without impacting my existing cluster I could write and RFP that stated that Intel 5500 and above parts which work with VMWare EVC (function masking) with my existing cluster be used. This would specify that Intel CPU's be used but would allow bidding from Dell, HP, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle and their resellers. I see nothing fundamentally wrong with such an RFP, but then I work in the private sector where picking the best technology for our needs is not only legal but often mandatory.
Modern refineries don't just do fractional distillation and that's how much gas and diesel they get, they do cracking where they break longer chains up into smaller. This process can be fairly easily tuned to meet demand and hence it's relatively trivial to go from making 60% gas 20% diesel to making 60% diesel 20% gas (about 20-40% of the fractional distillation comes out as gasoline and lighter compounds so there is a ceiling based on the crude feedstock).
They're getting better, the newest commercially available units are at 30 Wh/kg which competes with cheap nickel metal hydride cells. Volumetrically though they're very far from competing with either batteries or fossil fuels and current research doesn't seem to lead to any way to change that.
Exactly, I see algae reactors as probably the only long term sustainable future for our transportation energy needs. Nothing else is going to be convenient and cheap enough to supplant fossil fuels. The only thing that might change my mind would be if supercapacitors got small enough and cheap enough to make charge times and range for pure electrics similar to biodiesel and then energy losses might be enough lower than transporting fuel that electrics win out. However, that's a big if at this point considering that the best supercapacitors have about 1/3rd the energy density of biodiesel, are large, and are stupid expensive (with little chance of bringing down costs even with mass manufacturing).
I think the problem with your argument is that TekSawy is almost assuredly riding the same DSLAM and backhaul as Bell's customers, at least is the US very few CLEC's run their own infrastructure (and due to physical space and power limitations couldn't if they wanted to).
Dude, you must have *zero* clue about about how a large enterprise works. We put in an ERP package that required IE6 back in 2007, planning for that started in early 2006. We are just now rolling out the next version which supports IE8, but it's been in the works for almost 6 months and won't actually go into production until mid Q1 2011. Because it's mission critical to the business everything has to be thoroughly tested as does everything else that ties into it (we have an automated accounts payable system, 4 different reporting processes, automated document generation with submission to our document management system, automated bill sending, and ties into our CRM system to test). We can't and won't switch out our tested solution just to make some webmonkey at youtube happy. If they want to be able to get the pagehits from our users and all the other corporate users that are in the same situation they'll support IE6 until some majority have made the switch.
Survival was critically important if you wanted to play hardcore, and for anyone that played more than a few months that was where the game really began. I played HC a LOT for a couple years and only had one 99 Guardian and a few 95+ Guardians, all were built with survivability in mind and had gear with lots of resists and absorb because that's the only way you could survive that many encounters.
Trainers were great for testing a new weird build or trying out things after a new patch came out. I played hardcore so risking death after a patch changed something wasn't always the most appealing option. Oh, and trainers just gave you stuff and set your level in single player, that's very different from a bot.
You can use stock as well as cash and cash equivalents to perform a hostile takeover, but it generally requires a much larger equity value in the company performing the takeover.
Uh, the problem from a large CME is actually blowing out all power plants, substations, and transformers. It would take years (or decades) to recover from because we don't have enough global manufacturing capacity to rebuild all the decades worth of installed equipment that might be fried. However as I stated up-thread I'm not sure how much a short warning is going to help.
30 minutes isn't going to be enough, no way they can shutdown the entire grid that fast. Heck to really protect things they have to do more than disconnect plants, they have to open breakers on every substation they want to save to disconnect them from the miles of lines leading in and out. And even if they saved the substations there would still be problems as there are tons of transformers attached to the grid that don't have a way to be isolated and estimates are that replacing those would take years as there is just not enough global manufacturing capacity. I'm really not sure how much good the warning system will actually do if we have a large CME head straight for us.
Actually, I think the modern stock market does a VERY poor job of establishing the accurate value of a company, instead it accurately reflects the instantaneous value of the equity security. While at first blush the two are the same thing, they are in fact very different. It is the absolute focus on the security price that has ruined so many once great companies. CEO's and other executives are no longer incentivized or in many cases even allowed to look beyond the current quarter to build long term stockholder value, because of the focus of the large money holders on the instantaneous return from things like HFT's the focus on the core value of the company gets disconnected from the equity price.
If it really took 25% more inputs to create a gallon of diesel don't you think it would significantly more expensive, especially since modern diesel has nearly as many additives as gasoline? The fact is without cracking you actually get significantly more middle distillates (diesel, kerosene, etc) than you do light distillates (gasoline and gasses) so without introducing additional energy into the refining process to break chemical bonds you end up with more diesel per barrel. Now once you add cracking today you get more gasoline, but that's because the energy intensive cracking process is tuned to meet the market demand, not the most efficient output chain.
As to the cold weather claims, only a fraction of a percent of the population of the continental US lives in locations that get cold enough for block heaters to be necessary. I live in a place with cold winters (NE Ohio), but even around here modern diesels have no problems starting on #1 diesel throughout the winter.
No, it takes ~14% more oil to make a gallon of diesel and you get ~30% better fuel economy. The technology has a better thermal->movement efficiency. As to the hybrid comment, I think biodiesel is a significantly better longterm solution than putting lots of heavy batteries into a car (the most likely source for future biodiesel is algae reactors).
There are *different* emissions from diesels than from gasoline engines, more NOx and particulates but fewer VOC's and less CO2 plus there's the anti-knock additives in gasoline that leak into ground water. Overall the significant reduction in overall fuel use and the easier transition to alternative fuels (biodiesel) means that diesels are probably a net win.
CVT's are horribly complex with almost no engineering base. The maintenance interval for Ford's CVT was half the range for their automatic which tells me they have almost zero confidence in the thing. I wanted a 500 4 wheel drive but since the CVT was the only option I wasn't going to gamble on it and instead bought a used Sable with the bulletproof Duratec 3L. So far I'm at 142k miles with nothing but a radiator hose for maintenance items.
While it used to be true that #1 diesel and home heating oil were primarily the same that is no longer the case, on-road diesel has to meet ultra-low sulfur ratings which means it can't be made from many crude stocks without significant equipment at the refinery to remove sulfur content. Automotive diesel also has a non-trivial amount of additives to add to lubricity and detergents to clean fuel injectors. Oh, and jet fuel is closer to kerosene than it is to diesel, both are heavier distillations than gasoline but they are different enough that I doubt the two markets compete other than for the tuning of cracking towers at the refinery.
Stop spewing worthless FUD, because they are mechanically simpler diesels tend to have LOWER maintenance costs, and with a little maintenance routinely make it to 300k+ miles which is about 50% further than a typical gasoline engine.
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You don't understand. With VMWare you can cluster the hosts, but for vmotion and fault tolerance to work all members of the cluster have the same cpu's or at least cpu's that can work with EVC to mask off advanced functionality so that they all appear to be the same CPU's. This will potentially get you to 6 9's reliability if your software is sufficiently robust (and currently if it can fit into a single vCPU). The guests run on this cluster and move around between the hosts and in the case of FT actually run on two hosts simultaneously. Retiring one of the Intel server's isn't a big deal because you just buy a newer Intel server that's compatible with EVC and move the guests to that new host. That was kind of my point, there are practical technology limitations that can make a single vendor solution the best option. A good example is if they are currently using Outlook with forms based routing, to switch to an alternate messaging platform might exceed the cost of the messaging platform by several orders of magnitude based on developer costs. Is that an ideal situation to be in? Of course not, but to assume that all single source contracts are inherently bad or illegal is just stupid.
Uh, except it requires downtime to move between platforms so in most environments that would not be an acceptable solution =)
It depends. A perfectly reasonable RFP could include things that only lead to one technology being considered. For instance I have a VMWare cluster that uses Intel 5500 and 5600 CPU's, if I needed additional capacity without impacting my existing cluster I could write and RFP that stated that Intel 5500 and above parts which work with VMWare EVC (function masking) with my existing cluster be used. This would specify that Intel CPU's be used but would allow bidding from Dell, HP, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle and their resellers. I see nothing fundamentally wrong with such an RFP, but then I work in the private sector where picking the best technology for our needs is not only legal but often mandatory.
At 45MPH, which is lame. Tell me what it gets at 70MPH and I might be impressed.
Modern refineries don't just do fractional distillation and that's how much gas and diesel they get, they do cracking where they break longer chains up into smaller. This process can be fairly easily tuned to meet demand and hence it's relatively trivial to go from making 60% gas 20% diesel to making 60% diesel 20% gas (about 20-40% of the fractional distillation comes out as gasoline and lighter compounds so there is a ceiling based on the crude feedstock).
They're getting better, the newest commercially available units are at 30 Wh/kg which competes with cheap nickel metal hydride cells. Volumetrically though they're very far from competing with either batteries or fossil fuels and current research doesn't seem to lead to any way to change that.
Exactly, I see algae reactors as probably the only long term sustainable future for our transportation energy needs. Nothing else is going to be convenient and cheap enough to supplant fossil fuels. The only thing that might change my mind would be if supercapacitors got small enough and cheap enough to make charge times and range for pure electrics similar to biodiesel and then energy losses might be enough lower than transporting fuel that electrics win out. However, that's a big if at this point considering that the best supercapacitors have about 1/3rd the energy density of biodiesel, are large, and are stupid expensive (with little chance of bringing down costs even with mass manufacturing).
I think the problem with your argument is that TekSawy is almost assuredly riding the same DSLAM and backhaul as Bell's customers, at least is the US very few CLEC's run their own infrastructure (and due to physical space and power limitations couldn't if they wanted to).
Netflix HD is up to 1MBps which means you get ~1/2 hour per day of HD content, no exactly a lot.
Huh? I get 24.855 Kbps based on a 30 day month. I think it's you that has the math error.
They don't have an enterprise agreement with MS? Under our EA I can download everything back to MS DOS.
Dude, you must have *zero* clue about about how a large enterprise works. We put in an ERP package that required IE6 back in 2007, planning for that started in early 2006. We are just now rolling out the next version which supports IE8, but it's been in the works for almost 6 months and won't actually go into production until mid Q1 2011. Because it's mission critical to the business everything has to be thoroughly tested as does everything else that ties into it (we have an automated accounts payable system, 4 different reporting processes, automated document generation with submission to our document management system, automated bill sending, and ties into our CRM system to test). We can't and won't switch out our tested solution just to make some webmonkey at youtube happy. If they want to be able to get the pagehits from our users and all the other corporate users that are in the same situation they'll support IE6 until some majority have made the switch.
Survival was critically important if you wanted to play hardcore, and for anyone that played more than a few months that was where the game really began. I played HC a LOT for a couple years and only had one 99 Guardian and a few 95+ Guardians, all were built with survivability in mind and had gear with lots of resists and absorb because that's the only way you could survive that many encounters.
Trainers were great for testing a new weird build or trying out things after a new patch came out. I played hardcore so risking death after a patch changed something wasn't always the most appealing option. Oh, and trainers just gave you stuff and set your level in single player, that's very different from a bot.
You can use stock as well as cash and cash equivalents to perform a hostile takeover, but it generally requires a much larger equity value in the company performing the takeover.
Uh, the market cap for ORCL is ~144B, GOOG is ~196B, I don't think Google will be performing a hostile takeover of Oracle anytime soon.
Uh, the problem from a large CME is actually blowing out all power plants, substations, and transformers. It would take years (or decades) to recover from because we don't have enough global manufacturing capacity to rebuild all the decades worth of installed equipment that might be fried. However as I stated up-thread I'm not sure how much a short warning is going to help.
30 minutes isn't going to be enough, no way they can shutdown the entire grid that fast. Heck to really protect things they have to do more than disconnect plants, they have to open breakers on every substation they want to save to disconnect them from the miles of lines leading in and out. And even if they saved the substations there would still be problems as there are tons of transformers attached to the grid that don't have a way to be isolated and estimates are that replacing those would take years as there is just not enough global manufacturing capacity. I'm really not sure how much good the warning system will actually do if we have a large CME head straight for us.
Actually, I think the modern stock market does a VERY poor job of establishing the accurate value of a company, instead it accurately reflects the instantaneous value of the equity security. While at first blush the two are the same thing, they are in fact very different. It is the absolute focus on the security price that has ruined so many once great companies. CEO's and other executives are no longer incentivized or in many cases even allowed to look beyond the current quarter to build long term stockholder value, because of the focus of the large money holders on the instantaneous return from things like HFT's the focus on the core value of the company gets disconnected from the equity price.
If it really took 25% more inputs to create a gallon of diesel don't you think it would significantly more expensive, especially since modern diesel has nearly as many additives as gasoline? The fact is without cracking you actually get significantly more middle distillates (diesel, kerosene, etc) than you do light distillates (gasoline and gasses) so without introducing additional energy into the refining process to break chemical bonds you end up with more diesel per barrel. Now once you add cracking today you get more gasoline, but that's because the energy intensive cracking process is tuned to meet the market demand, not the most efficient output chain.
As to the cold weather claims, only a fraction of a percent of the population of the continental US lives in locations that get cold enough for block heaters to be necessary. I live in a place with cold winters (NE Ohio), but even around here modern diesels have no problems starting on #1 diesel throughout the winter.
No, it takes ~14% more oil to make a gallon of diesel and you get ~30% better fuel economy. The technology has a better thermal->movement efficiency. As to the hybrid comment, I think biodiesel is a significantly better longterm solution than putting lots of heavy batteries into a car (the most likely source for future biodiesel is algae reactors).
There are *different* emissions from diesels than from gasoline engines, more NOx and particulates but fewer VOC's and less CO2 plus there's the anti-knock additives in gasoline that leak into ground water. Overall the significant reduction in overall fuel use and the easier transition to alternative fuels (biodiesel) means that diesels are probably a net win.
CVT's are horribly complex with almost no engineering base. The maintenance interval for Ford's CVT was half the range for their automatic which tells me they have almost zero confidence in the thing. I wanted a 500 4 wheel drive but since the CVT was the only option I wasn't going to gamble on it and instead bought a used Sable with the bulletproof Duratec 3L. So far I'm at 142k miles with nothing but a radiator hose for maintenance items.
While it used to be true that #1 diesel and home heating oil were primarily the same that is no longer the case, on-road diesel has to meet ultra-low sulfur ratings which means it can't be made from many crude stocks without significant equipment at the refinery to remove sulfur content. Automotive diesel also has a non-trivial amount of additives to add to lubricity and detergents to clean fuel injectors. Oh, and jet fuel is closer to kerosene than it is to diesel, both are heavier distillations than gasoline but they are different enough that I doubt the two markets compete other than for the tuning of cracking towers at the refinery.
Stop spewing worthless FUD, because they are mechanically simpler diesels tend to have LOWER maintenance costs, and with a little maintenance routinely make it to 300k+ miles which is about 50% further than a typical gasoline engine.