You're joking, I assume, but this is a point they've answered in their FAQ:
Won't all those computers left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the climate system?
Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the climateprediction.net project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of electrical energy.
That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Let's use a tiny bit of physics to do it. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the climateprediction.net project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea!
Is five and a half million cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council, some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!!!
Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the climateprediction.net project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.
Assuming you are convinced this experiment needs to be done, there are basically two options: to buy a hangar-full of PCs and run it ourselves (not even an option right now, since the climate research community doesn't have the resources); or to recycle spare CPU out in the community, as we propose to do under the climateprediction.net experiment. Since the main environmental impact of a PC is in manufacture and disposal, not the power consumed in running it (never mind the air-conditioning costs and visual impact of that hangar on some innocent rural community), environmentalists will, we hope, approve of our strategy.
Actually, one of the purposes of this test was to weed out the best AAC encoder for participating in a future test that will compare it to MPC, Vorbis, MP3, and WMA. The discussion of this test can be found over at the Hydrogenaudio forums.
Next, they'll start suing people because they don't buy their crappy products.
"Your honour, in spite of the fact that we've added 33% larger breasts to the cover art for Britney Spears' latest album, the named defendants still refuse to buy her albums. We're suing for monetary damages."
And what a remarkable series of typos it would be.
"'2 GHz G5'... oh sorry, I meant to type '1.42 GHz G4'. Sorry! '...up to 1 GHz system bus...' Whups! I didn't mean to mention the system bus at all. Sorry. 'up to 8 GB of DDR RAM'... Whups again! I don't know what's wrong with my fingers today."
(via maccentral):
"The Neverwinter Nights tech demo requires a G3/450MHz or faster CPU, 256MB RAM, 3D graphics chip with 32MB VRAM and 645MB hard disk space."
I've spent my share of time with environmental groups and nobody I've known has ever thought that recycling was a panacea. Remember the three "Rs"? They're listed in order of preference: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Reducing your consumption is the best thing you can do for the environment. But if you must consume something, then maximize its use and reuse. And finally, if you've exhausted all the utility you can from something, then you recycle it, if the opportunity is available.
Most environmentalists are fully aware that recycling sometimes consumes more energy and resources than it saves, but that was never the main point. The real idea behind recycling was one of behaviour modification: if you could first convince people that they should think about the environment and start recycling, then it would be easier later to get them to reuse things, and finally to not consume so much stuff in the first place. Recycling is the easier of these three thing to do, which is why most of the emphasis was placed on it.
As it turns out, most people are too fucking lazy to even recycle, which is why I think there's no chance ever of getting people to reduce in a meaningful way. Some neoliberal economists have even tried to argue that increasing your consumption is good for the environment, but this is a notion too insane to bother rebutting.
So you can't be an environmentalist unless you live in a shack, grow your own food, forgo Western medicine, and don't use any technology that you didn't build yourself? That's absurd. I consider myself an environmentalist. I try to minimize my consumption. I think about purchases. I don't own a car. I try to educate others. But I live in a city, I use technology, and I use fossil fuels. Am I hypocrite?
Listen, it's easy to be a critic, but if you've ever seen with your own eyes what these tree sitters are fighting for, you might change your mind. I've been to some of the clearcuts on Vancouver Island, BC. You wouldn't believe the logging practices that went on before the environmental movement helped put a stop to them. There are entire mountains there that have been clearcut bald, from the summit straight into the valleys. Whole landscapes, brown and full of nothing but broken stumps. Soil washed away so nothing will grow back for a long time. It's gastly. But now, clearcuts like these are banned, and sustainable logging is being practiced more and more widely in BC.
These environmentals aren't against the wholesale use of wood, or oil, or technology - don't be silly. That's a false choice. It's in how we do things. Do we drive around town in Hummers, getting 8 miles per gallon, or do we acknowledge that yeah, there's more to living on this planet than unfettered self-gratification, and learn to make due with a smaller car? Or public transit? It's about rationale choices, man.
It's not just because Quark hasn't gone Carbon that publishing pros haven't switched to OS X. It's the zillions of plug-ins (XTensions) for Quark that also run only in OS 9. Since so many people rely on these in their workflow, it may be a long time before these people switchh to OS X.
Eyestrain can definately occur from wearing glasses that are too strong. Anyone who has ever worn glasses knows this; when you first put on a new prescripton, your eye muscles get sore from the sudden dramatic adjustment. Or, you can get the same effect by reading a computer screen from a foot away (if you're nearsighted) with your correct prescription glasses. That's why I use my old, weaker prescription glasses when I'm working at my computer. It's easier on the eye muscles.
What's really important about this discover is that it extends the boundaries in which we know life can exist, not just on Earth, but throughout the universe. If a microbe can live in boiling hot temperatures in complete darkness with nothing to eat but sulphur, then all of a sudden life on Mars or Europa seems all the more plausible.
An interesting process for sure, but I wonder if this is any more energy efficient than recycling old plastic which is, as I understand it, largely a mechanical process that involves separation and chipping. Where I live in Massachusetts, I'm shocked by the number of households that still don't recycle. You would think that after decades of environmental education, people would be in the habit of not tossing out their plastic milk jugs out with the trash, but still I see this all the time. There is still lots of cheap usable material out there, if people just weren't so damned lazy.
Someone who has lost their job or their marriage because of gaming addiction might disagree. Simply because gaming addiction is more subtle or less violent than alcoholism doesn't mean it can't have effects that are just as negative to the people involved.
It seems a bit irresponsible for her to dismiss gaming addiction as "just another amusement park". Clearly some people don't have the same willpower as she does, and for them gaming addiction is a real problem that causes them to become antisocial and lose touch with their friends, their jobs, their lives. The very word "addiction" means that the compulsion is stronger than the person's resistance. Any kind of behaviour which resists one's better judgement is damaging, IMHO.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not new. Remember that before their company self-destructed, Enron executives had repeatedly met with Dick Cheney while the Bush administration's energy policy was being drafted. Details of those meetings still haven't been disclosed, and Cheney refuses to do so, using the defence that forcing politicians to disclose the details of such meetings would stifle politicians from doing their job.
What he actually means by this, of course, is that if politicians aren't allowed to keep their backroom deals with corporations secret, then they won't be able to have secret backroom deals with corporations anymore. Having to behave like honest politicians is clearly unacceptable to the likes of Cheney and Bush.
if you actually read the abc story you'll find that he's not, as implied by the slashdot post, merely standing in the path of these avalanches wearing nothing but ski goggles and goretex. he's in a wooden bunker that's bolted to the bedrock and packed with instrumentation. this gives him not only live data from the basal layer of the avalanche, but an up-close experience that helps him interpret that data in a more insightful way.
of course, you could probably accomplish the same by giving thermometers to a bunch of graduate students and telling them, "stand over there. no, not in the trees, out there on the slope. wait right there while i push this button."
Slashdot Mirror
you're thinking US-centric. british households use 240V power, so 50W over there is equivalent to 100W on 120V power.
Won't all those computers left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the climate system?
Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the climateprediction.net project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of electrical energy.
That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Let's use a tiny bit of physics to do it. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the climateprediction.net project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea!
Is five and a half million cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council, some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!!!
Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the climateprediction.net project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.
Assuming you are convinced this experiment needs to be done, there are basically two options: to buy a hangar-full of PCs and run it ourselves (not even an option right now, since the climate research community doesn't have the resources); or to recycle spare CPU out in the community, as we propose to do under the climateprediction.net experiment. Since the main environmental impact of a PC is in manufacture and disposal, not the power consumed in running it (never mind the air-conditioning costs and visual impact of that hangar on some innocent rural community), environmentalists will, we hope, approve of our strategy.
they've done this at Brandeis. unpatched windows xp/2000 computers are banned from the network.
Tiny little lead aprons.
Actually, one of the purposes of this test was to weed out the best AAC encoder for participating in a future test that will compare it to MPC, Vorbis, MP3, and WMA. The discussion of this test can be found over at the Hydrogenaudio forums.
here's an article from the ubyssey, the student paper at ubc. it has some longer quotes from the researcher: http://www.ubyssey.bc.ca/article.shtml?/20010126/p rofLooksToStars.htmlf
Next, they'll start suing people because they don't buy their crappy products.
"Your honour, in spite of the fact that we've added 33% larger breasts to the cover art for Britney Spears' latest album, the named defendants still refuse to buy her albums. We're suing for monetary damages."
steve jobs' keynote address is now available as a quicktime stream here: http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
And what a remarkable series of typos it would be. "'2 GHz G5' ... oh sorry, I meant to type '1.42 GHz G4'. Sorry! '...up to 1 GHz system bus...' Whups! I didn't mean to mention the system bus at all. Sorry. 'up to 8 GB of DDR RAM' ... Whups again! I don't know what's wrong with my fingers today."
(via maccentral): "The Neverwinter Nights tech demo requires a G3/450MHz or faster CPU, 256MB RAM, 3D graphics chip with 32MB VRAM and 645MB hard disk space."
since apple has recently dropped the price on both the 12" and the 15" powerbooks, i would speculate that a 12" ppc970 'book is in the works as well.
I've spent my share of time with environmental groups and nobody I've known has ever thought that recycling was a panacea. Remember the three "Rs"? They're listed in order of preference: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Reducing your consumption is the best thing you can do for the environment. But if you must consume something, then maximize its use and reuse. And finally, if you've exhausted all the utility you can from something, then you recycle it, if the opportunity is available. Most environmentalists are fully aware that recycling sometimes consumes more energy and resources than it saves, but that was never the main point. The real idea behind recycling was one of behaviour modification: if you could first convince people that they should think about the environment and start recycling, then it would be easier later to get them to reuse things, and finally to not consume so much stuff in the first place. Recycling is the easier of these three thing to do, which is why most of the emphasis was placed on it. As it turns out, most people are too fucking lazy to even recycle, which is why I think there's no chance ever of getting people to reduce in a meaningful way. Some neoliberal economists have even tried to argue that increasing your consumption is good for the environment, but this is a notion too insane to bother rebutting.
So you can't be an environmentalist unless you live in a shack, grow your own food, forgo Western medicine, and don't use any technology that you didn't build yourself? That's absurd. I consider myself an environmentalist. I try to minimize my consumption. I think about purchases. I don't own a car. I try to educate others. But I live in a city, I use technology, and I use fossil fuels. Am I hypocrite?
Listen, it's easy to be a critic, but if you've ever seen with your own eyes what these tree sitters are fighting for, you might change your mind. I've been to some of the clearcuts on Vancouver Island, BC. You wouldn't believe the logging practices that went on before the environmental movement helped put a stop to them. There are entire mountains there that have been clearcut bald, from the summit straight into the valleys. Whole landscapes, brown and full of nothing but broken stumps. Soil washed away so nothing will grow back for a long time. It's gastly. But now, clearcuts like these are banned, and sustainable logging is being practiced more and more widely in BC.
These environmentals aren't against the wholesale use of wood, or oil, or technology - don't be silly. That's a false choice. It's in how we do things. Do we drive around town in Hummers, getting 8 miles per gallon, or do we acknowledge that yeah, there's more to living on this planet than unfettered self-gratification, and learn to make due with a smaller car? Or public transit? It's about rationale choices, man.
It's not just because Quark hasn't gone Carbon that publishing pros haven't switched to OS X. It's the zillions of plug-ins (XTensions) for Quark that also run only in OS 9. Since so many people rely on these in their workflow, it may be a long time before these people switchh to OS X.
Eyestrain can definately occur from wearing glasses that are too strong. Anyone who has ever worn glasses knows this; when you first put on a new prescripton, your eye muscles get sore from the sudden dramatic adjustment. Or, you can get the same effect by reading a computer screen from a foot away (if you're nearsighted) with your correct prescription glasses. That's why I use my old, weaker prescription glasses when I'm working at my computer. It's easier on the eye muscles.
What's really important about this discover is that it extends the boundaries in which we know life can exist, not just on Earth, but throughout the universe. If a microbe can live in boiling hot temperatures in complete darkness with nothing to eat but sulphur, then all of a sudden life on Mars or Europa seems all the more plausible.
An interesting process for sure, but I wonder if this is any more energy efficient than recycling old plastic which is, as I understand it, largely a mechanical process that involves separation and chipping. Where I live in Massachusetts, I'm shocked by the number of households that still don't recycle. You would think that after decades of environmental education, people would be in the habit of not tossing out their plastic milk jugs out with the trash, but still I see this all the time. There is still lots of cheap usable material out there, if people just weren't so damned lazy.
"fibre optic cable laying robot". yeah, sure. we all know that robot + fibre optic connection = high bandwidth voyeur cam.
Someone who has lost their job or their marriage because of gaming addiction might disagree. Simply because gaming addiction is more subtle or less violent than alcoholism doesn't mean it can't have effects that are just as negative to the people involved.
It seems a bit irresponsible for her to dismiss gaming addiction as "just another amusement park". Clearly some people don't have the same willpower as she does, and for them gaming addiction is a real problem that causes them to become antisocial and lose touch with their friends, their jobs, their lives. The very word "addiction" means that the compulsion is stronger than the person's resistance. Any kind of behaviour which resists one's better judgement is damaging, IMHO.
of course the soviet union no longer exists. i'll assume that you knew this, but had merely forgotten.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not new. Remember that before their company self-destructed, Enron executives had repeatedly met with Dick Cheney while the Bush administration's energy policy was being drafted. Details of those meetings still haven't been disclosed, and Cheney refuses to do so, using the defence that forcing politicians to disclose the details of such meetings would stifle politicians from doing their job.
What he actually means by this, of course, is that if politicians aren't allowed to keep their backroom deals with corporations secret, then they won't be able to have secret backroom deals with corporations anymore. Having to behave like honest politicians is clearly unacceptable to the likes of Cheney and Bush.
if you actually read the abc story you'll find that he's not, as implied by the slashdot post, merely standing in the path of these avalanches wearing nothing but ski goggles and goretex. he's in a wooden bunker that's bolted to the bedrock and packed with instrumentation. this gives him not only live data from the basal layer of the avalanche, but an up-close experience that helps him interpret that data in a more insightful way. of course, you could probably accomplish the same by giving thermometers to a bunch of graduate students and telling them, "stand over there. no, not in the trees, out there on the slope. wait right there while i push this button."
uh oh! looks like we slashdotted internet2.edu! just kidding.