52 Minutes into this National Geographic Invisible World video I first saw in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The brain to camera interface connector looks remarkably like the connector on a TV Picture Tube of that era.
Do you ever wonder why your Mac/PC seems to get slower over time? Here is one example, we bought a cheap Lexmark all-in-one printer which didn't appear to have a driver for the Mac, Linux, Solaris... only Microsoft Windows. I thought I'd try the OSX driver for a previous printer model. It didn't work so I tried another. That didn't work so I uninstalled them and gave up. It was only much later that I noticed these drivers still running consuming hefty CPU resources even though the printer they were designed for was no where to be seen.
Admittedly, I moved to OpenSolaris and OSX after 5 years running Linux, I don't intend to install Google Earth 5.0 to check it, but something like this should work (mostly) on Solaris/OpenSolaris/FreeBSD and OSX 10.5 or newer:
#/usr/sbin/dtrace #pragma D option quiet #pragma D option destructive proc:::exec-success /(execname =="{google-updater-execname}"/ printf ('google update PID=%s trying to be evil, sending kill signal!') raise(9)
we currently track 200+ external bugs across ~40 OSS projects. Half the bugs depend on something else getting fixed, first.
lymond01 writes
Across multiple bugtrack systems and projects...trickier.
I'm working on a lightweight system designed exactly for this problem. And when I can get enough internal interest in getting the project through the opensource process, it may see the light of day sometime in the next few months. Until then, use bugzillas dependency fields, launchpad or post it notes. Sorry.
Pay a visit to Bradford U.K. and check out their Sun Ray ultra thin client based infrastructure. (disclosure) I wrote the login manager but if you decide to use a Linux or OpenSolaris distribution, you can throw that out as well as the cost of (N) Microsoft Windows licenses.
My back o the envelope guesstimate:
Sun Ray Thin client: 4 Watts * 2000 desktops * 200 days * 8 hours = 12800 Kwh *.1p/kwh = 1280.
Typical P.C.: 80 Watts * 2000 * 200 days * 8 hours = 25600 Kwh *.1p/kwh = 25600
You can probably get away with 1 or 0.5 sysadmins to manage 2000 thin client desktops. Maybe 2 or 3 for Linux fat clients depending on how close together the schools are. Windows? I don't know, 10? 15?
Figure out who is going to manage the whole thing; a system can't just be put in a closet in a classroom...
To add to the learning experience, give your entire class a 50 year assignment: "To maintain or assign others to maintain the storage and/or the systems, to boldly go..." This project is an excellent idea, it's a classroom sized version of the longnow
to try to get students to think beyond the next {insert ephemeral pop star} video.
I would try to find a 40 or 50 year old electronics device, disassemble it and a modern P.C. to show the students what has changed and what remains.
Most 40-50 year old electronic devices used vacuum tubes which were fragile and had a finite lifespan but they were designed for easy replacement. Comments about the short lifespan of Electrolytic capacitors (primarily the big ones in switching supplies) are absolutely correct, especially when power isn't applied. What I would do is:
Find a motherboard which operates on 12VDC (e.g. laptop) and just assume that the 110-12VDC transformer won't work in 50 years but provide instructions for powering the device off a 12VDC source (e.g. car battery, photovoltaic battery or future power source).
Don't try to store a car battery, but if you select a low power motherboard, you could store a solar power supply with the PC.
Add a bridge rectifier in case the future archaeologist is careless with polarity.
Don't rely on spinning magnetic hard drive, but choose a system which can boot from a spinning magnetic hard drive, a USB flash device, a CD and a DVD. Install your OS and applications redundantly on all of these devices.
Upload the disk image to an online archive.
Store extra copies of the flash, CD and DVD in various locations. Document the GPS coordinates of these locations in paper documents which are also stored at each of the locations.
Your project is possible. Last spring I was running software on an Amiga 1000 from 1985 and as recently as 2004, I've watched videos on a VCR from 1976 (one of the filter caps on the VCR was bad so the sound was buzzy, but otherwise it was O.K.)
...I have to basically sign an affidavit that I will pay the same rate to the foreign worker as a similarly qualified US worker, and I have to swear that I can't find anyone in the US to fill the job.
Employers who abuse the H1B system should be heavily fined (revenue going to H1B employee backpay and unemployment compensation for displaced citizens.) HR managers who authorized the abuse should find themselves out of a job, if not in jail. We can turn a blind eye to such abuse during boom times but now that the economy is damaged, the blame should not pass on to the abused foreign worker. Blame lies squarely with the abusive company. H1B is designed to backfill specialized skills. Two decades in the IT industry working across a variety of environments has convinced me that most job posts for N years using X framework/language/application/OS are shams. The fact that a recent change in EEOC labor laws encourages this practice. Here is how it works:
Company X needs a unix expert but they don't want to pay for one. So they find a particularly obscure newspaper and advertise that they are looking for 29-31 years of experience using Java 1.7 on RedHat RHEL 21. They get a number of (irritating) domestic applicants who've used Java 1.6 on OSX, Solaris or Ubuntu. They throw these in the bin and hire the H1B person, underpaying them.
For the non IT person, it's almost the equivalent of a taxi firm only hiring drivers who have experience driving 2001 Ford Galaxy vans with the 5.0 Liter V8 engine.
We should have a national website which advertises jobs which are about to go to an H1B applicant. Post it there for a month with all employee/employer correspondence logged and then I'd be happy to hand the job to a person from anywhere. H1B can work to keep jobs in the country. If it isn't abused it is much better for our economy than allowing a company to relocate or outsource.
Care to give some links about this ? All I read about the H1B "grace" period is that there is none. (random recent link http://www.isss.umn.edu/H1BEmployment/GracePer.html). There's apparently an unofficial 10 day grace period, but that's about it.
Wow, there goes the rest of the U.S. housing market. (((((pfffffftt!)))))
And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.
Read only ZFS has been in OSX since 10.5, full blown ZFS is in OSX Snow Leopard as well as various flavors of FreeBSD. It will go into Linux if/when the kernel licensing issues can be overcome, it's already available via FUSE. ZFS is also used in several storage appliances by Sun and others.
A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it.
What is so difficult to understand? Sun divisions have contributed more than 1/2 of the OpenSource code out there (OpenOffice, Java, VirtualBox, MySQL, OpenSolaris...) Sun is a systems company. That code is out there so the world doesn't end up locked into systems built around Microsoft and Wintel fat clients. Where I think Sun could improve is in selling support and integration services for RedHat, OSX other *nixes. Sun definitely has the expertise and some Sun employees have expertise in enough *nix variants that they won't paint you into a corner. In fact, anyone who has ever been involved with porting from Linux to Solaris will tell you that step #1 is improve the quality of the code, Solaris/Forte doesn't let coders get away with the kind of sloppiness that gcc/Linux does.
Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)
Have you been watching Nexenta or OpenSolaris 2008.11? This X86/desktop "usability" gap has closed significantly and if you're using Linux for a server, you really need to look at OpenSolaris, ZFS admin is far easier than anything you'll find on RHEL, svcadm takes the randomness out of system services and dtrace is awesome for diagnosing issues in production systems.
Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.
The state of Texas has a similar voucher program that's been in place for a while now.
Texas needs that because they don't put enough salt on the roads to destroy vehicles in less than 5 years.
Unfortunately, neither the proposed federal bill or the existing Texas program offer vouchers for automobiles that are replaced by motorcycles or scooters.
The sad fact is, older (10+ year old cars) are at least, if not more, fuel-efficient than modern cars.
So true. Average U.S. fleet MPG peaked in 1987. I only reluctantly gave up my 1987 BMW in 2007, replacing it with the same make and model 1995 with the same size engine. The interior and trunk space of the newer car was actually slightly smaller and yet the newer car has lower MPG.
Historians are going to have a tough choice figuring out which early 21st century government policy is the most efficient at destroying the economy. This sounds like a relatively harmless Keynesian money flinging exercise but the side effects reward auto companies for the planned obsolescence in decreasing fuel efficiency during the time when oil went from $10 to $150/bbl.
As a result, most cars on the road are no older than 10 years. The few "bangers" nowadays are maybe 15 years old and they have at least passed the NCT.
NCT got rid of bangers but it overshot. Fear of NCT failure and Celtic tiger status meant many Irish cars were replaced before they were even properly broken in. I finally got rid of my 1987 BMW 'banger' in Ireland in 2007. It never failed an NCT on my 5 year watch. The replacement (same make and model 1995) only gets about 2/3rds the MPG of the original. I suspect the average Irish gas, petrol and diesel cars from the 1980s were much more fuel efficient than the 08-09 Hummers and SUVs I see here now.
I think the use of the tools can be annoying: when it's flashy and overly attention-grabbing, stuff unrelated to story content or when it's the only way to get the information presented - text should always be available.
Like those horrible "top/bottom 10 cities for X" with slides showing 'distinguishing' images of sidewalks, grey buildings and streetlights.
On the other hand, I've seen a great Java graphic application which explained mortgage amortization really well. I've seen a gif animation which demonstrated housing bubble's tendency to create "donut cities" and I'd love to see or write an applet which demonstrates money, tax and labor flow/counter flows in an economy, property values over time, the tendency for bubbles to spread regionally and globally. So far, amateur blogs do a much better job of data visualization than NYT, CNN or USAtoday
A tiny percentage of the energy does go into sound and light with some kinds of electric heaters and some is emitted as 60Hz electromagnetic waves, but assume an electric heater converts 99% of the electricity to heat, it still isn't correct to assume that all of this heat goes into your room. Some of the heat will go into the electric lines within the drafty walls of your home, some will heat the wires outside of your home, the transformers and the transmission lines all the way back to the power plant.
But back to google, I don't think we should panic about the amount of energy they are using when compared with driving your SUV to the library (which has now moved to the edge of town in many cities because that's where development, shopping centers and *-Marts went during the property bubble.) But I do hope google is trying to wean itself from the number of X86 boxen they throw at a problem. Not only does this generate much more waste in the power supply, memory and even wiring... as compared to a large server (ahem SUN Niagara/IBM Cell...), it requires more energy to build and transport the N thousand boxen and get rid of them at EOL.
Now that said, I expect Google to do their best to minimize energy consumption. Given that their electricity costs directly hit their cost of doing business, I suspect they agree with this goal.
One would expect that google would minimize their energy consumption, but remember that Google began as a small company in an era of $10/barrel oil. At that time, the cost of hardware and labor probably exceeded their cost of energy. Even with the recent panic sell, oil is still almost 4 times its price at Google IPO and even if oil were free, we're learning that burning massive amounts of it might not be good for this planet. But Google is stuck with a legacy of scaling a problem by throwing X86 PCs at it when IBM's Cell architecture or Sun's Niagara are almost certainly more efficient. If the post which mentioned Google's splitting a search query across "barrels" on different machines is true, forget the cup of tea, they're at about the level of efficiency of a 1967 Dodge Charger. It makes efficiency and economic sense to keep the shear number of machines to a minimum. CMT and multicore work because it eliminates redundancy.
Google's business model was based around cheap but fast X86 hardware. Just because 1 PC might seem a relatively efficient device for home use in 1990, doesn't mean 10,000 PCs are the best way of building a global grid in 2009.
"What about a couple hours' boat ride?"
Not enough. I once sailed across Lake Michigan about 100 miles north of Chicago (1999 ish) and took the night watch both there and back (a 8 to 10 hour cruise each way.) The Chicago lights were obvious to the south both during the clear night on the way across and the rainy night on the way back and of course the Milwaukee lights were visible only 80 miles away. It never really got very dark. You can stand on the east or west shore of Lake Michigan and make out cities on other shore, far over the horizon. Fortunately, until someone decides to install holographic laser advertising on LEO satellites, a few hundred miles of ocean IS sufficient to get you in darkness.
I'm still amazed that even with trillions lost in this economy, the prospective of saving a few billion through a no brainer effort (eliminate above horizing outdoor lighting) seems to scare people. Maybe it has something to do with the appearance of the Milky way which caused hundreds of "the sky is on fire" 911 calls during power outages which came from the the L.A. earthquake.
ALTHOUGH THERE IS A LACK OF UNIFORM DATA, RESEARCH INDICATES THAT WHILE IMPROVED STREET LIGHTING DOES NOT RESULT IN A SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN CRIME, PARTICULARLY IF CRIME DISPLACEMENT IS TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT, IT DOES SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE FEAR OF CRIME. IT IS FURTHER CONCLUDED THAT A DEFINITIVE STATEMENT CANNOT BE MADE ABOUT THE IMPACT OF STREET LIGHTING ON CRIME
Other studies have demonstrating that removing lights (e.g. from schools ad night) reduce the incidence of certain crimes, particularly vandalism, "Hey lefty, I can't see where me spraypaint is going." "you painted me you gob****". So why did we populate our cities with these glare prone lights which at worst help criminals hide in shadows and glare and at best do nothing? Why do we call the halogen/mercury lights hanging from houses and barns "security lights?" Someone once proposed that the utility companies have excess load at night and wast lights help balance their load.
But the real reason is that "feeling safer" is what homeland security is all about. Just like "feeling wealthy" works well in a keynsian based fiat currency system.
-- I must be old, I remember when reality had a bit more reality in it.
"The problem with LEDs at the moment is that they give off an incredibly harsh, piercing light. "
Quantify this in terms of spectrum and geometric optics/illumination gradients. and someone will come up with a solution. Until then, the LED makers could make a light which is spectrally, flicker, inefficiency identical to sodium/mercury/tungston lights and you will have people saying, "It's ugly, flickers more, not like the old days, it just doesn't have the warmth of high voltage applied across halides." On the other hand when incandescent headlights were replaced with halogen, some people really did notice more glare. Designers hadn't realized that even a subtle shift towards blue can result in more atmospheric and interocular scattering and in the past they were accidentally relying upon tungsten's yellow centered spectrum.
"Current streetlamps are chosen because the wavelengths they produce penetrate fog very well."
Mercury lights aren't very good in fog either, not only because their spectrum has too much blue but also because their emitter is so large it is impossible to focus the light where it belongs without an enormous lens, so light scatters in all directions. Current streetlamps are chosen for those wavelengths because it's easy to make cheap, relatively efficient mercury and sodium discharge lights and no one has yet figured out how to make Mercury or Sodium emit at different wavelengths... in this Universe.
This is really interesting. Until I saw this I couldn't figure out the unintended downside.
LEDs are efficient (if NYC can be retrofitted for less than $2million, there are literally billions to be saved in energy across the country.)
They can be switched on and off instantly (unlike sodium or mercury vapor lights) with little reduction in life (unlike incandescents) which should allow interesting usages. Why light an empty parking lot or path until motion detectors detect someone there?
Because of the small emitter size they can be far more directional than discharge lights, resulting in less glare and light pollution.
The white spectrum seems to have advantages in decreasing crime (as one commenter mentioned) and certainly renders colors more accurately. (A jury should never believe, "He was wearing a mauve baseball cap with the brim facing backwards and cyan colored jeans...", if the parking lot was illuminated by low pressure sodium but for white LED it is a plausible observation.)
But you've found a flaw. I hope engineers are working on resolving this before it becomes a mess. It shouldn't be too difficult since LEDs to produce some heat (just not the 95% lost to heat in incandescents!) Engineers need to learn human psychology and politics and recognize that overcoming such glitches early on are crucial to encourage acceptance. More than three decades since the 1970s energy saving concepts and solar houses became popular, the backlash over bad implementations is still strong enough to keep them from gaining significant market share now even that solar/efficiency technology is 30 years better, the cost is 30 years lower and oil is 30 years higher.
Indeed, most think of me as a lone indeed, "mad" scientist, alas it was not so. For when I returned home my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself. I have described myself as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural philosophy with whom I was acquainted appeared even to my boy's apprehensions as tyros engaged in the same pursuit......But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!
Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Frahn-kehn-steen)
I think you replied and debated the wrong parent thread. The man agrees with you, it was silly to leave OpenSolaris out of this test since it is a viable desktop as well as server OS and it is optimized for SSDs.
Don't expect me to disagree, I'm running OpenSolaris on a cute "toy weight" Toshiba laptop with 80Gb SSB. It boots in less than 30 seconds, much faster than my Toshiba Windows HD laptop wakes from sleep or hibernation, but it would be nice to see a like-with-like comparison. I'd be surprised if Linux, OSX or Windows beat Solaris on most SSD benchmarks but if they do, Solaris definitely has the observability to be able to get to the root of any problem and fix it.
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52 Minutes into this National Geographic Invisible World video I first saw in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The brain to camera interface connector looks remarkably like the connector on a TV Picture Tube of that era.
Do you ever wonder why your Mac/PC seems to get slower over time? Here is one example, we bought a cheap Lexmark all-in-one printer which didn't appear to have a driver for the Mac, Linux, Solaris... only Microsoft Windows. I thought I'd try the OSX driver for a previous printer model. It didn't work so I tried another. That didn't work so I uninstalled them and gave up. It was only much later that I noticed these drivers still running consuming hefty CPU resources even though the printer they were designed for was no where to be seen.
Forgot to put the relevant part in a block.
we currently track 200+ external bugs across ~40 OSS projects. Half the bugs depend on something else getting fixed, first.
lymond01 writes
Across multiple bugtrack systems and projects...trickier.
I'm working on a lightweight system designed exactly for this problem. And when I can get enough internal interest in getting the project through the opensource process, it may see the light of day sometime in the next few months. Until then, use bugzillas dependency fields, launchpad or post it notes. Sorry.
Here is a link to information on the Bradford BSF deployment if you can't visit the school in person.
Pay a visit to Bradford U.K. and check out their Sun Ray ultra thin client based infrastructure. (disclosure) I wrote the login manager but if you decide to use a Linux or OpenSolaris distribution, you can throw that out as well as the cost of (N) Microsoft Windows licenses. My back o the envelope guesstimate: Sun Ray Thin client: 4 Watts * 2000 desktops * 200 days * 8 hours = 12800 Kwh * .1p/kwh = 1280.
Typical P.C.: 80 Watts * 2000 * 200 days * 8 hours = 25600 Kwh * .1p/kwh = 25600
You can probably get away with 1 or 0.5 sysadmins to manage 2000 thin client desktops. Maybe 2 or 3 for Linux fat clients depending on how close together the schools are. Windows? I don't know, 10? 15?
Figure out who is going to manage the whole thing; a system can't just be put in a closet in a classroom...
To add to the learning experience, give your entire class a 50 year assignment: "To maintain or assign others to maintain the storage and/or the systems, to boldly go..." This project is an excellent idea, it's a classroom sized version of the longnow to try to get students to think beyond the next {insert ephemeral pop star} video.
I would try to find a 40 or 50 year old electronics device, disassemble it and a modern P.C. to show the students what has changed and what remains.
Most 40-50 year old electronic devices used vacuum tubes which were fragile and had a finite lifespan but they were designed for easy replacement. Comments about the short lifespan of Electrolytic capacitors (primarily the big ones in switching supplies) are absolutely correct, especially when power isn't applied. What I would do is:
Your project is possible. Last spring I was running software on an Amiga 1000 from 1985 and as recently as 2004, I've watched videos on a VCR from 1976 (one of the filter caps on the VCR was bad so the sound was buzzy, but otherwise it was O.K.)
...I have to basically sign an affidavit that I will pay the same rate to the foreign worker as a similarly qualified US worker, and I have to swear that I can't find anyone in the US to fill the job.
Employers who abuse the H1B system should be heavily fined (revenue going to H1B employee backpay and unemployment compensation for displaced citizens.) HR managers who authorized the abuse should find themselves out of a job, if not in jail. We can turn a blind eye to such abuse during boom times but now that the economy is damaged, the blame should not pass on to the abused foreign worker. Blame lies squarely with the abusive company. H1B is designed to backfill specialized skills. Two decades in the IT industry working across a variety of environments has convinced me that most job posts for N years using X framework/language/application/OS are shams. The fact that a recent change in EEOC labor laws encourages this practice. Here is how it works:
Company X needs a unix expert but they don't want to pay for one. So they find a particularly obscure newspaper and advertise that they are looking for 29-31 years of experience using Java 1.7 on RedHat RHEL 21. They get a number of (irritating) domestic applicants who've used Java 1.6 on OSX, Solaris or Ubuntu. They throw these in the bin and hire the H1B person, underpaying them.
For the non IT person, it's almost the equivalent of a taxi firm only hiring drivers who have experience driving 2001 Ford Galaxy vans with the 5.0 Liter V8 engine.
We should have a national website which advertises jobs which are about to go to an H1B applicant. Post it there for a month with all employee/employer correspondence logged and then I'd be happy to hand the job to a person from anywhere. H1B can work to keep jobs in the country. If it isn't abused it is much better for our economy than allowing a company to relocate or outsource.
Care to give some links about this ? All I read about the H1B "grace" period is that there is none. (random recent link http://www.isss.umn.edu/H1BEmployment/GracePer.html). There's apparently an unofficial 10 day grace period, but that's about it.
Wow, there goes the rest of the U.S. housing market. (((((pfffffftt!)))))
And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.
Read only ZFS has been in OSX since 10.5, full blown ZFS is in OSX Snow Leopard as well as various flavors of FreeBSD. It will go into Linux if/when the kernel licensing issues can be overcome, it's already available via FUSE. ZFS is also used in several storage appliances by Sun and others.
A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it.
What is so difficult to understand? Sun divisions have contributed more than 1/2 of the OpenSource code out there (OpenOffice, Java, VirtualBox, MySQL, OpenSolaris...) Sun is a systems company. That code is out there so the world doesn't end up locked into systems built around Microsoft and Wintel fat clients. Where I think Sun could improve is in selling support and integration services for RedHat, OSX other *nixes. Sun definitely has the expertise and some Sun employees have expertise in enough *nix variants that they won't paint you into a corner. In fact, anyone who has ever been involved with porting from Linux to Solaris will tell you that step #1 is improve the quality of the code, Solaris/Forte doesn't let coders get away with the kind of sloppiness that gcc/Linux does.
Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)
Have you been watching Nexenta or OpenSolaris 2008.11? This X86/desktop "usability" gap has closed significantly and if you're using Linux for a server, you really need to look at OpenSolaris, ZFS admin is far easier than anything you'll find on RHEL, svcadm takes the randomness out of system services and dtrace is awesome for diagnosing issues in production systems.
Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.
I agree wholeheartedly!
The state of Texas has a similar voucher program that's been in place for a while now.
Texas needs that because they don't put enough salt on the roads to destroy vehicles in less than 5 years.
Unfortunately, neither the proposed federal bill or the existing Texas program offer vouchers for automobiles that are replaced by motorcycles or scooters.
A collective duh reverberates through congress.
The sad fact is, older (10+ year old cars) are at least, if not more, fuel-efficient than modern cars.
So true. Average U.S. fleet MPG peaked in 1987. I only reluctantly gave up my 1987 BMW in 2007, replacing it with the same make and model 1995 with the same size engine. The interior and trunk space of the newer car was actually slightly smaller and yet the newer car has lower MPG.
Historians are going to have a tough choice figuring out which early 21st century government policy is the most efficient at destroying the economy. This sounds like a relatively harmless Keynesian money flinging exercise but the side effects reward auto companies for the planned obsolescence in decreasing fuel efficiency during the time when oil went from $10 to $150/bbl.
As a result, most cars on the road are no older than 10 years. The few "bangers" nowadays are maybe 15 years old and they have at least passed the NCT.
NCT got rid of bangers but it overshot. Fear of NCT failure and Celtic tiger status meant many Irish cars were replaced before they were even properly broken in. I finally got rid of my 1987 BMW 'banger' in Ireland in 2007. It never failed an NCT on my 5 year watch. The replacement (same make and model 1995) only gets about 2/3rds the MPG of the original. I suspect the average Irish gas, petrol and diesel cars from the 1980s were much more fuel efficient than the 08-09 Hummers and SUVs I see here now.
I think the use of the tools can be annoying: when it's flashy and overly attention-grabbing, stuff unrelated to story content or when it's the only way to get the information presented - text should always be available.
Like those horrible "top/bottom 10 cities for X" with slides showing 'distinguishing' images of sidewalks, grey buildings and streetlights.
On the other hand, I've seen a great Java graphic application which explained mortgage amortization really well. I've seen a gif animation which demonstrated housing bubble's tendency to create "donut cities" and I'd love to see or write an applet which demonstrates money, tax and labor flow/counter flows in an economy, property values over time, the tendency for bubbles to spread regionally and globally. So far, amateur blogs do a much better job of data visualization than NYT, CNN or USAtoday
A tiny percentage of the energy does go into sound and light with some kinds of electric heaters and some is emitted as 60Hz electromagnetic waves, but assume an electric heater converts 99% of the electricity to heat, it still isn't correct to assume that all of this heat goes into your room. Some of the heat will go into the electric lines within the drafty walls of your home, some will heat the wires outside of your home, the transformers and the transmission lines all the way back to the power plant.
But back to google, I don't think we should panic about the amount of energy they are using when compared with driving your SUV to the library (which has now moved to the edge of town in many cities because that's where development, shopping centers and *-Marts went during the property bubble.) But I do hope google is trying to wean itself from the number of X86 boxen they throw at a problem. Not only does this generate much more waste in the power supply, memory and even wiring... as compared to a large server (ahem SUN Niagara/IBM Cell...), it requires more energy to build and transport the N thousand boxen and get rid of them at EOL.
One would expect that google would minimize their energy consumption, but remember that Google began as a small company in an era of $10/barrel oil. At that time, the cost of hardware and labor probably exceeded their cost of energy. Even with the recent panic sell, oil is still almost 4 times its price at Google IPO and even if oil were free, we're learning that burning massive amounts of it might not be good for this planet. But Google is stuck with a legacy of scaling a problem by throwing X86 PCs at it when IBM's Cell architecture or Sun's Niagara are almost certainly more efficient. If the post which mentioned Google's splitting a search query across "barrels" on different machines is true, forget the cup of tea, they're at about the level of efficiency of a 1967 Dodge Charger. It makes efficiency and economic sense to keep the shear number of machines to a minimum. CMT and multicore work because it eliminates redundancy.
Google's business model was based around cheap but fast X86 hardware. Just because 1 PC might seem a relatively efficient device for home use in 1990, doesn't mean 10,000 PCs are the best way of building a global grid in 2009.
"What about a couple hours' boat ride?" Not enough. I once sailed across Lake Michigan about 100 miles north of Chicago (1999 ish) and took the night watch both there and back (a 8 to 10 hour cruise each way.) The Chicago lights were obvious to the south both during the clear night on the way across and the rainy night on the way back and of course the Milwaukee lights were visible only 80 miles away. It never really got very dark. You can stand on the east or west shore of Lake Michigan and make out cities on other shore, far over the horizon. Fortunately, until someone decides to install holographic laser advertising on LEO satellites, a few hundred miles of ocean IS sufficient to get you in darkness. I'm still amazed that even with trillions lost in this economy, the prospective of saving a few billion through a no brainer effort (eliminate above horizing outdoor lighting) seems to scare people. Maybe it has something to do with the appearance of the Milky way which caused hundreds of "the sky is on fire" 911 calls during power outages which came from the the L.A. earthquake.
This is exactly what countless studies from the U.S. Department of Justice, municipalities, and other organizations around the world have shown. Here is a quote from the DOJ study abstract:
ALTHOUGH THERE IS A LACK OF UNIFORM DATA, RESEARCH INDICATES THAT WHILE IMPROVED STREET LIGHTING DOES NOT RESULT IN A SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN CRIME, PARTICULARLY IF CRIME DISPLACEMENT IS TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT, IT DOES SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE FEAR OF CRIME. IT IS FURTHER CONCLUDED THAT A DEFINITIVE STATEMENT CANNOT BE MADE ABOUT THE IMPACT OF STREET LIGHTING ON CRIME
Other studies have demonstrating that removing lights (e.g. from schools ad night) reduce the incidence of certain crimes, particularly vandalism, "Hey lefty, I can't see where me spraypaint is going." "you painted me you gob****". So why did we populate our cities with these glare prone lights which at worst help criminals hide in shadows and glare and at best do nothing? Why do we call the halogen/mercury lights hanging from houses and barns "security lights?" Someone once proposed that the utility companies have excess load at night and wast lights help balance their load.
But the real reason is that "feeling safer" is what homeland security is all about. Just like "feeling wealthy" works well in a keynsian based fiat currency system.
-- I must be old, I remember when reality had a bit more reality in it.
"The problem with LEDs at the moment is that they give off an incredibly harsh, piercing light. " Quantify this in terms of spectrum and geometric optics/illumination gradients. and someone will come up with a solution. Until then, the LED makers could make a light which is spectrally, flicker, inefficiency identical to sodium/mercury/tungston lights and you will have people saying, "It's ugly, flickers more, not like the old days, it just doesn't have the warmth of high voltage applied across halides." On the other hand when incandescent headlights were replaced with halogen, some people really did notice more glare. Designers hadn't realized that even a subtle shift towards blue can result in more atmospheric and interocular scattering and in the past they were accidentally relying upon tungsten's yellow centered spectrum.
"Current streetlamps are chosen because the wavelengths they produce penetrate fog very well."
Mercury lights aren't very good in fog either, not only because their spectrum has too much blue but also because their emitter is so large it is impossible to focus the light where it belongs without an enormous lens, so light scatters in all directions. Current streetlamps are chosen for those wavelengths because it's easy to make cheap, relatively efficient mercury and sodium discharge lights and no one has yet figured out how to make Mercury or Sodium emit at different wavelengths... in this Universe.
But you've found a flaw. I hope engineers are working on resolving this before it becomes a mess. It shouldn't be too difficult since LEDs to produce some heat (just not the 95% lost to heat in incandescents!) Engineers need to learn human psychology and politics and recognize that overcoming such glitches early on are crucial to encourage acceptance. More than three decades since the 1970s energy saving concepts and solar houses became popular, the backlash over bad implementations is still strong enough to keep them from gaining significant market share now even that solar/efficiency technology is 30 years better, the cost is 30 years lower and oil is 30 years higher.
Now get off my lawn!
V. Frankenstein PhD BioPhilosophy
Indeed, most think of me as a lone indeed, "mad" scientist, alas it was not so. For when I returned home my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides myself. I have described myself as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural philosophy with whom I was acquainted appeared even to my boy's apprehensions as tyros engaged in the same pursuit... ...But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!
Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Frahn-kehn-steen)
I think you replied and debated the wrong parent thread. The man agrees with you, it was silly to leave OpenSolaris out of this test since it is a viable desktop as well as server OS and it is optimized for SSDs.
Don't expect me to disagree, I'm running OpenSolaris on a cute "toy weight" Toshiba laptop with 80Gb SSB. It boots in less than 30 seconds, much faster than my Toshiba Windows HD laptop wakes from sleep or hibernation, but it would be nice to see a like-with-like comparison. I'd be surprised if Linux, OSX or Windows beat Solaris on most SSD benchmarks but if they do, Solaris definitely has the observability to be able to get to the root of any problem and fix it.
Wen Teechers our obstucals two edumacation,