The shooter lists the Communist Manifesto among his favorite books. This is hardly Palin and Beck teritory. Among the killed was one of the most conservative judges in Arizona.
Crazy Schizophrenics do Crazy things. Its what they do. Its because they are crazy.
The actions of those who leap on every thing a crazy schizophrenic does to try to turn it to partisan advantage, though, are harder to justify. The best that could be said for some of them, is a tendency to overwhelming confirmation bias. Of course, those who are revealing their bias that all who disagree with them are crazy, should contemplate themselves, perhaps.
Imagine a civilizational crisis. War, Famine, Disease, whatever. How will we recover without Britannica and its peers. The renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of ancient books. If we lose technolgoy, how would we ever recover digitial records? A CD or DVD is a nearly magical device, with assumption piled on techniology atop compression algorithm, with healthy amounts of assumptions about scan rates and directions tossed in.
Wikipedia will be, not surprisingly, off-line.
The last print Britannica might be the last back-up check point for our civilization.
First read SMidge's reply above. It is quite good.
About the only thing that I saw him leavving out wwas that in humid parts of the world, there is heating going on every day of the year. Take in 8% humid air, cool it, and get ranstorms in the building (and mold). Chill it down to get enough moisture out, and you have air too cold, a cold breeze no one wants. So the air is heated again.
Waste heat from data centers can be a predictable source of re-heat. You need re-heat even while you are cooling offices every day of the year. Energy recycling is a great way to reduce footprint while preserving amenity.
In the riight scenarios, you can store heat as well, even in counterintuitive ways. Capture the heat from the overnight processin in the data center, run it through an absorption chiller, and pump the cool somewhere. If there is some reason to not put this into the cooling stream for the data center itself, you can store it in a pool of icey brine in the basement to use for cooling during peak electrical demand tomorrow...
The need for spin reserve is an effective tax on every renewable energy source because unfortunately renewable ==> unreliable. Check off rates (if you install an X, we will always charge you less for power) fail because too many people game them.
The big changes in electrical prices in Texas this year mirror the price changes in all energy markets. It is unclear to me how people think that *any* industry, no matter how regulated, can repeal supply and demand for its primary supplies. We have a regulated market structure only because nothing else made sense in 1908 when the current regulated market was created in Chicago. I would not expect slashdot, of all places, to be stuck in the technologies and markets of a century ago.
You can gain reliability by combining a number of unreliable sources, as long as the reliability profiles for the different sources are different. This requires scheduling and wide area service choreography, and perhaps even architectures with full ontologies, as some laughed about yesterday on another thread. Those interested should just google Kombikraftwerk.
There is an interesting combined power generation scheme currently underway in the inland empire area of California, IIANM, that combines remote web control of household systems, including homeowner intervention (Donâ(TM)t regulate anything today â" my wifeâ(TM)s parents are in town and I do not want to listen to my mother in law complain!). What is unique about the system is that it is only installed in house that also have solar panels, and the excess output (beyond each houseâ(TM)s needs) is sold back to the grid at prices as if it was one large distributed solar PV generator, a virtual power plant. This business model, and many others, only works with the extra incentives of live time-of-day pricing.
Live pricing does not work very well with the home and office infrastructure we have. Well, the internet did not work very well with the phone infrastructure we had 20 years ago. (Am I the only one who experienced the joy of setting up X.25 PADs all over New England?). Live prices will be what creates the infrastructure of tomorrow that will work differently.
One difference will be home storage of energy. Energy storage need not be limited to batteries or lakes in the mountains. A tank of icy slush in the basement is a fine energy store if your major energy use is daytime cooling; cool it at night and use it for Air Conditioning during the day. Your heat pump to make the slush is also working more efficiently when it is cooler outside. At a 20% price difference between 2AM and 2PM, that slush might start looking pretty good. At a 50% difference, everyone might have one. We do not know what folks will come up with, and without market information on value and scarcity, we wonâ(TM)t.
It is these new markets that make live pricing important. New business models will change technology decisions.
These all work together. Local energy storage will reduce demand on the grid during peak times. This will become critical unreliable energy sources get added to the grid. The demand for reliability will then increase incentives for local storage and generation. Local storage becomes an additional use for any locally generated power. This increases the benefits for both generation and storage. This continues to make folks less sensitive to grid fluctuations. This ecology of local energy requires live pricing to thrive.
That's what most everyone, including the Feds though in New Orleans. Unfortunately, multiple TELCOs/ISPs all went through the same node just outside of town, which was flooded.
All of this and no angst about Adobe deliberately killing the W3 specification for interactive DOM-based graphics. Silverlight and Flash are both abominations, but Silverlight is closer to open standards based de velopment (at east any standard existing across other web presentation methods) than is Flash. SVG, which makes graphics repurposeable by CSS and other specs is better than either. Adobe virtually killed SVG after it bought Flash, something internal Adobe personel working in the standards realm confess was vile.
Why in heck would one defend Flash? Why would anyone else think you have any standards or open specification cred after you have done so?
The problem is in the word properly designed. Most HVAC systems aren't designed at all. THey are sketched in 2D on peices of paper that are separate from the pieces of paper that have, say, plumbing. If the plumber get's their first, then the ductwork needs to go around the plumbing.
Even if it can be built as designed, the 2D designs are not so good, usually. Most commercial buildings simple oversize all compressors by a factor of two, and figure that brute force will overcome their design failings.
Building Information Modelling (BIM), including Building Modelling (3D objects rather than lines) allows actual design of the systems, and reduces the "plumbers got their first" problem," but it is still rarely applied to mechanical systems.
And the controls? Well the controls are still designed by the low-bid guy standing on a mud-bucket in the hallway. Russotto is spot on, we know how to do this. We have for a long time. Even initial capital costs are not that much different. We fail to do so out of laziness, ineptness, general innattention, or perhaps an over siloed business buying from over-siloed designers and contractors.
Now that begins to sounds like most IT projects.
Most communications with these systems are detail, not performance oriented. This effectively blocks out interactions with any but domain experts. This makes the operation of these systems invisible and uncontrollable, as far as the tenants are concerned, and leads to these systems genrally poor operation and design.
SNMP, mentioned above,is a lousy non-abstract model for inter-system communications; it requires too much knowledge of what the information in the MIBs means for casual integration and easy integration across domains. Even so, SNMP is about a 100 times better than the protocols that built systems use to communicate outside their domains.
This is changing. oBIX is opening up enterprise interactions with building systems. Data Centers, in particular, are beginning to establish interactions between Operations, Cooling Capacity, and Power Supply and Reliability, etc. TheGreenGrid is trying to establish general models for this. OpenADR is the beginning of direct power grid / data center communications.
THe biggest problem is that building systems have nothing that in the IT world, would be recongnized as a system architecture. This means that those who interact with them are expected to know too much. IT guys didn't happen to choose HVAC for their careers. The Admin Assistant has even less interest.
There is an interesting project over at ONTOLOG trying to define the abstractions to discusss what services are performed by building systems. Those services will make possible easy intgration of building systems into data centers and to office applications, in the same way that abstractions make USB keys and external disks identical objects to the user interface.
AB3A is correct in ways that many on this thread cannot imagine. I was a t a DOE briefing in January that indicated that if the power grid technology was not totally transformed, just keeping up with the way things are done now would require $800,000 in the next 7 years to just keep even.
There are efforts to change the paradigm. They range from the fairly traditional model, but using complete new control interctions and syntaxes like EPRI's Intelligrid (which feels more like the business as usual, but better described above) to market-based decomposition of the worlds largest robot into autonomous agents and entitites (GridWise, etc) to radical "it is impossible to fix, so dont try, but do something different" to be found in Galvin's Perfect Power Initiative.
Slashdotters who are actually interested might want to make comments on the proposed OpenADR standard now, while it can still be improved.
For the green or sustaianbly oriented, how well the problems of OpenADR (JFGI) are solved is likely to radiacally affect the chances of success for such high profile initiatives as the Zero Net Energy Commercial Building and the 2030 Challenge...
SVG is a vector format allowing backgrounds/bitmaps to be hosted within any vecor in which all objects are fully DOM accessible, meaning the graphic elemetns can be programmed as are any page elements. This means that it is easul extensible using any of the AJAX techniques. There is also a whole suite of behaviors/movements that are defined in the specification.
One good place for this is the old Adobe SVG Community page
We've got it in SVG. The problem is, most of the behaviors have never been impimented by anyone other than Adobe, who killed their implimentation after they bought Flash.
I have a large open interface project involving more than a hundred distinc web sites each with distinctive web graphics that need to be generated on the fly from underlying construction graphics, both CAD and BIM. As well as being interactive, these graphics nedded to be scalable to appear on a variety of display devices. We specified it out as SVG.
Two years in, the contractor came to me and asked if he could please use something else, as browsers with *actual* support for the full DOM functions/interactivity of SVG were non-existent and the one source of full function, Adobe, had abandoned their support after their purchase of Flash. The contractor also observed that their were simply no tools for working with SVG scripting that we could use in this automated process. He begged that he be able to use XAML.
One step, of many, before I gave in was asking this august forum (slashdot) if anyone had any experience, tools, or references that might let me in good conscience push back and maintain the orriginal spec. No one replied in any way.
So we switched to XAML. System should be on-line by early Spring. We tried, but really, what are the practical alternatives?
Well said. I was laughing about a name-calling know-it-all who clearly was misperceiving some pretty basic stuff and disparaging all others on *this* thread...
One thing that surprised me was the 32/64 predictions. I loaded Vista, figuring I's better elarn it before my customers. Everyone said "Watch out for the 64 bit version" so I loaded the 32 bit version. It was a morass of problems, every bit as bad as he said. After a couple months, I decided to try a fresh build anfd picked 64 bit on the same machine. 1000% better. It still has some annoyances, but now it is an OS I can really use.
Perhaps at least aprt of the underwhelming experience with VIsta is the timidity of those trying it.
Always happy to inform those whose mode of disccourse is hurling insults...but if you really can pull more heat out of a system than you put in energy doing so, run to the patent office...quick
From TheGreenGrid consortium
Conventional models for estimating the electrical efficiency of datacenters are grossly inaccurate for real-world installations. Currently, many manufacturers provide efficiency data for power and cooling equipment. For power equipment, efficiency is typically expressed as the percent of power out to power in. For cooling equipment, efficiency is typically expressed as the ratio of heat removed to electrical input power (coefficient of performance). Unfortunately, these individual values of efficiency
often lead people to think that the efficiency losses of a datacenter can be determined by simply adding up the inefficiencies of various components.
EnergyStar standards for power supplies are that no more than 20% of the AC power be converted to heat going through the transformer - which means that on most systems more has been turned to heat in the server room before it does anything. Just moving *that* heat conversion out of the server room where it does not need to be cooled away is a big win. Remember, it takes, in a well designed system, 1.7 times the energy to cool a space as it took energy to heat it. Opponents of DC in the server room usually miss this aspect.
Centralizing of the AC/DC conversion allows for the possibility of selecting much more efficient transformers. But we can quibble over that. In any case, isolating and concentrating just *that* portion of the heat enables new approaches. I have seen Absorption Chillers running off the transformer heat being used to boost data center cooling. I have seen domestic hot water heating. I have been in serious conversations on Stirling Engines running of the transformer heat to charge the batteries.
The highest performance versions of this are not actually about saving energy - they are about running the computer flat out. How hard can I run the machine? If the transformer and power distribution are running well, can I use my redundant power to double my machine power rather than providing redundancy? Can I do early detection of potential power failures and then back off...
Google searches, indexes, and retains all email to refine GMAIL ads. Google maintains personally identifiable histories of searches made across sessions. Google cross-references browser sessions with GMail databases to get combination profiles that include email / searches. Google is buying the largest Click-stream analytics company to extend the personal profiles it keeps to include as much as possible of all other places you go on the web.
MS may intend to be as evil, but it doesn't have the reach.
No one should resist Google absolute right to index all mail, all files, all sites, all traffic, all searches, all documents everywhere in every place. After all, they are sworn to "do no evil"
Google is the scariest company out there, right now - beyond MS, beyond Halliburton, beyond Blackwater.
Ho Ho - then there's the time that a live baby possum somhow found its way into our downstairs toilet overnight. Seat was down, but not lid. Typical female came and sat down w/o looking. I woke up to screams from downstairs that morning. Still not sure what happened exactly, but was definitiely told it was my fault.
I grew up in a household with 8 boys. My big sisters were the first to teach us to put the seat up. Because a six year old, or three year old is not going to wait around to find out. Seat lifting was invented for women.
That this is an issue at all is part and parcel of the great castratying man-hate that is part and parcell of all manistream women in the US. Then some of them wonder why they are unmarried at 38 and have to buy sperm.
Hears a clue. Men have to put up with female biology all the time. It is considered rude for men to explicitly point out what behaviroal crap they are having to put up with a quarter of the time. cCommon decency would suggest the women consder doing the same.
As long as there are the current almost religious wars between advocates of REST instead of message based WS that allow for long running business processes, then the chief problems will remain cultural. So many programmers think straight line, develop straight line, model straight line, that parallelism (which to my mind includes multi-coore, grid computing, and widely distributed virtual systems) seems a long way away.
Slashdot Mirror
The shooter lists the Communist Manifesto among his favorite books. This is hardly Palin and Beck teritory. Among the killed was one of the most conservative judges in Arizona.
Crazy Schizophrenics do Crazy things. Its what they do. Its because they are crazy.
The actions of those who leap on every thing a crazy schizophrenic does to try to turn it to partisan advantage, though, are harder to justify. The best that could be said for some of them, is a tendency to overwhelming confirmation bias. Of course, those who are revealing their bias that all who disagree with them are crazy, should contemplate themselves, perhaps.
Imagine a civilizational crisis. War, Famine, Disease, whatever. How will we recover without Britannica and its peers. The renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of ancient books. If we lose technolgoy, how would we ever recover digitial records? A CD or DVD is a nearly magical device, with assumption piled on techniology atop compression algorithm, with healthy amounts of assumptions about scan rates and directions tossed in.
Wikipedia will be, not surprisingly, off-line.
The last print Britannica might be the last back-up check point for our civilization.
First read SMidge's reply above. It is quite good.
About the only thing that I saw him leavving out wwas that in humid parts of the world, there is heating going on every day of the year. Take in 8% humid air, cool it, and get ranstorms in the building (and mold). Chill it down to get enough moisture out, and you have air too cold, a cold breeze no one wants. So the air is heated again.
Waste heat from data centers can be a predictable source of re-heat. You need re-heat even while you are cooling offices every day of the year. Energy recycling is a great way to reduce footprint while preserving amenity.
In the riight scenarios, you can store heat as well, even in counterintuitive ways. Capture the heat from the overnight processin in the data center, run it through an absorption chiller, and pump the cool somewhere. If there is some reason to not put this into the cooling stream for the data center itself, you can store it in a pool of icey brine in the basement to use for cooling during peak electrical demand tomorrow...
Great comments.
The need for spin reserve is an effective tax on every renewable energy source because unfortunately renewable ==> unreliable. Check off rates (if you install an X, we will always charge you less for power) fail because too many people game them.
The big changes in electrical prices in Texas this year mirror the price changes in all energy markets. It is unclear to me how people think that *any* industry, no matter how regulated, can repeal supply and demand for its primary supplies. We have a regulated market structure only because nothing else made sense in 1908 when the current regulated market was created in Chicago. I would not expect slashdot, of all places, to be stuck in the technologies and markets of a century ago.
You can gain reliability by combining a number of unreliable sources, as long as the reliability profiles for the different sources are different. This requires scheduling and wide area service choreography, and perhaps even architectures with full ontologies, as some laughed about yesterday on another thread. Those interested should just google Kombikraftwerk.
There is an interesting combined power generation scheme currently underway in the inland empire area of California, IIANM, that combines remote web control of household systems, including homeowner intervention (Donâ(TM)t regulate anything today â" my wifeâ(TM)s parents are in town and I do not want to listen to my mother in law complain!). What is unique about the system is that it is only installed in house that also have solar panels, and the excess output (beyond each houseâ(TM)s needs) is sold back to the grid at prices as if it was one large distributed solar PV generator, a virtual power plant. This business model, and many others, only works with the extra incentives of live time-of-day pricing.
Live pricing does not work very well with the home and office infrastructure we have. Well, the internet did not work very well with the phone infrastructure we had 20 years ago. (Am I the only one who experienced the joy of setting up X.25 PADs all over New England?). Live prices will be what creates the infrastructure of tomorrow that will work differently.
One difference will be home storage of energy. Energy storage need not be limited to batteries or lakes in the mountains. A tank of icy slush in the basement is a fine energy store if your major energy use is daytime cooling; cool it at night and use it for Air Conditioning during the day. Your heat pump to make the slush is also working more efficiently when it is cooler outside. At a 20% price difference between 2AM and 2PM, that slush might start looking pretty good. At a 50% difference, everyone might have one. We do not know what folks will come up with, and without market information on value and scarcity, we wonâ(TM)t.
It is these new markets that make live pricing important. New business models will change technology decisions.
These all work together. Local energy storage will reduce demand on the grid during peak times. This will become critical unreliable energy sources get added to the grid. The demand for reliability will then increase incentives for local storage and generation. Local storage becomes an additional use for any locally generated power. This increases the benefits for both generation and storage. This continues to make folks less sensitive to grid fluctuations. This ecology of local energy requires live pricing to thrive.
www.newDaedalus.com
That's what most everyone, including the Feds though in New Orleans. Unfortunately, multiple TELCOs/ISPs all went through the same node just outside of town, which was flooded.
All of this and no angst about Adobe deliberately killing the W3 specification for interactive DOM-based graphics. Silverlight and Flash are both abominations, but Silverlight is closer to open standards based de velopment (at east any standard existing across other web presentation methods) than is Flash. SVG, which makes graphics repurposeable by CSS and other specs is better than either. Adobe virtually killed SVG after it bought Flash, something internal Adobe personel working in the standards realm confess was vile.
Why in heck would one defend Flash? Why would anyone else think you have any standards or open specification cred after you have done so?
The problem is in the word properly designed. Most HVAC systems aren't designed at all. THey are sketched in 2D on peices of paper that are separate from the pieces of paper that have, say, plumbing. If the plumber get's their first, then the ductwork needs to go around the plumbing.
Even if it can be built as designed, the 2D designs are not so good, usually. Most commercial buildings simple oversize all compressors by a factor of two, and figure that brute force will overcome their design failings.
Building Information Modelling (BIM), including Building Modelling (3D objects rather than lines) allows actual design of the systems, and reduces the "plumbers got their first" problem," but it is still rarely applied to mechanical systems.
And the controls? Well the controls are still designed by the low-bid guy standing on a mud-bucket in the hallway. Russotto is spot on, we know how to do this. We have for a long time. Even initial capital costs are not that much different. We fail to do so out of laziness, ineptness, general innattention, or perhaps an over siloed business buying from over-siloed designers and contractors.
Now that begins to sounds like most IT projects.
Most communications with these systems are detail, not performance oriented. This effectively blocks out interactions with any but domain experts. This makes the operation of these systems invisible and uncontrollable, as far as the tenants are concerned, and leads to these systems genrally poor operation and design.
SNMP, mentioned above,is a lousy non-abstract model for inter-system communications; it requires too much knowledge of what the information in the MIBs means for casual integration and easy integration across domains. Even so, SNMP is about a 100 times better than the protocols that built systems use to communicate outside their domains.
This is changing. oBIX is opening up enterprise interactions with building systems. Data Centers, in particular, are beginning to establish interactions between Operations, Cooling Capacity, and Power Supply and Reliability, etc. TheGreenGrid is trying to establish general models for this. OpenADR is the beginning of direct power grid / data center communications.
THe biggest problem is that building systems have nothing that in the IT world, would be recongnized as a system architecture. This means that those who interact with them are expected to know too much. IT guys didn't happen to choose HVAC for their careers. The Admin Assistant has even less interest.
There is an interesting project over at ONTOLOG trying to define the abstractions to discusss what services are performed by building systems. Those services will make possible easy intgration of building systems into data centers and to office applications, in the same way that abstractions make USB keys and external disks identical objects to the user interface.
Not exactly
Although I have had some very bad songs from the 70's running therough my head for years, and I do not plan to pay the RIAA for them, either...
AB3A is correct in ways that many on this thread cannot imagine. I was a t a DOE briefing in January that indicated that if the power grid technology was not totally transformed, just keeping up with the way things are done now would require $800,000 in the next 7 years to just keep even.
There are efforts to change the paradigm. They range from the fairly traditional model, but using complete new control interctions and syntaxes like EPRI's Intelligrid (which feels more like the business as usual, but better described above) to market-based decomposition of the worlds largest robot into autonomous agents and entitites (GridWise, etc) to radical "it is impossible to fix, so dont try, but do something different" to be found in Galvin's Perfect Power Initiative.
Slashdotters who are actually interested might want to make comments on the proposed OpenADR standard now, while it can still be improved.
For the green or sustaianbly oriented, how well the problems of OpenADR (JFGI) are solved is likely to radiacally affect the chances of success for such high profile initiatives as the Zero Net Energy Commercial Building and the 2030 Challenge...
SVG is a vector format allowing backgrounds/bitmaps to be hosted within any vecor in which all objects are fully DOM accessible, meaning the graphic elemetns can be programmed as are any page elements. This means that it is easul extensible using any of the AJAX techniques. There is also a whole suite of behaviors/movements that are defined in the specification.
One good place for this is the old Adobe SVG Community page
http://www.adobe.com/svg/community/external.html
I have alway been fond of the WPS Real-Time control widgets.
dev.opera.com is another good source of articles
svg.org lists 169 SVG capable phones
I am hoping that SVG is in the winter of its discontent and a spring is coming. But part of me also fears that it is dead.
We've got it in SVG. The problem is, most of the behaviors have never been impimented by anyone other than Adobe, who killed their implimentation after they bought Flash.
I have a large open interface project involving more than a hundred distinc web sites each with distinctive web graphics that need to be generated on the fly from underlying construction graphics, both CAD and BIM. As well as being interactive, these graphics nedded to be scalable to appear on a variety of display devices. We specified it out as SVG.
Two years in, the contractor came to me and asked if he could please use something else, as browsers with *actual* support for the full DOM functions/interactivity of SVG were non-existent and the one source of full function, Adobe, had abandoned their support after their purchase of Flash. The contractor also observed that their were simply no tools for working with SVG scripting that we could use in this automated process. He begged that he be able to use XAML.
One step, of many, before I gave in was asking this august forum (slashdot) if anyone had any experience, tools, or references that might let me in good conscience push back and maintain the orriginal spec. No one replied in any way.
So we switched to XAML. System should be on-line by early Spring. We tried, but really, what are the practical alternatives?
Well said. I was laughing about a name-calling know-it-all who clearly was misperceiving some pretty basic stuff and disparaging all others on *this* thread...
Even better if the P2P Trojan got into your system using the Sony rootkit...
One thing that surprised me was the 32/64 predictions. I loaded Vista, figuring I's better elarn it before my customers. Everyone said "Watch out for the 64 bit version" so I loaded the 32 bit version. It was a morass of problems, every bit as bad as he said. After a couple months, I decided to try a fresh build anfd picked 64 bit on the same machine. 1000% better. It still has some annoyances, but now it is an OS I can really use.
Perhaps at least aprt of the underwhelming experience with VIsta is the timidity of those trying it.
With my Mom she isn't working, cost is not really the issue but BIG TYPE is the issue. Indeed it is the first issue.
Everyone is so focussed on the technology, and hacking the system, that they left out the big issues of the aging eye.
Excellent summary, Inciteful of the challenges ahead, and I have no mod points, but nothing to add, either.
From TheGreenGrid consortium
http://www.thegreengrid.org/gg_content/Green_GridAlso from the Green Grid, estimating data center efficiency http://www.thegreengrid.org/gg_content/Green_Grid
Typical Numbers
IT Equipment: 30%
PDU 5%
UPS 18%
Switchgear 1%
Lighting 1%
CRAC 9%
Humidifier 3%
Chiller 33%
ASHRAE recommednations before 2005 have typically oversized data center cooling, amking the numbers worse. Ypu could look it up. Or you cou
Great - so you've got a working Carnot-Cycle generator. Cool.
EnergyStar standards for power supplies are that no more than 20% of the AC power be converted to heat going through the transformer - which means that on most systems more has been turned to heat in the server room before it does anything. Just moving *that* heat conversion out of the server room where it does not need to be cooled away is a big win. Remember, it takes, in a well designed system, 1.7 times the energy to cool a space as it took energy to heat it. Opponents of DC in the server room usually miss this aspect.
Centralizing of the AC/DC conversion allows for the possibility of selecting much more efficient transformers. But we can quibble over that. In any case, isolating and concentrating just *that* portion of the heat enables new approaches. I have seen Absorption Chillers running off the transformer heat being used to boost data center cooling. I have seen domestic hot water heating. I have been in serious conversations on Stirling Engines running of the transformer heat to charge the batteries.
The highest performance versions of this are not actually about saving energy - they are about running the computer flat out. How hard can I run the machine? If the transformer and power distribution are running well, can I use my redundant power to double my machine power rather than providing redundancy? Can I do early detection of potential power failures and then back off...
Clearly there is an idiot in the conversation.
Google searches, indexes, and retains all email to refine GMAIL ads.
Google maintains personally identifiable histories of searches made across sessions.
Google cross-references browser sessions with GMail databases to get combination profiles that include email / searches.
Google is buying the largest Click-stream analytics company to extend the personal profiles it keeps to include as much as possible of all other places you go on the web.
MS may intend to be as evil, but it doesn't have the reach.
Meet your new boss.
No one should resist Google absolute right to index all mail, all files, all sites, all traffic, all searches, all documents everywhere in every place. After all, they are sworn to "do no evil"
Google is the scariest company out there, right now - beyond MS, beyond Halliburton, beyond Blackwater.
Ho Ho - then there's the time that a live baby possum somhow found its way into our downstairs toilet overnight. Seat was down, but not lid. Typical female came and sat down w/o looking. I woke up to screams from downstairs that morning. Still not sure what happened exactly, but was definitiely told it was my fault.
I grew up in a household with 8 boys. My big sisters were the first to teach us to put the seat up. Because a six year old, or three year old is not going to wait around to find out. Seat lifting was invented for women.
That this is an issue at all is part and parcel of the great castratying man-hate that is part and parcell of all manistream women in the US. Then some of them wonder why they are unmarried at 38 and have to buy sperm.
Hears a clue. Men have to put up with female biology all the time. It is considered rude for men to explicitly point out what behaviroal crap they are having to put up with a quarter of the time. cCommon decency would suggest the women consder doing the same.
As long as there are the current almost religious wars between advocates of REST instead of message based WS that allow for long running business processes, then the chief problems will remain cultural. So many programmers think straight line, develop straight line, model straight line, that parallelism (which to my mind includes multi-coore, grid computing, and widely distributed virtual systems) seems a long way away.