starts to become a more valuable source of future fuel.
To expand on that, non-nuke people think fuel is burned up and there's just a tiny percentage of ash remaining, like coal plants.
Nukes work differently. Usually the fuel rods have to support themselves... what fraction of atoms in a chunk of "stuff" can you screw up and its still recognizably a chunk of "stuff"? AKA "burnup" or "burnup ratio". Well it turns out "a percent or so" is the most you can do before mechanical properties get all weird. More with some chemistries and designs, less with others.
Imagine as a thought experiment a "coal plant" where the coal is formed into pencil like rods, and the rods are burned until it would be too risky WRT collapse. Maybe you could only burn one percent of the coal. The other 99% is perfectly ready to use coal, plus 1% of really icky waste contaminants that have to be removed. Thats kinda how nukes are.
By weight, almost all of the "waste" is perfectly good unburned fuel.
Its really not a big deal because the guys in caves can do it pretty easily if they don't care about dying, or can just use the fuel pellets as is to create contamination.
The chief problem with reprocessing, US, USSR, as far as I know "everywhere" is you're fundamentally going to have to convert a ridiculously chemically inert ceramic or oxide to a water soluble ion, and every freaking place that does it invariably eventually turns into a glow in the dark superfund site.
Can't trust the capitalists, can't trust the commies... Everyone who tries it creates a superfund site, often worst than just dumping the stuff out on the dirt and walking away. Its a law of nature... Making the "stuff" a billion times more bio available by dissolving a ceramic in water means you have to be a billion times more careful not to spill it, or rephrased, being as safe as possible with both the insoluble and soluble stuff means spilling a billionth of the liquefied stuff is now just as bad as dumping the entire solidified batch in the back yard and walking away.
Imagine a big ceramic lump. It'll take a billion years to weather away. Of course in a million it'll totally decay to being as harmless as granite, but... Or you can dissolve it for reprocessing and it seems not to be technologically possible at an industrial scale to not pollute the environment... and unlike the non-reactive lump, the dissolved solution will go right in your drinking water. Ooops.
Also whenever you have "security" it inevitably devolves into "security... provided to coverup the environmental contamination". Combine that with a profit motive and you're got a recipe for disaster.
You need a reprocessing strategy that doesn't involve mechanical grinding or dissolving or ionizing or... in other words something that doesn't exist. Whoops.
Keep good, usable, uninfected backups of anything that's important to you.
I have a policy of no data on windows partitions/drives/images/machines. Everything valuable belongs on the cloud or a LAN server. Wipe windows at any time if necessary.
OPs best purchase would be a really big external hard drive connected by usb or fw or whatever and a linux "live" boot disk / USB key.
Before he gets owned, assuming he isn't already, dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/usborwhatever/my_backup_image.img (wait a couple hours?)
After he gets owned, dd if=/dev/usborwhatever/my_backup_image.img of=/dev/sda (wait a couple hours, remove linux boot device, reboot, and its back to the future)
You can keep multiple backup images, and you should. Also might be a good idea to see if md5adm/dev/usborwhatever/my_backup and md5adm/dev/sda match.
I mean specifically the places where it "won't work" as opposed to your designs, which will work.
Its possible to "sabotage" an app with endless hardcoded stuff, but that means the app dev failed design, hard. If an admin has to grep around in the raw source code at 2am to change an ip address, the dev has failed.
True, but those are bad designs. Some kind of environment or global variable tells you if its prod or dev in most of the "framework"ish systems. Not too hard to implement something like that in other systems. So.... all your passwords, hostnames, config, whatever are all located in/usr/local/src/passwords/whatever and that file and/or directory is different for -dev and -prod and admin via puppet maintains that file... the devs just have to trust them. This guarantees a goofy dev is going to hardcode the wrong thing in a app generating chaos, seen it a million times.
Also you'd be amazed what a motivated admin can do with Puppet. You can "git checkout" and then force a puppet run and within a couple seconds puppet has done "whatever" to completely customize the system.
I will say that "git flow" only works for application changes. Fundamental server software changes pretty much need admin coordination (We're using rails 3.2 now, etc). The devs can help the admins by squirting in a syslog message every time the app crontab kicks that says "gotta install 3.2". But someone's gotta apt-get it all into place. Server software changes are best done by rolling out an image with all the changes as -test and then promoting the image, assuming it works, to -prod, just like any other update or security patch..... "git pull" in a crontab is the kind of mistake you only make once... But purely for app changes, git flow will do.
I know I'm posting late, but where I work, for internal apps, we "git flow" and have some naming conventions and if your "deployment instructions" as a dev are more than the single line "git checkout release/2012-09-blah" then you've failed as a dev, naughty dev, go away until that works. That's the official "demac point" or whatever you want to call it.
So... umm... yeah... a dev can log into a production server and type in "git checkout release/whatever". And the admins know it..
I'm sure you can make a horrifically complicated system involving all kinds of software and checks and balances and endless procedures and meetings, but if you can eliminate all that via technology and standardization, that's a win.
The biggest problems I've ever heard of with "git flow" is devs making releases work unidirectional (like they only support database schema upgrades not downgrades, add a line to a file every time it notices it was upgraded without checking to see if the line is already there, etc) and devs and admins getting into branch "revert" wars and people on both sides refusing to adhere to the demarc (well, yeah, git checkout and then also please manually edit file X and blah blah for 5 pages, um, no thats not the agreed upon standard, nothing but one git checkout line is allowed) All three are management level issues not dev / admin issues..
Needless to say this forces massive automation and logging and a real test environment the use of which is enforced. Which is good.
You can put a hook into git such that it emails when you change branches. Don't recall how, maybe its just a script that periodically looks at diffs of the output of "git status", but its obviously quite valuable in this situation, combined with a email list for the admins and devs, so everyone is instantly on the same page when something gets released.
And at the NYT the presses sit idle most of the day.
I worked at two printing companies in the past, doing IT type stuff. The local newspaper prints spam when they're not printing newspapers, and quite a bit of it. Low quality, however, the "real" printing company had much nicer output. I'm sure that in the mail you periodically get some type of "coupon shopper" printed on newspaper which is pure spam. To be honest, I think that deal might be the only thing keeping the newspaper company afloat. Also maintenance requirements are disturbingly high for a press... lots of moving parts, and they tend to be old moving parts. "Not printing" does not mean press operators are not crawling all over it. Finally, if you think about the content, most of a sunday newspaper can be printed up in advance.... so it is. Presses are a big capital expense, so humorously they probably do a better job than data center operators at keeping the machinery in production. If a press is collecting dust, competition means they're going out of business, and soon.
You seem to be adding a frosting of additional technology you don't really need. Just expand the existing rental infrastructure by a factor of, say, 100, and modernize up to 2000 era standards.
All you need is, almost every parking lot, is now an "enterprise rent-a-car" lot, and streamline the rental process from 10 minutes down to perhaps 10 seconds for those pre-approved in a "club".
There used to be severe cultural issues with people filling their cars up with "8-tracks" then "cassette tapes" then "cds" but now you just bluetooth stream off the phone. Also some cultural issues with people packing their cars with, well, trash, just like some people do that with their houses. Hoarders. And some issues with kids car seats. But for most civilized people, swapping cars is not a big deal.
I think a clearing corporation who force all the rental operators interchange fluidly would be a pretty interesting business model. Much as any bank can cash any old fashioned paper check from any other bank, eventually, anyway, any rental lot operator needs to be able to rent any rental operator's car in a fluid, (mostly) cheap, transparent manner.. With remote control of the car and a cell phone, you don't really need clerks at every parking lot anyway, this also makes all rental operations 24x7 which is really convenient. Dumbphone means talk to a call center in India, smartphone means use an app, if you must use apps...
Batteries getting low and you're in too much of a hurry to charge, or going on a long road trip? Simply pick up a new car while on the road... your old car's GPS gives you directions to your new car.
Pay, lets say, fifty cents per mile and a buck per hour to rent any car. My employer's parking lot is now a rental lot, as is the strip mall two blocks from my house. They'd make maybe $500/month off me, which really isn't too bad compared to my existing insurance, maintenance, registration, taxes, and car payment. That would work very well for me. I'd save money with this scheme, but I'd be willing to lose a little money if it meant I didn't have the headaches of owning a car. I would imagine there's always going to be old timers who demand the old ways (Amish (literally) or whatever) and the system can accommodate them.
If you demand smartphone apps, write one where taxi drivers bid on your offer to be driven from wherever you are to the closest (now reserved) rent a car. The rentacar pays the taxi driver directly, you tip in cash a buck or two. I suppose human valet parking deals can be arranged too, for a modest fee and probably the usual cash tip.
I could also see an incentive system developing maybe in a dreaded smartphone app... the AI knows the baseball stadium will have high rental demand at the end of the game... how about a $5 credit if you drop off a car at the stadium parking lot and take the bus to work? Or if you promise to return this car to a residential lot before 6am rush hour we'll give you $1 off your next rental... Even really crazy stuff like guarantee the price will never be more than a buck per hour or a buck per mile but it could be as low as free if there's immense demand due to vacation traffic or whatever.. place a bid on a car, see if you win...
oil will never run dry, there are centuries of supply of fossil fuel and any hydrocarbon fuel chain can be changed to any other
EROEI. Energy returned on Energy Invested. When it takes more than a barrel to extract another barrel you're all done with that as a primary energy source. We're RAPIDLY approaching that.
Yes, we'll pump oil for decades (centuries?) after EROEI drops below 1, to make organic chems... all non-energy related stuff.
I would rather rent an old fashioned gasoline car at the gas station. Enterprise rentacar and the rest have this whole thing down to a science, where random hotel clerks rent cars. Adding the training for gas station clerks would not be a heroic additional achievement. Some tow truck operators already have "affiliate" programs with rental companies.
An ex coworker who rented a giant SUV for a cross country trip recently discovered another advantage of renting your cross country cruiser from a nationwide rental outfit.... you know what horrible things happens when you break down in the middle of nowhere 1000 miles from home? Nothing bad at all. In about an hour a dude shows up with a replacement vehicle and you continue your trip without a care in the world about the broken down car laying in the middle of nowhere. Renting... love it !
If my daily driver broke down 1000 miles from home and I knew I had to be home and driving it to work next monday, I'd be absolutely shitting bricks about how much I'm about to get screwed by the locals, like Deliverance but with cars and car mechanics, and how the vacation trip is now utterly ruined, but if you rent and have all the insurance options, a breakdown is just "eh, interesting story, whatever".
The black forest region? Used to be the international poster-child for acid rain pollution. Its not anymore... maybe they cleaned it up, or maybe they just gave up hope. Donno.
I'm sure there must be good reasons why this wouldn't work, given it never seems to get consideration - but what are they?
Legal liability issues, mostly.
I swap and receive at 99% worn out, 1% barely working battery and I'm the lucky guy who terminally burns it out. Do I get to pay full list price to replace it? I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere, who pays for the tow truck? Stalled out on the interstate and got rear ended, who'd liable? Its a mess.
Another classic is product liability issue, if we invented gasoline pumps today we'd never be able to deploy a gasoline infrastructure. Burned to death by the gas pump is "OK" because we're all familiar with the risk. Since we're inventing magic battery swapping machines, toddlers are going to get decapitated trying to watch / play with the machines, mechanical failures will damage dent destroy the car (and or battery which you may or may not be liable for...). What if my car / battery / actions destroy the battery changing robot... I bet the robot costs more than a gas pump hose and nozzle.
Finally, theft. The nickel in a Prius battery is worth a couple hundred bucks. A recycler might pay a meth head $100 for a Prius battery... Luckily ? it takes about 2 hours work to remove (well, probably less if you don't care what happens to the upholstery). Imagine a meth head hearing he can get $1000 for your electric car battery and it was designed by the manufacturer to be removed in less than a minute... Oh this isn't good at all. If the battery fits in a pickup truck bed then its "gone in 60 seconds time".
The "its only a $20 tank" "I'll install it myself" propane grill tank business model doesn't work when the "tank" costs $20K and it takes a robot to install it.
There will never be a large market for electric cars until the infrastructure has been upgraded accordingly.... You can't expect people to buy the car if the infrastructure doesn't support the car.
OMG I have to put in an electrical outlet... Its not a big deal. The transition from horse stables to automobile garages a century or so ago was MUCH more impressive yet was handled pretty well.
What is a big deal is the collision of three things, one is infrastructure related:
1) Toyota is a Japanese company first, not solely an exporter. Yes the Americans love their imported Toyotas, and the Japanese are sensitive to our desires, but they're primarily a Japanese company first. Its not like Foxconn in China, where basically none of what they make stays in country. The Japanese people really do expect to drive Japanese made cars, oddly enough.
2) Asian "save face" culture means they can't talk directly about a national embarrassment. Not being Japanese myself, and being on/., this is not a problem for me!
3) Fukushima
Because of #3 above, they're shutting down all the nuke plants, which means they've got a SERIOUS electrical shortage issue at least in the short to medium term. Because of #2 above they can't talk about #3 above which is short term turning them into a 3rd world electrical infrastructure. Because #3 causes #2, they can't sell electric cars in Japan (realistically) so #1 above they are not exporting them to the USA either.
Frankly every time we discuss UPS and electrical power on/., it sounds like USA coasties are already living in the 3rd world, and if you need to charge overnight, and as apparently often happens to coasties, you don't have power, then you're not driving to work tomorrow. In the heartland we basically never have power outages other than the weird once per decade stuff (drunk driver vs telephone pole, etc). I would wonder about selling an electric car to 3rd world electrical infrastructure areas. It would work well in Wisconsin but in a state of endless brownouts and blackouts like California I don't think its an appropriate technology. They've gotta stick with the smog-belchers.
Here's how it'll play out, as a long time SE watcher.
If there's no answer that is "acceptable" then it'll be closed as "off topic".
If there's only one "acceptable" answer then the lurkers / astroturfers will pounce, post the single "acceptable" answer, and the question will get "protected question" status which was originally invented to stop idiot noobs to the site from posting "Me toooo" but is more commonly used to prevent alternative viewpoints from being discussed.
Being SE that means no discussion allowed. In theory this is good, in practice its a descent into authoritarianism. "Al Gore invented the internet and here's some cites" is an acceptable answer. Its wrong, but its acceptable because its not a discussion. A reply of "No, al gore did not invent the internet and here are some cites" will be down modded / deleted because discussion is not allowed on SE.
So the lobby action will all be in the moderation and meta-moderation, probably not in the posts.
The biggest problem I see is most of the SE sites I watch are more or less psuedo-homework helpers... If not literal homework, they're "help the noobs" in general. The patent office probably needs more "trivia hounds" than the usual SE kindergarten teacher / noob helpers. To give you a real world example, there must be 5000 SE electronics board questions that are equivalent to "how do I calculate the resistor to current limit a LED?" and the SE crew is pretty good at pattern matching and answering in noob-ish language, something like supply voltage minus device voltage drop, take that "resistor voltage" and divide the current in amps (not mA). But for 5000 more or less LED-resistor-questions there probably are only 5 or so "what solid state semiconductor physics is the pre-room temperature (aka subzero) blue LED based upon?" for the trivia hounds, and unfortunately that tiny minority of trivia hounds are who the patent office needs, and frankly I don't think the kind of people who can answer the really weird stuff hang out on SE anyway (so I'm a tolerable practical RF engineer, why would I wanna answer "I wanna light a LED" all day? Much rather talk about trying to make a SMA connector do the job of a 2.92K connector or whatever... hey if you can force an old fashioned "uhf connector" to work at 70cm, why not force a SMA to work (lower) K band? but the rep is SE is not for "higher end" problems)
Rough engineering estimate, a watt continuously is a buck per year.
If you're American-centric. Elsewhere, it's easily double that.
In most civilized areas of the US (not the coasts) its about half that. Especially purchased in bulk.
That's why its called a Rough Engineering Estimate instead of a precisely calculated and verified data point.
A bad rough engineering estimate would be a couple orders of magnitude off, like 1 cent or 100 bucks per Wy. That was what was so shocking about some Iraq/Afganistan stories from a purely EE standpoint... what happens to your systems analysis decisions when electricity costs the equivalent of 100 bucks per Wy or whatever it was.
Worst case, if we just include first world people, it's only about a 100W per person
Rough engineering estimate, a watt continuously is a buck per year.
For commercial I'm completely unimpressed. That's like the depreciation on my desk and chair, or the dept "free" coffee budget for a month. A tiny fraction of the overhead lighting power, which is a tiny fraction of the HVAC power, which is a tiny fraction of my salary. In terms of environmental degradation, the gasoline I burn to commute is worse than my share of the corporate data center (based on a KWh being about a pound of coal, so 16 pounds of coal per week, and commute four times per week is about 4 gallons or about 24 pounds of gasoline)
For residential I'm amazed. They need to make $100/yr off my mom who doesn't even have internet access just to pay the electrical bill. I donno if they can make $100 of me per year and I'm always on the net doing "stuff". One interesting comparison WRT advertising is "one million page views per year = one thousand dollars per month or about a penny per pageview". Donno how true that is anymore. But it would imply that just to pay the electric bill the average person would have to visit 27 web pages per day, every day, which seems pretty high across an entire nation.
I pay $20, for 50mbps down and 25 up, 250Gb per month. I use Novus, which is available in select buildings in Vancouver.
So you can only use it for eleven hours per month. Which brings up the question of what you can do for "less than 10 hours per month" at that high speed.
A new "super duper WOW like MMORPG" that requires 50 megs complete with smell-o-vision sounds cool, but you can only play for 10 hours a month, so maybe not so cool... Watch extra super triple resolution streamed hi def TV? Sure... just keep it under 20 minutes per day...
The good news about the future is eventually we'll all have 10Gig ethernet fiber to our homes... the bad news is the cap of 1 gig / month to discourage piracy/abuse/file sharing. 800 milliseconds per month of full speed service....
In my case I'm working on setting up an Open VPN connection between myself and another so that my media library is accessible remotely. I'm already able to stream to my phone. Lots of potential!
You can do that with Plex outta the box with the integrated myplex service. Takes about 5 minutes to set up, assuming you've already got Plex as a media server or you're willing to run in parallel with mythtv (which is what I do). The fact that I can stream my videos over a slow CELL PHONE connection indicates I have absolutely no idea what to do with 50 megs.
I know what a business could do with that. What I'm mystified about is given likely "no servers" terms of service, what can a end user do with it?
the new designs deviate from the traditional configurations and specifications, which means data center operators will need to find and then source racks from third-party vendors (or, in the case of Facebook, design their own).
Other stuff goes in racks too. Power distribution, cable mis-management, fiber trays, all that stuff needs to be redesigned.
If I remember the hobbit correctly, that's going to pretty well F up the script WRT the dwarve / elve racial tensions.
Couldn't they have just added a teenage female human with a crossbow without screwing up the story too much? I heard all fantasy-type movies are now required to have one of those in the cast.
Except in most places if you could get away with covering the village walls with pictures of naked chicks we wouldn't be there in the first place.
Looks like France is gearing up for more rioting for some damn cartoon or another, and they've got those Kate Middleton pictures everywhere...
I think its more the concept of confusing and distracting the enemy anyway. So put up 500 (homemade?) Nintendo Mario posters to distract, and dress the real insurgents in genuine Mario halloween costumes. Heck, if you wanna go star wars, stormtrooper armor might actually work. Put up Escher drawing posters just to piss off the digital algorithms trying to model what it sees in 3d... so those stairs lead upward to that platform that leads upward to the original platform?
Are you implying the 'prophet' is an insignificant speck?
You kids and your low resolution 1080 wide screen monitors. Here's a quarter, get yourself a high res monitor like my 1600x1200 CRT from back in 1999 and look again.
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starts to become a more valuable source of future fuel.
To expand on that, non-nuke people think fuel is burned up and there's just a tiny percentage of ash remaining, like coal plants.
Nukes work differently. Usually the fuel rods have to support themselves... what fraction of atoms in a chunk of "stuff" can you screw up and its still recognizably a chunk of "stuff"? AKA "burnup" or "burnup ratio". Well it turns out "a percent or so" is the most you can do before mechanical properties get all weird. More with some chemistries and designs, less with others.
Imagine as a thought experiment a "coal plant" where the coal is formed into pencil like rods, and the rods are burned until it would be too risky WRT collapse. Maybe you could only burn one percent of the coal. The other 99% is perfectly ready to use coal, plus 1% of really icky waste contaminants that have to be removed. Thats kinda how nukes are.
By weight, almost all of the "waste" is perfectly good unburned fuel.
Its really not a big deal because the guys in caves can do it pretty easily if they don't care about dying, or can just use the fuel pellets as is to create contamination.
The chief problem with reprocessing, US, USSR, as far as I know "everywhere" is you're fundamentally going to have to convert a ridiculously chemically inert ceramic or oxide to a water soluble ion, and every freaking place that does it invariably eventually turns into a glow in the dark superfund site.
Can't trust the capitalists, can't trust the commies... Everyone who tries it creates a superfund site, often worst than just dumping the stuff out on the dirt and walking away. Its a law of nature... Making the "stuff" a billion times more bio available by dissolving a ceramic in water means you have to be a billion times more careful not to spill it, or rephrased, being as safe as possible with both the insoluble and soluble stuff means spilling a billionth of the liquefied stuff is now just as bad as dumping the entire solidified batch in the back yard and walking away.
Imagine a big ceramic lump. It'll take a billion years to weather away. Of course in a million it'll totally decay to being as harmless as granite, but... Or you can dissolve it for reprocessing and it seems not to be technologically possible at an industrial scale to not pollute the environment... and unlike the non-reactive lump, the dissolved solution will go right in your drinking water. Ooops.
Also whenever you have "security" it inevitably devolves into "security... provided to coverup the environmental contamination". Combine that with a profit motive and you're got a recipe for disaster.
You need a reprocessing strategy that doesn't involve mechanical grinding or dissolving or ionizing or ... in other words something that doesn't exist. Whoops.
Keep good, usable, uninfected backups of anything that's important to you.
I have a policy of no data on windows partitions/drives/images/machines. Everything valuable belongs on the cloud or a LAN server. Wipe windows at any time if necessary.
OPs best purchase would be a really big external hard drive connected by usb or fw or whatever and a linux "live" boot disk / USB key.
Before he gets owned, assuming he isn't already, dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/usborwhatever/my_backup_image.img (wait a couple hours?)
After he gets owned, dd if=/dev/usborwhatever/my_backup_image.img of=/dev/sda (wait a couple hours, remove linux boot device, reboot, and its back to the future)
You can keep multiple backup images, and you should. Also might be a good idea to see if md5adm /dev/usborwhatever/my_backup and md5adm /dev/sda match.
True, but those are bad designs
I mean specifically the places where it "won't work" as opposed to your designs, which will work.
Its possible to "sabotage" an app with endless hardcoded stuff, but that means the app dev failed design, hard. If an admin has to grep around in the raw source code at 2am to change an ip address, the dev has failed.
True, but those are bad designs. Some kind of environment or global variable tells you if its prod or dev in most of the "framework"ish systems. Not too hard to implement something like that in other systems. So.... all your passwords, hostnames, config, whatever are all located in /usr/local/src/passwords/whatever and that file and/or directory is different for -dev and -prod and admin via puppet maintains that file... the devs just have to trust them. This guarantees a goofy dev is going to hardcode the wrong thing in a app generating chaos, seen it a million times.
Also you'd be amazed what a motivated admin can do with Puppet. You can "git checkout" and then force a puppet run and within a couple seconds puppet has done "whatever" to completely customize the system.
I will say that "git flow" only works for application changes. Fundamental server software changes pretty much need admin coordination (We're using rails 3.2 now, etc). The devs can help the admins by squirting in a syslog message every time the app crontab kicks that says "gotta install 3.2". But someone's gotta apt-get it all into place. Server software changes are best done by rolling out an image with all the changes as -test and then promoting the image, assuming it works, to -prod, just like any other update or security patch..... "git pull" in a crontab is the kind of mistake you only make once... But purely for app changes, git flow will do.
I know I'm posting late, but where I work, for internal apps, we "git flow" and have some naming conventions and if your "deployment instructions" as a dev are more than the single line "git checkout release/2012-09-blah" then you've failed as a dev, naughty dev, go away until that works. That's the official "demac point" or whatever you want to call it.
So... umm... yeah... a dev can log into a production server and type in "git checkout release/whatever". And the admins know it..
I'm sure you can make a horrifically complicated system involving all kinds of software and checks and balances and endless procedures and meetings, but if you can eliminate all that via technology and standardization, that's a win.
The biggest problems I've ever heard of with "git flow" is devs making releases work unidirectional (like they only support database schema upgrades not downgrades, add a line to a file every time it notices it was upgraded without checking to see if the line is already there, etc) and devs and admins getting into branch "revert" wars and people on both sides refusing to adhere to the demarc (well, yeah, git checkout and then also please manually edit file X and blah blah for 5 pages, um, no thats not the agreed upon standard, nothing but one git checkout line is allowed) All three are management level issues not dev / admin issues..
Needless to say this forces massive automation and logging and a real test environment the use of which is enforced. Which is good.
You can put a hook into git such that it emails when you change branches. Don't recall how, maybe its just a script that periodically looks at diffs of the output of "git status", but its obviously quite valuable in this situation, combined with a email list for the admins and devs, so everyone is instantly on the same page when something gets released.
... you might send out a 'linux guy' (who doesn't know linux scripting, that's an advanced linux guy)
Oh how times have changed... what limited tasks, pray tell, can a non-advanced linux guy do... stick the ubuntu install DVD in and hit reset?
And at the NYT the presses sit idle most of the day.
I worked at two printing companies in the past, doing IT type stuff. The local newspaper prints spam when they're not printing newspapers, and quite a bit of it. Low quality, however, the "real" printing company had much nicer output. I'm sure that in the mail you periodically get some type of "coupon shopper" printed on newspaper which is pure spam. To be honest, I think that deal might be the only thing keeping the newspaper company afloat. Also maintenance requirements are disturbingly high for a press... lots of moving parts, and they tend to be old moving parts. "Not printing" does not mean press operators are not crawling all over it. Finally, if you think about the content, most of a sunday newspaper can be printed up in advance.... so it is. Presses are a big capital expense, so humorously they probably do a better job than data center operators at keeping the machinery in production. If a press is collecting dust, competition means they're going out of business, and soon.
You seem to be adding a frosting of additional technology you don't really need. Just expand the existing rental infrastructure by a factor of, say, 100, and modernize up to 2000 era standards.
All you need is, almost every parking lot, is now an "enterprise rent-a-car" lot, and streamline the rental process from 10 minutes down to perhaps 10 seconds for those pre-approved in a "club".
There used to be severe cultural issues with people filling their cars up with "8-tracks" then "cassette tapes" then "cds" but now you just bluetooth stream off the phone. Also some cultural issues with people packing their cars with, well, trash, just like some people do that with their houses. Hoarders. And some issues with kids car seats. But for most civilized people, swapping cars is not a big deal.
I think a clearing corporation who force all the rental operators interchange fluidly would be a pretty interesting business model. Much as any bank can cash any old fashioned paper check from any other bank, eventually, anyway, any rental lot operator needs to be able to rent any rental operator's car in a fluid, (mostly) cheap, transparent manner.. With remote control of the car and a cell phone, you don't really need clerks at every parking lot anyway, this also makes all rental operations 24x7 which is really convenient. Dumbphone means talk to a call center in India, smartphone means use an app, if you must use apps...
Batteries getting low and you're in too much of a hurry to charge, or going on a long road trip? Simply pick up a new car while on the road... your old car's GPS gives you directions to your new car.
Pay, lets say, fifty cents per mile and a buck per hour to rent any car. My employer's parking lot is now a rental lot, as is the strip mall two blocks from my house. They'd make maybe $500/month off me, which really isn't too bad compared to my existing insurance, maintenance, registration, taxes, and car payment. That would work very well for me. I'd save money with this scheme, but I'd be willing to lose a little money if it meant I didn't have the headaches of owning a car. I would imagine there's always going to be old timers who demand the old ways (Amish (literally) or whatever) and the system can accommodate them.
If you demand smartphone apps, write one where taxi drivers bid on your offer to be driven from wherever you are to the closest (now reserved) rent a car. The rentacar pays the taxi driver directly, you tip in cash a buck or two. I suppose human valet parking deals can be arranged too, for a modest fee and probably the usual cash tip.
I could also see an incentive system developing maybe in a dreaded smartphone app... the AI knows the baseball stadium will have high rental demand at the end of the game... how about a $5 credit if you drop off a car at the stadium parking lot and take the bus to work? Or if you promise to return this car to a residential lot before 6am rush hour we'll give you $1 off your next rental... Even really crazy stuff like guarantee the price will never be more than a buck per hour or a buck per mile but it could be as low as free if there's immense demand due to vacation traffic or whatever.. place a bid on a car, see if you win...
oil will never run dry, there are centuries of supply of fossil fuel and any hydrocarbon fuel chain can be changed to any other
EROEI. Energy returned on Energy Invested. When it takes more than a barrel to extract another barrel you're all done with that as a primary energy source. We're RAPIDLY approaching that.
Yes, we'll pump oil for decades (centuries?) after EROEI drops below 1, to make organic chems ... all non-energy related stuff.
but rent it at a gas station
I would rather rent an old fashioned gasoline car at the gas station. Enterprise rentacar and the rest have this whole thing down to a science, where random hotel clerks rent cars. Adding the training for gas station clerks would not be a heroic additional achievement. Some tow truck operators already have "affiliate" programs with rental companies.
An ex coworker who rented a giant SUV for a cross country trip recently discovered another advantage of renting your cross country cruiser from a nationwide rental outfit.... you know what horrible things happens when you break down in the middle of nowhere 1000 miles from home? Nothing bad at all. In about an hour a dude shows up with a replacement vehicle and you continue your trip without a care in the world about the broken down car laying in the middle of nowhere. Renting... love it !
If my daily driver broke down 1000 miles from home and I knew I had to be home and driving it to work next monday, I'd be absolutely shitting bricks about how much I'm about to get screwed by the locals, like Deliverance but with cars and car mechanics, and how the vacation trip is now utterly ruined, but if you rent and have all the insurance options, a breakdown is just "eh, interesting story, whatever".
Where exactly is pollution 'hideous' in Germany?
The black forest region? Used to be the international poster-child for acid rain pollution. Its not anymore... maybe they cleaned it up, or maybe they just gave up hope. Donno.
I'm sure there must be good reasons why this wouldn't work, given it never seems to get consideration - but what are they?
Legal liability issues, mostly.
I swap and receive at 99% worn out, 1% barely working battery and I'm the lucky guy who terminally burns it out. Do I get to pay full list price to replace it? I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere, who pays for the tow truck? Stalled out on the interstate and got rear ended, who'd liable? Its a mess.
Another classic is product liability issue, if we invented gasoline pumps today we'd never be able to deploy a gasoline infrastructure. Burned to death by the gas pump is "OK" because we're all familiar with the risk. Since we're inventing magic battery swapping machines, toddlers are going to get decapitated trying to watch / play with the machines, mechanical failures will damage dent destroy the car (and or battery which you may or may not be liable for...). What if my car / battery / actions destroy the battery changing robot... I bet the robot costs more than a gas pump hose and nozzle.
Finally, theft. The nickel in a Prius battery is worth a couple hundred bucks. A recycler might pay a meth head $100 for a Prius battery... Luckily ? it takes about 2 hours work to remove (well, probably less if you don't care what happens to the upholstery). Imagine a meth head hearing he can get $1000 for your electric car battery and it was designed by the manufacturer to be removed in less than a minute... Oh this isn't good at all. If the battery fits in a pickup truck bed then its "gone in 60 seconds time".
The "its only a $20 tank" "I'll install it myself" propane grill tank business model doesn't work when the "tank" costs $20K and it takes a robot to install it.
There will never be a large market for electric cars until the infrastructure has been upgraded accordingly.... You can't expect people to buy the car if the infrastructure doesn't support the car.
OMG I have to put in an electrical outlet... Its not a big deal. The transition from horse stables to automobile garages a century or so ago was MUCH more impressive yet was handled pretty well.
What is a big deal is the collision of three things, one is infrastructure related:
1) Toyota is a Japanese company first, not solely an exporter. Yes the Americans love their imported Toyotas, and the Japanese are sensitive to our desires, but they're primarily a Japanese company first. Its not like Foxconn in China, where basically none of what they make stays in country. The Japanese people really do expect to drive Japanese made cars, oddly enough.
2) Asian "save face" culture means they can't talk directly about a national embarrassment. Not being Japanese myself, and being on /., this is not a problem for me!
3) Fukushima
Because of #3 above, they're shutting down all the nuke plants, which means they've got a SERIOUS electrical shortage issue at least in the short to medium term. Because of #2 above they can't talk about #3 above which is short term turning them into a 3rd world electrical infrastructure. Because #3 causes #2, they can't sell electric cars in Japan (realistically) so #1 above they are not exporting them to the USA either.
Frankly every time we discuss UPS and electrical power on /., it sounds like USA coasties are already living in the 3rd world, and if you need to charge overnight, and as apparently often happens to coasties, you don't have power, then you're not driving to work tomorrow. In the heartland we basically never have power outages other than the weird once per decade stuff (drunk driver vs telephone pole, etc). I would wonder about selling an electric car to 3rd world electrical infrastructure areas. It would work well in Wisconsin but in a state of endless brownouts and blackouts like California I don't think its an appropriate technology. They've gotta stick with the smog-belchers.
Here's how it'll play out, as a long time SE watcher.
If there's no answer that is "acceptable" then it'll be closed as "off topic".
If there's only one "acceptable" answer then the lurkers / astroturfers will pounce, post the single "acceptable" answer, and the question will get "protected question" status which was originally invented to stop idiot noobs to the site from posting "Me toooo" but is more commonly used to prevent alternative viewpoints from being discussed.
Being SE that means no discussion allowed. In theory this is good, in practice its a descent into authoritarianism. "Al Gore invented the internet and here's some cites" is an acceptable answer. Its wrong, but its acceptable because its not a discussion. A reply of "No, al gore did not invent the internet and here are some cites" will be down modded / deleted because discussion is not allowed on SE.
So the lobby action will all be in the moderation and meta-moderation, probably not in the posts.
The biggest problem I see is most of the SE sites I watch are more or less psuedo-homework helpers... If not literal homework, they're "help the noobs" in general. The patent office probably needs more "trivia hounds" than the usual SE kindergarten teacher / noob helpers. To give you a real world example, there must be 5000 SE electronics board questions that are equivalent to "how do I calculate the resistor to current limit a LED?" and the SE crew is pretty good at pattern matching and answering in noob-ish language, something like supply voltage minus device voltage drop, take that "resistor voltage" and divide the current in amps (not mA). But for 5000 more or less LED-resistor-questions there probably are only 5 or so "what solid state semiconductor physics is the pre-room temperature (aka subzero) blue LED based upon?" for the trivia hounds, and unfortunately that tiny minority of trivia hounds are who the patent office needs, and frankly I don't think the kind of people who can answer the really weird stuff hang out on SE anyway (so I'm a tolerable practical RF engineer, why would I wanna answer "I wanna light a LED" all day? Much rather talk about trying to make a SMA connector do the job of a 2.92K connector or whatever... hey if you can force an old fashioned "uhf connector" to work at 70cm, why not force a SMA to work (lower) K band? but the rep is SE is not for "higher end" problems)
The problem with RIM isn't their product, it's their entire business model being outdated.
Get a government contract and hang on forever? I donno thats doing pretty well elsewhere...
If you're American-centric. Elsewhere, it's easily double that.
In most civilized areas of the US (not the coasts) its about half that. Especially purchased in bulk.
That's why its called a Rough Engineering Estimate instead of a precisely calculated and verified data point.
A bad rough engineering estimate would be a couple orders of magnitude off, like 1 cent or 100 bucks per Wy. That was what was so shocking about some Iraq/Afganistan stories from a purely EE standpoint... what happens to your systems analysis decisions when electricity costs the equivalent of 100 bucks per Wy or whatever it was.
Worst case, if we just include first world people, it's only about a 100W per person
Rough engineering estimate, a watt continuously is a buck per year.
For commercial I'm completely unimpressed. That's like the depreciation on my desk and chair, or the dept "free" coffee budget for a month. A tiny fraction of the overhead lighting power, which is a tiny fraction of the HVAC power, which is a tiny fraction of my salary. In terms of environmental degradation, the gasoline I burn to commute is worse than my share of the corporate data center (based on a KWh being about a pound of coal, so 16 pounds of coal per week, and commute four times per week is about 4 gallons or about 24 pounds of gasoline)
For residential I'm amazed. They need to make $100/yr off my mom who doesn't even have internet access just to pay the electrical bill. I donno if they can make $100 of me per year and I'm always on the net doing "stuff". One interesting comparison WRT advertising is "one million page views per year = one thousand dollars per month or about a penny per pageview". Donno how true that is anymore. But it would imply that just to pay the electric bill the average person would have to visit 27 web pages per day, every day, which seems pretty high across an entire nation.
I pay $20, for 50mbps down and 25 up, 250Gb per month. I use Novus, which is available in select buildings in Vancouver.
So you can only use it for eleven hours per month. Which brings up the question of what you can do for "less than 10 hours per month" at that high speed.
A new "super duper WOW like MMORPG" that requires 50 megs complete with smell-o-vision sounds cool, but you can only play for 10 hours a month, so maybe not so cool... Watch extra super triple resolution streamed hi def TV? Sure... just keep it under 20 minutes per day...
The good news about the future is eventually we'll all have 10Gig ethernet fiber to our homes... the bad news is the cap of 1 gig / month to discourage piracy/abuse/file sharing. 800 milliseconds per month of full speed service....
In my case I'm working on setting up an Open VPN connection between myself and another so that my media library is accessible remotely. I'm already able to stream to my phone. Lots of potential!
You can do that with Plex outta the box with the integrated myplex service. Takes about 5 minutes to set up, assuming you've already got Plex as a media server or you're willing to run in parallel with mythtv (which is what I do). The fact that I can stream my videos over a slow CELL PHONE connection indicates I have absolutely no idea what to do with 50 megs.
I know what a business could do with that. What I'm mystified about is given likely "no servers" terms of service, what can a end user do with it?
the new designs deviate from the traditional configurations and specifications, which means data center operators will need to find and then source racks from third-party vendors (or, in the case of Facebook, design their own).
Other stuff goes in racks too. Power distribution, cable mis-management, fiber trays, all that stuff needs to be redesigned.
Looks like a mighty painful transition.
Oh no. Please, I hope I'm getting this wrong, but I've got a real bad feeling I'm gonna be right about this:
I read somewhere that they were adding a female Elf to the company, because ...
... he thinks he's remaking "snow white and the seven dwarfs"
If I remember the hobbit correctly, that's going to pretty well F up the script WRT the dwarve / elve racial tensions.
Couldn't they have just added a teenage female human with a crossbow without screwing up the story too much? I heard all fantasy-type movies are now required to have one of those in the cast.
Except in most places if you could get away with covering the village walls with pictures of naked chicks we wouldn't be there in the first place.
Looks like France is gearing up for more rioting for some damn cartoon or another, and they've got those Kate Middleton pictures everywhere...
I think its more the concept of confusing and distracting the enemy anyway. So put up 500 (homemade?) Nintendo Mario posters to distract, and dress the real insurgents in genuine Mario halloween costumes. Heck, if you wanna go star wars, stormtrooper armor might actually work. Put up Escher drawing posters just to piss off the digital algorithms trying to model what it sees in 3d... so those stairs lead upward to that platform that leads upward to the original platform?
Are you implying the 'prophet' is an insignificant speck?
You kids and your low resolution 1080 wide screen monitors.
Here's a quarter, get yourself a high res monitor like my 1600x1200 CRT from back in 1999 and look again.