With respect (but not much of it), real engineers on non-IT projects have to cope with such situations, so why shouldn't IT people who call themselves engineers expect a free ride?
That's an annoying tactic. I worked on a plant shutdown where my manager exploited the situation where so much had been outsourced that there were not enough people to keep track of contractors. We'd sit waiting around drinking cups of tea from 7am to 5pm when the safety inspectors went home and then do some real work (frequently being told to go slow) until 2am, coming back at 7am for a bit over a month (was supposed to be a nine day shutdown). He was charging the client for overtime rates and paying a fairly low flat rate to his staff. Incredibly frustrating since most of us wanted to get the work done and get out of there and had some real work we could have been doing. It's a bit of a worry sitting high on scaffolding with a machine that involves electricity plus picric acid on your lap and going into microsleeps, especially when the things you are checking for damage will let out vast amounts of ammonia or hydrogen when they fail so it's not just your own safety at risk. Of course that guy eventually had to bring people in from other cities once he's turned over a lot of employees and word had got around. I thought it weird that one of the first things he did after he employed me was to pull a knife out of his boot and show it to me, saying it was for protection, an odd thing for an engineer to do - made sense after a bit. A lot of "red tape" exists due to thieves like that.
You are playing that cardboard cutout character again. How about displaying some evidence of thinking about the issue instead of playing this silly game. All coders can set their own hours? You are not that stupid. Please stop acting that way.
Spot on. If you don't get to set your own hours then your time shouldn't be free when a project gets out of control and needs more effort. The other way around rewards poor management skills.
it just seems weird or counter-intuitive to heat the fluid on purpose to get compression as a byproduct
You are looking at it the wrong way if it seems weird. A temperature difference is being used to do work, and the refridgeration cycle is a way of doing that even though it doesn't appear obvious that such a thing is happening. If your high school texts dealt with it poorly instead of going from simple to complex then the introductory chapters of an engineering thermodynamics textbook may be worth a look.
I'm wondering if a combination geothermal and solar-thermal HVAC is feasible
It's being done that way in Glasgow but in that case they have vast quantities of flooded mine tunnels under almost the entire city with water constantly at 12C. It's listed on page 6 of this PDF (http://www.sust.org/pdf/glenalmond.pdf). No real detail but there's probably other stuff about it or similar elsewhere.
This is either bullshit, or you're doing it very, very wrong.
A lot of places do it very, very wrong. Amazing how scanned HR paperwork can expand to fill a larger amount of data than highly detailed geological survey data of very large areas.
Funny how someone shouting "moron" forgot that there are a lot of commonly used container formats out there which can contain the subtitle data in addition to the sound and video. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats Column 7 is what you want to look at.
How about putting in a perfectly innocent looking CDROM and infecting the machine with a rootkit? There may even be some lying around on the Sony premises
Don't bother. The above poster has grouped everything outside the place he cares about as "here be dragons" and bundled it all together. He probably says the same about Canada. Or Utah.
There's been plenty of wakeup calls since the movie "The computer who wore tennis shoes" came out, or maybe even before. Taking the easy and lazy way out is seen as better than waking up and doing something sensible.
Here's a link from a bunch selling residential sized ones, haven't read much of it but it looks like what I'm writing about. Wikipedia has a long article on solar air-conditioning and may have stuff about those industrial sized ones in the many types described. http://www.icesolair.com/the-b...
I have to admit I'm a bit astonished at your reaction and one of an earlier poster since I thought the principle would be obvious to anyone with a rough idea of how a fridge works. I suppose it's because I've been aware of things like kerosene powered fridges for many years and can't get why people think you need electricity to cool things.
To sum up, with a temperature difference and a working fluid you can cool stuff down without having to connect up electricity. In a kerosene fridge the heat input is a flame and the compressor is a tank of water. With solar you use concentrated sunlight as the heat and cold water or another heatsink as the compressor. It's the sort of stuff that used to be covered in high school science. Maybe it still is. Surely at least they tell the kids how a fridge works before they let them loose in a technological society.
I think that's exactly what is going to happen as batteries fall in price and utility charges rise. I've already seen it viable in 1999 at a farm where the connection fee would have been very large to get on the grid, and now it's getting close to the point where it's going to be a better deal even in suburbia.
It's not going to happen, they'll be a "house always wins" situation where the consumers pay top dollar to consume at peak times but get a flat amount for generating. We're not going to see real capitalism at work because that would endanger government protected electricity monopolies that are paying into revenue and campaign donations. Even a politician who is completely honest is going to be swayed by the revenue paid to get monopoly rights.
They've got some of those in Antarctica. For nearly half the year they work at night. There's still a bit of a bug where they don't work at all in winter. It's really strange seeing photos of solar panels mounted vertically. It's also a nice thing to remember when someone says they are too far from the equator to be able to use solar. If the alternative is trucking in vast amounts of fuel for long distances then it works well enough in summer anywhere on the planet.
Take a look at load fluctuation during a day. Those five hours in the middle are a long way above base load so slicing that off saves a shitload of coal and maybe even means one or two less boilers running for most of the year. There's two 500MW units that have been mothballed near me due to that, which is not a bad thing since firing up things like that for only daytime use puts a lot of strain on them and reduces their life a lot more than running constantly. However that's in a place where it never snows and you can even get badly sunburnt outside of your five hours.
Consider the farm windmills that have been in a lot of places for the last century. They pump when there is wind. When there is no wind it doesn't matter so much because they have filled up a water tank, and the tank is large enough that there's going to be more wind some time before it runs dry. With a solar driven pump you'd do the same - aim for decent output and it fills the tank when it can.
Or utility charges have to go up by 1/3 or more due to utilities abusing their monopoly status and price gouging. It can see that happening in a few places within a very short span of years.
An extreme example of that is at Dome A in Antarctica. Instead of carefully angling to catch the sun the panels were tied to vertical poles, which is close to the perfect alignment way down there.
Six posts to get you to pay attention to content instead of a keyword - so yes, thank you for your "we all learn" which after I've spent a few days calming down I see as honestly intended in ignorance of how it looks and not an insult. I'm learning that I'm overestimating the attention people pay to posts they read before they reply.
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With respect (but not much of it), real engineers on non-IT projects have to cope with such situations, so why shouldn't IT people who call themselves engineers expect a free ride?
That's an annoying tactic. I worked on a plant shutdown where my manager exploited the situation where so much had been outsourced that there were not enough people to keep track of contractors. We'd sit waiting around drinking cups of tea from 7am to 5pm when the safety inspectors went home and then do some real work (frequently being told to go slow) until 2am, coming back at 7am for a bit over a month (was supposed to be a nine day shutdown). He was charging the client for overtime rates and paying a fairly low flat rate to his staff. Incredibly frustrating since most of us wanted to get the work done and get out of there and had some real work we could have been doing. It's a bit of a worry sitting high on scaffolding with a machine that involves electricity plus picric acid on your lap and going into microsleeps, especially when the things you are checking for damage will let out vast amounts of ammonia or hydrogen when they fail so it's not just your own safety at risk.
Of course that guy eventually had to bring people in from other cities once he's turned over a lot of employees and word had got around. I thought it weird that one of the first things he did after he employed me was to pull a knife out of his boot and show it to me, saying it was for protection, an odd thing for an engineer to do - made sense after a bit.
A lot of "red tape" exists due to thieves like that.
You are playing that cardboard cutout character again. How about displaying some evidence of thinking about the issue instead of playing this silly game. All coders can set their own hours? You are not that stupid. Please stop acting that way.
Spot on.
If you don't get to set your own hours then your time shouldn't be free when a project gets out of control and needs more effort.
The other way around rewards poor management skills.
You are looking at it the wrong way if it seems weird. A temperature difference is being used to do work, and the refridgeration cycle is a way of doing that even though it doesn't appear obvious that such a thing is happening. If your high school texts dealt with it poorly instead of going from simple to complex then the introductory chapters of an engineering thermodynamics textbook may be worth a look.
It's being done that way in Glasgow but in that case they have vast quantities of flooded mine tunnels under almost the entire city with water constantly at 12C. It's listed on page 6 of this PDF (http://www.sust.org/pdf/glenalmond.pdf). No real detail but there's probably other stuff about it or similar elsewhere.
A lot of places do it very, very wrong. Amazing how scanned HR paperwork can expand to fill a larger amount of data than highly detailed geological survey data of very large areas.
"If I work all day on the blue sky mine they'll be food on the table tonight."
Much worse places than Sony even if it sounds like a bad choice.
Funny how someone shouting "moron" forgot that there are a lot of commonly used container formats out there which can contain the subtitle data in addition to the sound and video.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats
Column 7 is what you want to look at.
How about putting in a perfectly innocent looking CDROM and infecting the machine with a rootkit? There may even be some lying around on the Sony premises
Don't bother. The above poster has grouped everything outside the place he cares about as "here be dragons" and bundled it all together. He probably says the same about Canada. Or Utah.
Maybe somebody sold it to Kim?
There's been plenty of wakeup calls since the movie "The computer who wore tennis shoes" came out, or maybe even before. Taking the easy and lazy way out is seen as better than waking up and doing something sensible.
Here's a link from a bunch selling residential sized ones, haven't read much of it but it looks like what I'm writing about. Wikipedia has a long article on solar air-conditioning and may have stuff about those industrial sized ones in the many types described.
http://www.icesolair.com/the-b...
I have to admit I'm a bit astonished at your reaction and one of an earlier poster since I thought the principle would be obvious to anyone with a rough idea of how a fridge works. I suppose it's because I've been aware of things like kerosene powered fridges for many years and can't get why people think you need electricity to cool things.
To sum up, with a temperature difference and a working fluid you can cool stuff down without having to connect up electricity. In a kerosene fridge the heat input is a flame and the compressor is a tank of water. With solar you use concentrated sunlight as the heat and cold water or another heatsink as the compressor.
It's the sort of stuff that used to be covered in high school science. Maybe it still is. Surely at least they tell the kids how a fridge works before they let them loose in a technological society.
I think that's exactly what is going to happen as batteries fall in price and utility charges rise. I've already seen it viable in 1999 at a farm where the connection fee would have been very large to get on the grid, and now it's getting close to the point where it's going to be a better deal even in suburbia.
It's not going to happen, they'll be a "house always wins" situation where the consumers pay top dollar to consume at peak times but get a flat amount for generating. We're not going to see real capitalism at work because that would endanger government protected electricity monopolies that are paying into revenue and campaign donations. Even a politician who is completely honest is going to be swayed by the revenue paid to get monopoly rights.
They've got some of those in Antarctica. For nearly half the year they work at night. There's still a bit of a bug where they don't work at all in winter.
It's really strange seeing photos of solar panels mounted vertically. It's also a nice thing to remember when someone says they are too far from the equator to be able to use solar. If the alternative is trucking in vast amounts of fuel for long distances then it works well enough in summer anywhere on the planet.
Take a look at load fluctuation during a day. Those five hours in the middle are a long way above base load so slicing that off saves a shitload of coal and maybe even means one or two less boilers running for most of the year. There's two 500MW units that have been mothballed near me due to that, which is not a bad thing since firing up things like that for only daytime use puts a lot of strain on them and reduces their life a lot more than running constantly. However that's in a place where it never snows and you can even get badly sunburnt outside of your five hours.
Yes but the money is going into other people's pockets! The dread spirit of Capitalism is threatening their local monopolies!
Yes the really expensive photovoltaics get used behind concentrators.
Which is another waste. Solar thermal is already in use for industrial scale air conditioning and avoids a very lossy step.
A "left" that includes Hitler, Mussolini, Franco etc puts your midpoint in an interesting place.
Consider the farm windmills that have been in a lot of places for the last century. They pump when there is wind. When there is no wind it doesn't matter so much because they have filled up a water tank, and the tank is large enough that there's going to be more wind some time before it runs dry.
With a solar driven pump you'd do the same - aim for decent output and it fills the tank when it can.
Or utility charges have to go up by 1/3 or more due to utilities abusing their monopoly status and price gouging. It can see that happening in a few places within a very short span of years.
An extreme example of that is at Dome A in Antarctica. Instead of carefully angling to catch the sun the panels were tied to vertical poles, which is close to the perfect alignment way down there.
Six posts to get you to pay attention to content instead of a keyword - so yes, thank you for your "we all learn" which after I've spent a few days calming down I see as honestly intended in ignorance of how it looks and not an insult. I'm learning that I'm overestimating the attention people pay to posts they read before they reply.