My wife used to leave the TV on as background noise too. So far I've managed to convince her that she doesn't need the video, just the audio, which is much less objectionable, and much less brain-damaging for my one-year-old daughter.
is that AC wall wart for a Shure wireless mic or something?
No, nothing that fancy, it's just for my DSL modem - a basic SpeedStream 5360. I guess the modem might need AC power for its telephone line interface circuitry, or something.
why does my machine room contain about fifteen wall warts, all producing slightly different DC voltages
This is a very good question. I recently analyzed my collection of wall warts to see whether I could replace any of them with connections to my outboard ATX power supply, which is powering my audio mixer anyhow. One of the wall warts produce AC (!), and of the other 4, 3 of them produce very odd voltages: 18 V, 15.6V, and 9V. No luck there. But one did produce 5V (for my Netgear switch), so I replaced it with a cable terminated in an ATX connector. Presto - one less wall wart! The others would need a small array of DC-DC convertors/regulators, which I haven't assembled yet. A project for another day. Not counting the AC-producing wall wart... not sure what's up with that one.
Then there's the whole question of the UPS and the inefficient/redundant DC-AC-DC conversions between it and the computer power supplies... argh!
Avoids some serious grief at the end of the project when you find you completely missed out on the features that the purse holder wanted!
Yes, you have discovered the critical difference between the GoalDonor
and the GoldOwner.
I like your project execution template. I think if I were to get into contracting/consulting in a big way I would almost certainly want to use something very similar.
concept of politicians. Lets see, a group of people who desperately want lots of personal power.
I think Douglas Adams put it best:
The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: It is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
They are inadvertently (or purposefully) creating a situation where people are running 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and now 10.4...
Don't forget the folks running 10.0!
I got off the upgrade bandwagon at 10.2. I have seen various applications that run on 10.2 and 10.3 but not 10.1, so I think the 10.2 move was a good one, but I haven't found a lot of reasons for going to 10.3 for $129. If stuff starts coming out that I want to run and it no longer runs on 10.2, I might think about upgrading. But from the release notes I've seen, it looks like 10.2 and 10.3 are more or less identical from an API point of view, at least for the average application. (Applications don't seem to have separate binaries for the two OS versions.) So if this is the case, developers who support 10.3 will probably inadvertently be supporting 10.2 as well, and so I won't have to worry for a while yet.
Well, some of us cashed out at the right time, but then we wisely invested our ill-gotten gains in assets of lasting value, like real estate - not names in a novel!
Okay, so I bought a few toys too - what the heck. (*cough* home theater equipment *cough*) But I don't think a name in a novel is going to make the list no matter what.
It is here in Hicksville, Ontario, Canada - er, I mean, Ottawa, a.k.a. Silicon Valley North, a.k.a. the Nation's Capital:
Hydro Ottawa: Hello, how can we help you?
Me: Hi, do you support net metering or have any plans to support it in the near future?
Hydro Ottawa: Er, uh, duh, net who?
And while we're on the subject: why is it called "Hydro Ottawa"? Why do people think that "hydro" = electricity? "Hydro" means water! I expect a "hydro" company to supply my faucets, not my electrical outlets!
In effect, this institutes a kind of "information segregation" or isolationism that has the effect of a barrier to poorer nations - such as Nigeria or Rwanda - to the internet commerce that is so critical to the economy of the future.
Barriers to Nigerian internet commerce, you say? Let's see...
Spam wealthy North Americans.
Collect cash from gullible greedy victims.
Profit!
Nope, don't see any problems related to expensive SSL certificates there at all. There isn't even a ??? step. It seems that Nigerian internet commerce, rather than suffering from "information segregation", is alive and well, and indeed thriving.
I think if these "poorer nations" you speak of want to participate in the "internet economy" that we use in North America, Europe, and Japan, they will first have to deal with some more serious issues than cheap and trustworthy certificate authorities.
The fact that most climate forcing is due to CO2 from fossil fuels burned in the last 50 years does not refute the article's hypothesis that human activity caused climate change over the past 8,000 years. Just because humans might have caused gradual climate change over the past 8 millennia doesn't mean that recent activities might not cause much greater and more rapid changes.
Granted. It appears that I interpreted "anthropogenic climate forcing" a bit too broadly, and as you say, recent industrial contributions to atmospheric CO2 concentrations are around 5x what the contribution of early farming was. But the point I was trying to make was, the effect of that farming over the past 8,000 years has resulted in a mean temperature increase of roughly 0.8 degrees C compared to the increase (to date) caused by industrial fossil fuel burning of 0.6 degrees C. I mistakenly interpreted "mean temperature change" as part of "anthropogenic climate forcing", but as you say the temperature change is a result of the forcing, not part of it.
Anyhow, certainly we are going to be in for "interesting times", as Terry Pratchett likes to say, as a result of the 25% increase in atmospheric CO2. (Actually it looks to me more like 50% - from around 280 ppm to nearly 380! This last number is from the Mauna Loa CO2 charts.)
By imminent decline in the production of fossil fuels, I am referring to the peak of oil and natural gas production scheduled to occur imminently, followed by a long decline. This represents a peril due to the fact that our industrial civilization depends almost exclusively on the ready availability of cheap oil and gas, entirely apart from what these fuels are doing to the climate we live in. The production of coal will not decline soon, but most of us don't use coal for transportation or heating, and switching from oil and gas for these uses to coal is not likely to constitute an improvement in any measurable sense.
A significant majority of anthropogenic climate forcing is due to CO2 produced directly by burning fossil fuels.
Actually there's an
article
in Scientific American this month, which refutes this claim using analysis of long-term climate data. (Full article text requires subscription, etc.)
The gist of the article was that when humans started agriculture 8,000 years ago, the resulting changes in planetary conditions (deforestation, increased population of humans and cultivated livestock, etc.) actually contributed a greater increase in global temperatures than everything that has been contributed by fossil fuel production in the last 150 years. Even more interesting, without these 8,000 years of climate forcing, we would probably be well on our way to the planet's next natural ice age by now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that burning off the planet's store of fossil fuels as fast as we can is a good idea! Or even that we are in any less climatic peril in this interpretation than we would be any other way, not to mention the peril we face from an imminent decline in production of those fossil fuels...
The U.S.A. peaked its oil production in the 70's - 40 years after discovery peaked there in the 30's. Globally, discovery peaked in the 60's and therefore global production is set to peak (you guessed it) 40 years later, in the early 2000's.
What about the evidence that suggests that oil may be produced abiotically at deep pressures from common elements found in the crust ?
If this process is occurring, it is a trickle at best. It will not affect global oil production in a measurable fashion.
What about the fact that all our oil numbers come from people in the oil industry - who have a vested interest in keeping their prices at a premium?
You can certainly hope that the possibility of declining oil production is an industry PR measure just to keep prices up. Only time will tell - the next few years, in fact. Of course when U.S. production peaked in 1971, many people didn't believe it could be a peak - that didn't become apparent until a few years later, after production had begun to decline. It's been declining in that country ever since.
Note that OPEC countries do indeed have strong financial incentives to overstate their reserves, and this has almost certainly been happening in the last few years as their reserve numbers have suddenly jumped without any corresponding increase in discovery or production. However this does not mean that there is, in fact, lots more oil to be had.
Not only will the oil not last forever, but the evidence seems to indicate that we are reaching the peak of the global production bell curve now. This means that there will be less and less of it available as the years pass. The consequence of having the supply not meet the demand will likely cause widespread wars and collapse all by itself, which may or may not occur in time to save the planet's climate.
Spend your children's inheritance, so long as you had fun in your Hummer, right?
Well, I have to wonder what our children's inheritance actually is. Once we started down the oil road, given human nature, there was really only one possible outcome - population overshoot and collapse. For 150 years we have been living on borrowed time... our children not only don't have an inheritance any longer, but they never had one to begin with.
Specific impulse has always been a bit fuzzy to me too, and I do have some physics background. But I always think of VASIMR whenever someone mentions specific impulse. That's gotta be just about the coolest engine ever.
I wasn't seriously suggesting that a coal-powered aircraft was feasible (hence my comment that it is left as an exercise to the reader), nor that coal is a particularly good fuel source.
I do think that nuclear is the way to go, since it (and coal) are the only two sources of plentiful energy available to us that are of higher density than solar in any of its forms. I'd love to see a nuclear powered farm tractor or a nuclear generator for my house's electrical needs. I just hope we figure out how to build, operate, and decommission these safely (and affordably) while there's still time. A nuclear powered aircraft? Should be feasible, if we can build nuclear powered ships...
It's absurd to think that people will just not be able to figure out how to come up with an alternative fuel source. It's easy for me to imagine a jet engine that runs on biodiesel, retrofitted to the current jumbo airframes.
Sure, it's easy to imagine that, but have you thought about the energy involved? Remember that biodiesel is just a way to convert solar energy to hydrocarbons in roughly real-time. The only way we can cough up enough energy to put a jumbo jet in the sky today is by pumping pre-concentrated hydrocarbons out of the ground. It took millions of years to put it there, but we can pump it out in minutes. We can't get energy from biodiesel at that rate, because it's not growing at that rate.
For instance, it takes about 1 acre to grow enough soybeans to generate 48 gallons of biodiesel - per year. This means to get 1 jumbo jet across the Pacific, just once in a year, you would need to dedicate 88000/48 = 1800 acres of farmland.
Currently all of that farmland is almost certainly being used to grow food - so somebody is going to go hungry while you are taking that jet across the ocean. Not only that, but as oil and natural gas become scarce and expensive, the food yield of existing farmland will be going down already - quite dramatically. The last thing anybody is going to want to do in those circumstances is convert perfectly good farmland into jet fuel.
Some people are thinking about generating biodiesel using algae, and that sounds very neat, but I am equally skeptical about scaling that up. It would require water farms instead of land farms, but fresh water is almost as much of a problem today as oil is, and saltwater algae farms have not to my knowledge been deployed on a large scale. I'll believe that when I see it.
You say that it is absurd to think that people will just not be able to figure out how to come up with an alternative fuel source, but the fact is that there is nothing on this planet that even comes close to rivaling the energy profit ratio of oil. And there is nothing that technological inventions can do to change that - it is a limitation of physics, not technology. Nuclear power might almost do it, but that has its own raft of problems, not least of which is dumping the waste in someone else's back yard. Coal is the only other imaginable alternative - like oil, it represents pre-concentrated solar energy on a vast scale. Building a coal-powered jetliner is left as an exercise for the reader, however.
It looks like fossil-fuel-powered air travel is going to go the way of the dodo, just like fossil-fuel-powered land travel. Bicycling and walking look quite viable though. Sailing too. And I think it would be a hoot to see a flock of Gossamer Albatrosses!
the big question of who will adapt better to a world without oil
This would be my main question - what are they going to fuel these giant planes with in 20 years? Or 10 years? Or even 5 years? Already, fuel prices are causing airlines headaches, and most airlines are operating in the red as it is.
I suspect the future of flight might look more like this than this.
In reality, The economy grows steadily at 2-3%. This is reasonable and sustainable
More accurately, the economy has grown at 2-3%. It can only continue to do this as long as energy is available to fuel it. What is going to happen when the energy supply (petrochemicals) starts to decline at 2-3% per year, instead of grow? This change in energy availability, unfortunately, is going to start very very soon, if it hasn't already. It will completely overshadow any potential I.T. boom, and most other economic sectors as well.
The US style of writing dates (and I live in the US) drive me completely batty.
I don't live there any more, but I was born there, and the dates aren't the only thing that drive me batty. How about that oh-so-intuitive measurement system which is just slightly different from that other oh-so-intuitive Imperial measurement system?
U.S. and Imperial measurements - OLD and BUSTED.
Metric measurements - NEW and COOL.
My biggest PITA design flaw in software (just so I'm not completely offtopic) is the inability to remember previous user input, such as the directory you picked the last time you hit "File -> Open". I don't care when the last time was, just remember the directory I was in, dammit! This falls under the general principle of "Make the user's life easier and simpler", and yes, I did send it in to TOG.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife used to leave the TV on as background noise too. So far I've managed to convince her that she doesn't need the video, just the audio, which is much less objectionable, and much less brain-damaging for my one-year-old daughter.
No, nothing that fancy, it's just for my DSL modem - a basic SpeedStream 5360. I guess the modem might need AC power for its telephone line interface circuitry, or something.
This is a very good question. I recently analyzed my collection of wall warts to see whether I could replace any of them with connections to my outboard ATX power supply, which is powering my audio mixer anyhow. One of the wall warts produce AC (!), and of the other 4, 3 of them produce very odd voltages: 18 V, 15.6V, and 9V. No luck there. But one did produce 5V (for my Netgear switch), so I replaced it with a cable terminated in an ATX connector. Presto - one less wall wart! The others would need a small array of DC-DC convertors/regulators, which I haven't assembled yet. A project for another day. Not counting the AC-producing wall wart... not sure what's up with that one.
Then there's the whole question of the UPS and the inefficient/redundant DC-AC-DC conversions between it and the computer power supplies... argh!
Yes, you have discovered the critical difference between the GoalDonor and the GoldOwner.
I like your project execution template. I think if I were to get into contracting/consulting in a big way I would almost certainly want to use something very similar.
I think Douglas Adams put it best:
The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: It is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Don't forget the folks running 10.0!
I got off the upgrade bandwagon at 10.2. I have seen various applications that run on 10.2 and 10.3 but not 10.1, so I think the 10.2 move was a good one, but I haven't found a lot of reasons for going to 10.3 for $129. If stuff starts coming out that I want to run and it no longer runs on 10.2, I might think about upgrading. But from the release notes I've seen, it looks like 10.2 and 10.3 are more or less identical from an API point of view, at least for the average application. (Applications don't seem to have separate binaries for the two OS versions.) So if this is the case, developers who support 10.3 will probably inadvertently be supporting 10.2 as well, and so I won't have to worry for a while yet.
Okay, so I bought a few toys too - what the heck. (*cough* home theater equipment *cough*) But I don't think a name in a novel is going to make the list no matter what.
It is here in Hicksville, Ontario, Canada - er, I mean, Ottawa, a.k.a. Silicon Valley North, a.k.a. the Nation's Capital:
Hydro Ottawa: Hello, how can we help you?
Me: Hi, do you support net metering or have any plans to support it in the near future?
Hydro Ottawa: Er, uh, duh, net who?
And while we're on the subject: why is it called "Hydro Ottawa"? Why do people think that "hydro" = electricity? "Hydro" means water! I expect a "hydro" company to supply my faucets, not my electrical outlets!
Barriers to Nigerian internet commerce, you say? Let's see...
Nope, don't see any problems related to expensive SSL certificates there at all. There isn't even a ??? step. It seems that Nigerian internet commerce, rather than suffering from "information segregation", is alive and well, and indeed thriving.
I think if these "poorer nations" you speak of want to participate in the "internet economy" that we use in North America, Europe, and Japan, they will first have to deal with some more serious issues than cheap and trustworthy certificate authorities.
Granted. It appears that I interpreted "anthropogenic climate forcing" a bit too broadly, and as you say, recent industrial contributions to atmospheric CO2 concentrations are around 5x what the contribution of early farming was. But the point I was trying to make was, the effect of that farming over the past 8,000 years has resulted in a mean temperature increase of roughly 0.8 degrees C compared to the increase (to date) caused by industrial fossil fuel burning of 0.6 degrees C. I mistakenly interpreted "mean temperature change" as part of "anthropogenic climate forcing", but as you say the temperature change is a result of the forcing, not part of it.
Anyhow, certainly we are going to be in for "interesting times", as Terry Pratchett likes to say, as a result of the 25% increase in atmospheric CO2. (Actually it looks to me more like 50% - from around 280 ppm to nearly 380! This last number is from the Mauna Loa CO2 charts.)
By imminent decline in the production of fossil fuels, I am referring to the peak of oil and natural gas production scheduled to occur imminently, followed by a long decline. This represents a peril due to the fact that our industrial civilization depends almost exclusively on the ready availability of cheap oil and gas, entirely apart from what these fuels are doing to the climate we live in. The production of coal will not decline soon, but most of us don't use coal for transportation or heating, and switching from oil and gas for these uses to coal is not likely to constitute an improvement in any measurable sense.
Actually there's an article in Scientific American this month, which refutes this claim using analysis of long-term climate data. (Full article text requires subscription, etc.)
The gist of the article was that when humans started agriculture 8,000 years ago, the resulting changes in planetary conditions (deforestation, increased population of humans and cultivated livestock, etc.) actually contributed a greater increase in global temperatures than everything that has been contributed by fossil fuel production in the last 150 years. Even more interesting, without these 8,000 years of climate forcing, we would probably be well on our way to the planet's next natural ice age by now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that burning off the planet's store of fossil fuels as fast as we can is a good idea! Or even that we are in any less climatic peril in this interpretation than we would be any other way, not to mention the peril we face from an imminent decline in production of those fossil fuels...
Some vendors use FUD, others use good ol' guilt...
I inherited this from my grandfather the machinist. People always ask me what I would need a milling machine for, but they've never seen my case mods.
The U.S.A. peaked its oil production in the 70's - 40 years after discovery peaked there in the 30's. Globally, discovery peaked in the 60's and therefore global production is set to peak (you guessed it) 40 years later, in the early 2000's.
What about the evidence that suggests that oil may be produced abiotically at deep pressures from common elements found in the crust ?
If this process is occurring, it is a trickle at best. It will not affect global oil production in a measurable fashion.
What about the fact that all our oil numbers come from people in the oil industry - who have a vested interest in keeping their prices at a premium?
You can certainly hope that the possibility of declining oil production is an industry PR measure just to keep prices up. Only time will tell - the next few years, in fact. Of course when U.S. production peaked in 1971, many people didn't believe it could be a peak - that didn't become apparent until a few years later, after production had begun to decline. It's been declining in that country ever since.
Note that OPEC countries do indeed have strong financial incentives to overstate their reserves, and this has almost certainly been happening in the last few years as their reserve numbers have suddenly jumped without any corresponding increase in discovery or production. However this does not mean that there is, in fact, lots more oil to be had.
Not only will the oil not last forever, but the evidence seems to indicate that we are reaching the peak of the global production bell curve now. This means that there will be less and less of it available as the years pass. The consequence of having the supply not meet the demand will likely cause widespread wars and collapse all by itself, which may or may not occur in time to save the planet's climate.
Spend your children's inheritance, so long as you had fun in your Hummer, right?
Well, I have to wonder what our children's inheritance actually is. Once we started down the oil road, given human nature, there was really only one possible outcome - population overshoot and collapse. For 150 years we have been living on borrowed time... our children not only don't have an inheritance any longer, but they never had one to begin with.
Specific impulse has always been a bit fuzzy to me too, and I do have some physics background. But I always think of VASIMR whenever someone mentions specific impulse. That's gotta be just about the coolest engine ever.
I do think that nuclear is the way to go, since it (and coal) are the only two sources of plentiful energy available to us that are of higher density than solar in any of its forms. I'd love to see a nuclear powered farm tractor or a nuclear generator for my house's electrical needs. I just hope we figure out how to build, operate, and decommission these safely (and affordably) while there's still time. A nuclear powered aircraft? Should be feasible, if we can build nuclear powered ships...
Sure, it's easy to imagine that, but have you thought about the energy involved? Remember that biodiesel is just a way to convert solar energy to hydrocarbons in roughly real-time. The only way we can cough up enough energy to put a jumbo jet in the sky today is by pumping pre-concentrated hydrocarbons out of the ground. It took millions of years to put it there, but we can pump it out in minutes. We can't get energy from biodiesel at that rate, because it's not growing at that rate.
For instance, it takes about 1 acre to grow enough soybeans to generate 48 gallons of biodiesel - per year. This means to get 1 jumbo jet across the Pacific, just once in a year, you would need to dedicate 88000/48 = 1800 acres of farmland.
Currently all of that farmland is almost certainly being used to grow food - so somebody is going to go hungry while you are taking that jet across the ocean. Not only that, but as oil and natural gas become scarce and expensive, the food yield of existing farmland will be going down already - quite dramatically. The last thing anybody is going to want to do in those circumstances is convert perfectly good farmland into jet fuel.
Some people are thinking about generating biodiesel using algae, and that sounds very neat, but I am equally skeptical about scaling that up. It would require water farms instead of land farms, but fresh water is almost as much of a problem today as oil is, and saltwater algae farms have not to my knowledge been deployed on a large scale. I'll believe that when I see it.
You say that it is absurd to think that people will just not be able to figure out how to come up with an alternative fuel source, but the fact is that there is nothing on this planet that even comes close to rivaling the energy profit ratio of oil. And there is nothing that technological inventions can do to change that - it is a limitation of physics, not technology. Nuclear power might almost do it, but that has its own raft of problems, not least of which is dumping the waste in someone else's back yard. Coal is the only other imaginable alternative - like oil, it represents pre-concentrated solar energy on a vast scale. Building a coal-powered jetliner is left as an exercise for the reader, however.
It looks like fossil-fuel-powered air travel is going to go the way of the dodo, just like fossil-fuel-powered land travel. Bicycling and walking look quite viable though. Sailing too. And I think it would be a hoot to see a flock of Gossamer Albatrosses!
This would be my main question - what are they going to fuel these giant planes with in 20 years? Or 10 years? Or even 5 years? Already, fuel prices are causing airlines headaches, and most airlines are operating in the red as it is.
I suspect the future of flight might look more like this than this.
More accurately, the economy has grown at 2-3%. It can only continue to do this as long as energy is available to fuel it. What is going to happen when the energy supply (petrochemicals) starts to decline at 2-3% per year, instead of grow? This change in energy availability, unfortunately, is going to start very very soon, if it hasn't already. It will completely overshadow any potential I.T. boom, and most other economic sectors as well.
The number would be a lot less mysterious if they spelled it correctly: 1337
A, chishnato?
I think you forgot: "...you insensitive clod!"
I don't live there any more, but I was born there, and the dates aren't the only thing that drive me batty. How about that oh-so-intuitive measurement system which is just slightly different from that other oh-so-intuitive Imperial measurement system?
U.S. and Imperial measurements - OLD and BUSTED.
Metric measurements - NEW and COOL.
My biggest PITA design flaw in software (just so I'm not completely offtopic) is the inability to remember previous user input, such as the directory you picked the last time you hit "File -> Open". I don't care when the last time was, just remember the directory I was in, dammit! This falls under the general principle of "Make the user's life easier and simpler", and yes, I did send it in to TOG.