Do I get more energy out of ethanol than it takes to produce it?
The question is actually a little more complex than that and there are really two issues at play here.
Point one, it raises my hackles when someone raises conservation of energy as a reason why some alternative energy solution will not work. It completely misses the point that there is GOBS of energy just sitting around, that ain't the problem, the problem is that the vast bulk of it is busy holding atoms together and isn't easily convertable into mechnical work.
The trick is we take sources of energy that are available but transitory and convert them into formats that are stable, storable, portable, reasonably safe and easily convertable to mechanical work. Solar energy is one such example, it's much more potentially useful if we can catch it and store it, whether thats by using photovoltaics to charge a battery or using photosynthesis to (eventually) produce ethanol.
If I put x units of difficult to use energy in to a process and get.7x units of stored usable energy out that in itself is maybe not so bad.
Which brings me to the second point, which is to point out some issues with people who extrapolate from Dr. Pimentel's analysis to label all ethanol based solutions as doomed. As presented I don't dispute any of his facts or his conclusion, Ethanol made from subsidized corn using fossil fuel dependent farming methods and natural gas to fuel the distillation process is not a good idea, all it does it convert the energy from one useful form to another with a lot of loss along the way.
Where I disagree is that that does not necessarly lead to the conclusion that ethanol is, in and of itself, a poor energy solution. In point of fact as a motor fuel it has some advantages over gasoline not the least of which being that it produces less CO2. What needs to be done is to find more sensible energy inputs to produce the stuff than what is currently used.
Perfect illustration of this is the technology, discussed on/. recently, of using agricultural waste (corn stalks, straw etc.) to produce cellulose ethanol. If you rerun the numbers on this, even using natural gas to fuel the distallation, you tip the balance. It's reasonable to assume in this case that the energy inputs in fertilizer production and tractor fuel go to the food that is produced not the waste product we are leveraging so our added energy cost is only what it costs to gather the waste and truck it to the plant. At that point the fossil energy balance is already favourable, one gets more stored energy in ethanol out of the process than one put fossil fuels in, the difference being supplied by the photosynthesis that produced the stuff we're coverting to fuel. Keep the logic flowing, power the distillation off something other than natural gas and it gets even better...
Now that said the energy density of the source materials is such that it will never come close to completely erasing our dependency on fermented dinosaur poop but it has the potential to make a decent dent in the problem.
Uhmm...
Them rats is just trying to improve their public image. IIRC it was a shipment of Gambian rats that brought Monkeypox to the US (and thence to Richardson's ground squirrels aka prairie dogs and thence to humans).
And if density really matters and you're running Linux then you go with IBM JS20 blades. If I'm reading the specs right you can get 14 2Way 1.6Ghz 970 blades in 7U (twice the density of Xserve, similar list price for the blades themselves but one must still buy the Bladecenter chassis so the IBM solution would be a little more expensive).
Had to decide to reply to this or mod it down, decided to reply.
That's a wildly inaccurate summary of the landscape of RDBMS clustering technology.
Problem is, that's not what we are talking about here.
So the answer to your question at this end is almost certainly "none of the above" or probably more correctly "some bits of all of the above". Functionally most of the kind of stuff you do here doesn't need shared concurrent access to the same data files however for simplicity of implementation they probably nevertheless run GPFS so that all nodes can see all files.
Asked the missus (who works in the field of contest and advertising law but is not a lawyer) and she basically agrees with you. You can offer a contest to members only as long as that contest is not an incentive to join.
Stuff they apparantly learned to do from looking at Alpha but then the Digital/Intel co-development plans went south and all of a sudden Intel figured out how to make faster Pentiums. Digital did sue, and settle much later.
Speaking of Digital, I still think Ken Olsen is the true father of the PPC, some folks at Apple knew Rich Weitek and wanted Alpha for the RISC Mac but Ken refused to deal with them as he didn't want to give any input on the chip design to outsiders driving Apple to PPC. About the same time Ken is rumoured to have responded to Ford's request to build a ruggedized Alpha variant for embedded automotive use that "we don't do embedded" and Ford also went PPC.
The judge in this case gets the answer right then absolutely blows it when required to show his work. If this decision is substantially based on that analogy then this won't survive appeal.
There are a number of substantive differences between P2P file sharing and a photocopier in a public library. Not the least of which being that the technology in the library case is such that it does not easily facilitiate the wholesale copying of entire works, when was the last time you saw someone at the library copying all of the pages of a book? Of course the more important fact is that many libraries do buy material at a higher than street price with an explicit license to redistribute granted as a result.
I'm passingly familiar with this bloke from his previous job at the competition bureau, he didn't get the real world there and obviously the big pay increase hasn't helped....
Uhm, is this legal? Since a purchase is required for entry, this ceases to be a promotional contest and becomes gambling, does AOL have a casino licence?
IBM continued to support OS/2 well after most other vendors would have completely canned it. The reality is that "it's about the application software" and there's only so much any OS vendor can do to incent people, especially commercial vendors, to support an OS for which they see a limited market. Linux already has more real world support in the software market, including from some true heavyweights like SAP, Oracle and of course IBM that OS/2 ever did.
Absolutely correct. A receipt that leaves the polling station is a demonstrably bad thing as it enables vote buying.
A printed receipt with no identifing data that is required to be depositied in a ballot box and thus provides a paper trail in case of recounts is a nice idea, however no printer is 100% reliable and I've yet to have someone give a credible answer to the question "what happens if the printer malfunctions and I don't get my slip?".
You still can't beat "take a piece paper and pen, make an X, stick it in this box" for reliability. That said I've scrutineered a couple of elections and yes, people still manage to mess this up.
"fair use" in IP terms has a specific meaning (in point of fact "fair use" is the US term, the wording in the Canadian legislation is actually "fair dealing" but they mean the same thing).
The idea is that copyrights should not interfere with certain activities beneficial to the public (education and news reporting for example) so "fair use" provides certain exceptions to copyright protections if the copying/performance is done for these purposes (education, critism, news reporting, or to translate to a useable format for disabled users). In most cases the exception only covers "reasonable excerpts" of the copyrighted work.
While you may think making a mixed tape is a fair thing to do with the recordings you have bought it is NOT legal "fair use", technically what you bought is a license to play a recording for your personal use, period, with the introduction of the levies (which IIRC have been around a fairly long time on audio cassettes) that licenses is extended to the right to make as many copies as you want as long as they are still for your personal use.
The Candian media levy is possibly the most widely misunderstood concept in a long time. At least from the way people talk about it.
The idea is that the blank media "tax" legalizes making multiple copies of recordings you have legally licensed. Before the tax, you got what you bought with very limited right to copy (basically nothing outside of fair use) so mixed tapes for example, where technically illegal, as was making MP3 rips for a portable player, now they aren't.
Not that the law was in any way enforcable but that's the idea. In fact that's the point, because the law was unenforcable and yet the recording industry was claiming losses due to rampant illegal copying this was therefore a way to make the common practise legal and recover the damages (not that I believe that the recording industry was actually suffering the losses they claim, but if you buy their claims then it does make logical sense).
The levy is not intended to pay for anyone to download/copy stuff for which they have not obtained a legal license. You've been paying for the right to make mixed CD's and use a portable MP3 player, not to download and more particularily upload with impunity.
There are some interesting ways that this does not appear to be like Gates and MS. In that case Bill and company spent a looong time postitioning Uncle Fester for a promotion, sticking him in front of the wall street types etc. by the time the change was formally announced it was pretty ho-hum because it was so thoroughly foreshadowed. This seems to have come out of the blue which 99 times out of 100 means something is afoot likely a major shareholder is angry about something and this is the first not so gentle poke out onto the plank for Mikey. If looking for a parallel I'd be more inclined to think Ken Olsen than Bill Gates. If this was just about job splitting to improve the appearance of governance this would have been foreshadowed more.
Not the same thing. In point of fact Sun has had roughly equivilant hard partitions through domains for years as well, before HP.
This is quite similar to vPar's in HP/UX (forgive me but I stopped paying attention to HP's ugly stepchildren Alpha & Tru64 a long time ago, it's too bad 'cause it was a great chip but its moribund, you would be wise to do the same pretty soon).
Hard partitions, like Sun Domains, HP's nPARs and IBM's LPARs slice up a physical machine and run an OS image on each slice. As far as I can tell here there is still just one OS image but applications running in these Zones can be isolated from each other. A malicous root user in the global zone is still able to make mischief in the zones if they want to.
The nice thing here unlike on HP is that you can slice up a uniprocessor machine if you have many tiny workloads that need to be isolated. IBM will too be able to do this soon with the next crank of their LPAR technology but a better implmentation with no issues with a global root user.
Well it's too early to say how Itanium will really behave in large SMP configs so far in the application benchmarks I've seen scaling beyond 4 way is non-impressive, better than Sparc (but that's not saying much) but way behind POWER and Alpha but this has been vendors like NEC, Fujitsu and Bull, running Windows, HP has not yet benchmarked an Itanium Superdome running HP/UX in this space which I expect will be better (still lagging POWER, but better).
HP has convinced Oracle to support the same binary formats on Itanium and PA-RISC (at least with 9i) so a huge percentage of the HP/UX install base has a much eased migration to Itanium. Not so Alpha, the users of which are, at least the ones I talk to, just plain pissed with HP (but then again they would have to be to be talking to me, as a rule).
Nice idea but somewhat impractical with the possible exception of the storm drain application, in a contained area you have to repeat the treatment at least weekly (and more often would be better) for at least 10 weeks before you break the breeding cycle.
Something more practical in west nile terms would be a small, timer driven one that could be put in a birdbath for a whole season. The wetland and canal dragged versions are just short of silly.
The real problem with west nile at least are breeds of mosquitos that tend to prefer urban settings and can (and do) breed in the water trapped in a discarded pop can so all this would do is naturally select for the bugs that tend to use more marginal water sources.
As much as one would like to one does not want to take these things completely out of the food chain, just keep them away from areas of human habitation.
There are easier solutions in many cases, our summer place abuts a swamp where we just couldn't get in there with this thing as it's so overgrown, Last year we used one of those CO2 exhaling traps (Mosquito Magnet brand) and it's amazing how well it works, for the first time in living memory we were able to sit outside at dusk without being eaten alive. Changing a propane tank every three weeks and emptying the bag of dead mosquitos (and no other bugs) sure beats slogging through a swamp in hip waders once or twice a week...
Can't believe nobody has mentioned the horroible mid-seventies Ford Mustang II. Truly an awful car at least the 4cyl (yes that's right an a woefully underpowered fourbanger with the Mustang name one it).
My mother drove not one but two Chevy Vega's (the first was totalled before she realized what a crap car it was), 1972 model was an undrivable oil burning rust heap by 1977.
I had an 1972 AMC Gremlin that I paid $250 dollars for in 1982, and while it was undeniably a rolling piece of poo it had basically no rust and had a 302 V8 engine that was actually possible to service myself. It had it's bad points no doubt but I don't think it really belongs on the worst list
Actually the MCM is a ceramic carrier with a thyroid condition that holds 4 chips, each chip has 2 CPUs. I think the ceramic carrier is 85mm x 85mm has somthing like 5100 "pins".
The unit that goes into the midrange and entry servers and the workstations is just the same chip on a more familiar looking ceramic chip carrier. There is no single CPU POWER4 chip, single CPU machines have a dual CPU chip, but the second CPU is disabled in microcode (and one suspects in most cases the disabled half of the chip did not pass QA).
And while I'll grant you there is a a price differential the cheapest of the entry servers (p615) it is not massively more expensive than a server class Xeon MP machine of similar power certainly not 1/8 of $150,000 per CPU.
You will not run a single Linux image on 32 processors on such a box for quite some time.
I can't off the top remember how many CPUs are supported in a single image, 4 or 8 but sure as heck not 32.
You can of course partition the machine and run multiple virtual machines but if you need to run something that will scale in a single SMP image but doesn't know from how to scale loosely coupled (certain DBMS workloads leap to mind) then your only choice at present is AIX.
Now given AIX's "Linux Affinity" you should be able to re-compile and run any well behaved Linux code but can't honestly say I know how true this is but that's the theory.
It looks like both of the contenders for the 64-bit x86 replacement (ia64 and x86-64, of course) are going to be very SMP capable
I wouldn't count on that, so far for the application benchmarks I've seen IA-64 SMP scaling above 8 way sucks wind. Not as bad as Sunfire/Starcat but not as good as IBM POWER or Alpha for that matter.
Nice idea in theory but unless they're prepared to wait for nearly ten years like HP did for Merced/Itanium then they would have to pick something already out there which leaves them with, uhh, Itanium and IBM. The first is an also ran strategy (which granted is better than thy're doing right now) and the second is just a proxy for shuttering the hardware side of the house anyway. Sun's hope as a hardware company lies in Fujitsu/Siemens who themselves are also keeping a foot in the Itanium camp.
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The question is actually a little more complex than that and there are really two issues at play here.
Point one, it raises my hackles when someone raises conservation of energy as a reason why some alternative energy solution will not work. It completely misses the point that there is GOBS of energy just sitting around, that ain't the problem, the problem is that the vast bulk of it is busy holding atoms together and isn't easily convertable into mechnical work.
The trick is we take sources of energy that are available but transitory and convert them into formats that are stable, storable, portable, reasonably safe and easily convertable to mechanical work. Solar energy is one such example, it's much more potentially useful if we can catch it and store it, whether thats by using photovoltaics to charge a battery or using photosynthesis to (eventually) produce ethanol.
If I put x units of difficult to use energy in to a process and get .7x units of stored usable energy out that in itself is maybe not so bad.
Which brings me to the second point, which is to point out some issues with people who extrapolate from Dr. Pimentel's analysis to label all ethanol based solutions as doomed. As presented I don't dispute any of his facts or his conclusion, Ethanol made from subsidized corn using fossil fuel dependent farming methods and natural gas to fuel the distillation process is not a good idea, all it does it convert the energy from one useful form to another with a lot of loss along the way.
Where I disagree is that that does not necessarly lead to the conclusion that ethanol is, in and of itself, a poor energy solution. In point of fact as a motor fuel it has some advantages over gasoline not the least of which being that it produces less CO2. What needs to be done is to find more sensible energy inputs to produce the stuff than what is currently used.
Perfect illustration of this is the technology, discussed on /. recently, of using agricultural waste (corn stalks, straw etc.) to produce cellulose ethanol. If you rerun the numbers on this, even using natural gas to fuel the distallation, you tip the balance. It's reasonable to assume in this case that the energy inputs in fertilizer production and tractor fuel go to the food that is produced not the waste product we are leveraging so our added energy cost is only what it costs to gather the waste and truck it to the plant. At that point the fossil energy balance is already favourable, one gets more stored energy in ethanol out of the process than one put fossil fuels in, the difference being supplied by the photosynthesis that produced the stuff we're coverting to fuel. Keep the logic flowing, power the distillation off something other than natural gas and it gets even better...
Now that said the energy density of the source materials is such that it will never come close to completely erasing our dependency on fermented dinosaur poop but it has the potential to make a decent dent in the problem.
Uhmm... Them rats is just trying to improve their public image. IIRC it was a shipment of Gambian rats that brought Monkeypox to the US (and thence to Richardson's ground squirrels aka prairie dogs and thence to humans).
Better formatting doesn't solve the fundemental problem here which is that the content is wildly inaccurate.
And if density really matters and you're running Linux then you go with IBM JS20 blades. If I'm reading the specs right you can get 14 2Way 1.6Ghz 970 blades in 7U (twice the density of Xserve, similar list price for the blades themselves but one must still buy the Bladecenter chassis so the IBM solution would be a little more expensive).
That's a wildly inaccurate summary of the landscape of RDBMS clustering technology.
Problem is, that's not what we are talking about here.
So the answer to your question at this end is almost certainly "none of the above" or probably more correctly "some bits of all of the above". Functionally most of the kind of stuff you do here doesn't need shared concurrent access to the same data files however for simplicity of implementation they probably nevertheless run GPFS so that all nodes can see all files.
Considering the stuff with odd symmetries they fould fossils of in the Burgess Shale it is certainly an issue to keep in mind.
Asked the missus (who works in the field of contest and advertising law but is not a lawyer) and she basically agrees with you. You can offer a contest to members only as long as that contest is not an incentive to join.
Speaking of Digital, I still think Ken Olsen is the true father of the PPC, some folks at Apple knew Rich Weitek and wanted Alpha for the RISC Mac but Ken refused to deal with them as he didn't want to give any input on the chip design to outsiders driving Apple to PPC. About the same time Ken is rumoured to have responded to Ford's request to build a ruggedized Alpha variant for embedded automotive use that "we don't do embedded" and Ford also went PPC.
The judge in this case gets the answer right then absolutely blows it when required to show his work. If this decision is substantially based on that analogy then this won't survive appeal. There are a number of substantive differences between P2P file sharing and a photocopier in a public library. Not the least of which being that the technology in the library case is such that it does not easily facilitiate the wholesale copying of entire works, when was the last time you saw someone at the library copying all of the pages of a book? Of course the more important fact is that many libraries do buy material at a higher than street price with an explicit license to redistribute granted as a result. I'm passingly familiar with this bloke from his previous job at the competition bureau, he didn't get the real world there and obviously the big pay increase hasn't helped....
Uhm, is this legal? Since a purchase is required for entry, this ceases to be a promotional contest and becomes gambling, does AOL have a casino licence?
IBM continued to support OS/2 well after most other vendors would have completely canned it. The reality is that "it's about the application software" and there's only so much any OS vendor can do to incent people, especially commercial vendors, to support an OS for which they see a limited market. Linux already has more real world support in the software market, including from some true heavyweights like SAP, Oracle and of course IBM that OS/2 ever did.
A printed receipt with no identifing data that is required to be depositied in a ballot box and thus provides a paper trail in case of recounts is a nice idea, however no printer is 100% reliable and I've yet to have someone give a credible answer to the question "what happens if the printer malfunctions and I don't get my slip?".
You still can't beat "take a piece paper and pen, make an X, stick it in this box" for reliability. That said I've scrutineered a couple of elections and yes, people still manage to mess this up.
The idea is that copyrights should not interfere with certain activities beneficial to the public (education and news reporting for example) so "fair use" provides certain exceptions to copyright protections if the copying/performance is done for these purposes (education, critism, news reporting, or to translate to a useable format for disabled users). In most cases the exception only covers "reasonable excerpts" of the copyrighted work.
While you may think making a mixed tape is a fair thing to do with the recordings you have bought it is NOT legal "fair use", technically what you bought is a license to play a recording for your personal use, period, with the introduction of the levies (which IIRC have been around a fairly long time on audio cassettes) that licenses is extended to the right to make as many copies as you want as long as they are still for your personal use.
The idea is that the blank media "tax" legalizes making multiple copies of recordings you have legally licensed. Before the tax, you got what you bought with very limited right to copy (basically nothing outside of fair use) so mixed tapes for example, where technically illegal, as was making MP3 rips for a portable player, now they aren't.
Not that the law was in any way enforcable but that's the idea. In fact that's the point, because the law was unenforcable and yet the recording industry was claiming losses due to rampant illegal copying this was therefore a way to make the common practise legal and recover the damages (not that I believe that the recording industry was actually suffering the losses they claim, but if you buy their claims then it does make logical sense).
The levy is not intended to pay for anyone to download/copy stuff for which they have not obtained a legal license. You've been paying for the right to make mixed CD's and use a portable MP3 player, not to download and more particularily upload with impunity.
There are some interesting ways that this does not appear to be like Gates and MS. In that case Bill and company spent a looong time postitioning Uncle Fester for a promotion, sticking him in front of the wall street types etc. by the time the change was formally announced it was pretty ho-hum because it was so thoroughly foreshadowed. This seems to have come out of the blue which 99 times out of 100 means something is afoot likely a major shareholder is angry about something and this is the first not so gentle poke out onto the plank for Mikey. If looking for a parallel I'd be more inclined to think Ken Olsen than Bill Gates. If this was just about job splitting to improve the appearance of governance this would have been foreshadowed more.
This is quite similar to vPar's in HP/UX (forgive me but I stopped paying attention to HP's ugly stepchildren Alpha & Tru64 a long time ago, it's too bad 'cause it was a great chip but its moribund, you would be wise to do the same pretty soon).
Hard partitions, like Sun Domains, HP's nPARs and IBM's LPARs slice up a physical machine and run an OS image on each slice. As far as I can tell here there is still just one OS image but applications running in these Zones can be isolated from each other. A malicous root user in the global zone is still able to make mischief in the zones if they want to.
The nice thing here unlike on HP is that you can slice up a uniprocessor machine if you have many tiny workloads that need to be isolated. IBM will too be able to do this soon with the next crank of their LPAR technology but a better implmentation with no issues with a global root user.
It looks very much like a Lear Siegler ADM 5 terminal, could have been hooked to just about anything.
Well it's too early to say how Itanium will really behave in large SMP configs so far in the application benchmarks I've seen scaling beyond 4 way is non-impressive, better than Sparc (but that's not saying much) but way behind POWER and Alpha but this has been vendors like NEC, Fujitsu and Bull, running Windows, HP has not yet benchmarked an Itanium Superdome running HP/UX in this space which I expect will be better (still lagging POWER, but better). HP has convinced Oracle to support the same binary formats on Itanium and PA-RISC (at least with 9i) so a huge percentage of the HP/UX install base has a much eased migration to Itanium. Not so Alpha, the users of which are, at least the ones I talk to, just plain pissed with HP (but then again they would have to be to be talking to me, as a rule).
Something more practical in west nile terms would be a small, timer driven one that could be put in a birdbath for a whole season. The wetland and canal dragged versions are just short of silly.
The real problem with west nile at least are breeds of mosquitos that tend to prefer urban settings and can (and do) breed in the water trapped in a discarded pop can so all this would do is naturally select for the bugs that tend to use more marginal water sources.
As much as one would like to one does not want to take these things completely out of the food chain, just keep them away from areas of human habitation.
There are easier solutions in many cases, our summer place abuts a swamp where we just couldn't get in there with this thing as it's so overgrown, Last year we used one of those CO2 exhaling traps (Mosquito Magnet brand) and it's amazing how well it works, for the first time in living memory we were able to sit outside at dusk without being eaten alive. Changing a propane tank every three weeks and emptying the bag of dead mosquitos (and no other bugs) sure beats slogging through a swamp in hip waders once or twice a week...
Can't believe nobody has mentioned the horroible mid-seventies Ford Mustang II. Truly an awful car at least the 4cyl (yes that's right an a woefully underpowered fourbanger with the Mustang name one it). My mother drove not one but two Chevy Vega's (the first was totalled before she realized what a crap car it was), 1972 model was an undrivable oil burning rust heap by 1977. I had an 1972 AMC Gremlin that I paid $250 dollars for in 1982, and while it was undeniably a rolling piece of poo it had basically no rust and had a 302 V8 engine that was actually possible to service myself. It had it's bad points no doubt but I don't think it really belongs on the worst list
I love Wordpro, much superior to Word. 1-2-3 vs. Excel is a coin toss, Freelance is crap. Never really used Approach so I can't say.
The unit that goes into the midrange and entry servers and the workstations is just the same chip on a more familiar looking ceramic chip carrier. There is no single CPU POWER4 chip, single CPU machines have a dual CPU chip, but the second CPU is disabled in microcode (and one suspects in most cases the disabled half of the chip did not pass QA).
And while I'll grant you there is a a price differential the cheapest of the entry servers (p615) it is not massively more expensive than a server class Xeon MP machine of similar power certainly not 1/8 of $150,000 per CPU.
I can't off the top remember how many CPUs are supported in a single image, 4 or 8 but sure as heck not 32.
You can of course partition the machine and run multiple virtual machines but if you need to run something that will scale in a single SMP image but doesn't know from how to scale loosely coupled (certain DBMS workloads leap to mind) then your only choice at present is AIX.
Now given AIX's "Linux Affinity" you should be able to re-compile and run any well behaved Linux code but can't honestly say I know how true this is but that's the theory.
It looks like both of the contenders for the 64-bit x86 replacement (ia64 and x86-64, of course) are going to be very SMP capable I wouldn't count on that, so far for the application benchmarks I've seen IA-64 SMP scaling above 8 way sucks wind. Not as bad as Sunfire/Starcat but not as good as IBM POWER or Alpha for that matter.
Nice idea in theory but unless they're prepared to wait for nearly ten years like HP did for Merced/Itanium then they would have to pick something already out there which leaves them with, uhh, Itanium and IBM. The first is an also ran strategy (which granted is better than thy're doing right now) and the second is just a proxy for shuttering the hardware side of the house anyway. Sun's hope as a hardware company lies in Fujitsu/Siemens who themselves are also keeping a foot in the Itanium camp.