The SheevaPlug is great: I've come down from over 600W for a rack of Solaris servers via 18W for a Linux laptop to now under 4W for a SheevaPlug (all quiet/typical consumption) to provide the same services, see:
I've reduced the consumption so much that the plug now runs entirely off-grid from a small array of solar PV panels (under 200Wp) with a small (12V, 40Ah) battery to cover nights and very dull days...
I'm about halfway through moving my main server onto a SheevaPlug: a fairly stock Linux (2.6.31) with three lots of solid-state (flash) storage totalling ~160GB: it boots in ~30s (I just timed it 5 minutes ago).
I'm in the process of moving my main Internet-facing server onto an ARM-based SheevaPlug (1.2GHz, 512MB memory) that consumes 3W--5W (pegged at 5W right now doing a large Java build/obfuscation).
Nominally I'm at the top of my profession and one of the highest paid for what I do in the world.
It is absolutely right that the client check that *I* can do the tech, not some substitute over the phone, and see if they think I'll fit with other people there. It's slightly annoying but a necessary consequence of the presence of the unscrupulous and inept.
Plus I do the same when I'm on the other side of the interview desks.
And though (from an earlier thread) minimising the number of on-site interviews is good (to minimise the inconvenience to the candidate *and* the interviewers), sometimes several have to be done. My last contract required a couple of face-to-face interviews, and the one one I'm going for at the moment may (and two screening rounds, email and phone, have already happened).
The "I'm too important to be questioned" attitude is unhelpful. Presidents and CEOs get questioned too: regularly unless they are dangerous and evasive.
After 20-odd years I'm glad that people are still checking carefully who they hire: I've seen some real shysters slip through for jobs and university places when the process is less rigorous.
There are many ways, and this is necessary to protect turbines against storm damage anyway.
The most obvious for large turbine IMHO is to have blades with adjustable pitch and change the pitch so that they simply extract no energy from the air and stop turning.
This sort of lopsided silliness (and the RIP Act) was why I walked away from being a ISP (one of the very first in the UK, with sensible notions of who owned the data passing over our wires).
So glad that I'm out of it, and still not really believing anyone makes money being an ISP.
Umm, I make sure that my sites work without JavaScript (indeed in just the way you want them to work). I too am technically and ethically and otherwise distressed by designers who break HTML's original contract just because they can and/or they are too lazy or ignorant to do better.
I don't take my ball and go home if you won't contribute because I provide many pro-bono services from my own pocket and accept that there are some freeloaders and some who genuinely cannot pay (for whom I primarily provide the services) and I cannot distinguish between them with any simple reliable technical measure.
But there are lots of people who make up wonderfully complex rationalisations for simply being mean tightwads. Be sure that your principles are really principles and not merely failed justifications for freeloading. As humans we are amazing confabulators: it takes effort to overcome.
Yes, with you there: I provide all my content free but it does cost me, out of my pocket. I typically only recover 30% of my costs from ad revenue, and that fraction continues to fall.
Remember that 'sticking it to the man' on some kind of principle is no kind of principle at all. In some cases that 'man' is a fellow geek being kind to you; would you piss in his/my beer too on some kind of principle (CmdrTaco excepted, my liege)?
And *no*, I absolutely seriously do not want advertisers' money stolen by clicking on ads that visitors are not interested in as some kind of misguided 'tip jar': I'm an advertiser to bring new traffic in too.
Just allow a few more shades of grey in!
(I run NoScript, BTW, but primarily for safety; it's a jungle out there!)
I realise that I didn't mean quite what I said, but rather that gathering entropy for such tasks shouldn't just rely on scraping up whatever happens to be on your box at start-up. For example, you can collect more, with care, from HTTP hits on a busy server (with guards against being spoofed such as only using microsecond-scale jitter between hits).
...should be importing it explicitly (eg to create important crypto keys) from an external source, such as random.hd.org (mine) or random.org or whatever.
I admit that at that time of my life I might have sneered at the McD roles, but I wouldn't have sued and I wouldn't have felt entitled, and I was already running my own company on seed capital and 18 hours a day...
Ignore cap-and-trade (and note that I'm in the EU and we're already doing it without the end of the world having passed) and climate change for a moment: all our current non-renewable fuels appear to be peaking (oil and Uranium) and/or have other problems (horrible toxic emissions from coal such as Mercury and Uranium again), so just 'building more power plants' won't cut it for more than about 40 years-ish without BAU. Note that BAU consumption is not steady, but rises exponentially (yes, I mean that, faster than polynomial).
And renewables will struggle to deliver the power we've become used to at times we demand it, given intermittency, its diffuse nature and NIMBYism.
Something has to give: this is one relatively painless way to help balance the system.
There are times when there's much more generation than can otherwise consumed, eg when baseload nukes (or non-callable wind) are still pumping out on a Saturday at 3am while demand is at its minimum. That electricity might otherwise have to be run to earth and wasted. The domestic/retail electricity market was arguably invented to fill the gaps when industrial users (eg factories) weren't using the power.
So as long as not EVERYTHING switches on at once (and only about 1/3rd of electricity is supplied on the 'Economy 7' off-peak tariff in the UK in spite of significant bribes^W^W good rates) which would be bad for stability anyhow, no, it should reach a nice equilibrium.
I love the entirely ignorant and self-absorbed "I'm alright Jack" and "Keep the Gubmint Outta My Fridge" and "I want the right to burn dioxins on my own lawn" comments.
Goodness.
For a start there's at least two sorts of appliance smartness that are useful.
1) For example, load-shifting use until there is low demand on the gird. Sometimes that electricity can be practically free (or even negative price) and reduces infrastructure costs (hardware built to cope with a smaller peak) and reduces use of often dirty and expensive 'peaking' plant. You don't have to subscribe to Climate Change to see this as a good idea. And yes, for the average family home the main candidates are the dishwasher and the washing machine. Just avoiding running your dishwasher right after dinner (until you go to bed or optimally ~3am) in the UK right now saves circa 100g CO2 emissions each time for no inconvenience at all usually:
And indeed right now since the highs and the lows are at fairly fixed times then a simple timer will do a good job: not much Big Brother smartness there.
But as more intermittent power such as wind comes on line, those 'excess power available' moments will be less predictable. A really smart dishwasher lets you run it just when you want to, but if you're not in a hurry you could set it for "make sure it's done by the morning, but try to pick the time for minimum costs/emissions". I already do this in my house.
2) Balancing the grid cycle by cycle is a separate issue. In the UK fridge/freezers alone correspond to a base load of ~2GW. If a 'smart' fridge notes that the power frequency has dropped because the grid is struggling then it can postpone restarting the compressor so as to stay within normal temperature limits but coast a little while on its store of 'cool'. It might also suspend any auto-defrost for example. That helps keep the house lights on (yours and everybody else's) without spoiling your butter or denying you any rights at all. Last year we had a major nuke trip out in the UK and 500,000 people across the UK were 'load shed' and lost supply entirely. If all the fridges had been smart they may well have stayed on line without anyone noticing.
Hyperventilating about "communists" turning off the lights and freezer is so childish I find again/. posts failing to meet the IQ levels that I assumed were necessary to type. %-P
This is not to deny that such a mechanism can be royally f**ked up by individual governments and utilities, but going purple in the face while ignoring that the alternatives may well include more blackouts or higher prices, even ignoring climate-change issues, doesn't help.
Note: I already do some of this at home. I still haven't voted communist (though they may have had a local candidate here for the last elections).
I still simply don't agree that "no one cares" and "everything is broken". Lots of people don't care, often for the reasons that you cite, and because they and those around them have now learned bad habits and low expectations, and lots of bits of tech stuff are indeed rickety. But if it's not running a safety-critical (or mission-critical) system then it may be better to do it much (1000x?) cheaper and have it fail 1% of the time, rather than build a system that essentially never fails even if we can do so. Do we really need Twitter and news.bbc.co.uk up ALL the time and would we be prepared to pay for the implementations that were? No, I say, much as it would warm my heart.
So, I'm still strongly objecting to your self-flagellating absolutism.
Put down that monochrome binary viewpoint and step away slowly with your hands up.
See the shades of grey and even eat some of the roses on the way.
OK, I hear what you say, though I still think you are over-egging the pudding. As it happens I was just mailing an old colleague/friend/boss/client who's come back from meetings with M$ and I said:
"I still vastly prefer Java/LAMP to any of the M$ tech offerings though finally finally M$ has been taking security and reliability (ie the pig under the lipstick) more seriously, so the game may change."
In other words I think that (for example) M$ has had a malign effect on the entire software industry by pumping out meretricious crap that only just works and lowers expectations all round; when 9 out of the 10 ways of calling a M$-supplied interface are undocumented or crash or both... I've certainly cut back in the past on engineering my components that I've interfaced with or run on M$ code on the grounds that further improvements in my stuff will be entirely nugatory and masked by M$ crapness.
One reason that I like(d) Sun has been its engineering focus. Not perfect, not bug-free, but it aims to be and it cares. Lets hope that Oracle doesn't squash that aspect.
If you said "all gays/blacks/women can't design or write concurrent code that works" then should I regard it as more or less offensive depending on whether I am gay/black/female and thus personally addressed in some way?
The fact is that your simplification resulted in a clearly untrue statement and also one offensive in its obliteration of the important differences between individuals covered by your swipe and their skill levels and professionalism. There are people that produce crap that are CS and EE and whatever.
You have to hope that I'm not the lawyer sitting next to you the next time that you make a careless and unnecessary remark like that. Please: loose lips sink egos.
What a hideous and offensive generalisation: "everything is programmed using procedural code, and nothing works right anymore." That may be how *some* programmers work, but I give a sh*t, and I write concurrent (and more generally concurrency-safe) code all the time. And I can do that procedurally or by graph reduction or however you like.
As to: "Electrical engineers are trained in how to design things that really work"; do you have any snooty views about all EE grads being better people than all CS grads for example? My first interest was electronics but I don't see a halo.
Any other bigotry about "natural rhythm" or "education shrivelling the uterus".
I must be new here: I expect better reasoned objectivity from someone apparently able to type with reasonable spelling and grammar.
Slashdot Mirror
I have now ordered two plugs direct from the US costing about £100 in total each.
http://www.newit.co.uk/ claims to have them for next-day dispatch in the UK, though I know nothing about them...
Rgds
Damon
Sorry if you're having trouble getting through at the moment: someone in schedom-europe.net seems to be DoSing me... Bv
Rgds
Damon
The SheevaPlug is great: I've come down from over 600W for a rack of Solaris servers via 18W for a Linux laptop to now under 4W for a SheevaPlug (all quiet/typical consumption) to provide the same services, see:
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html
(Served off the plug indeed...)
I've reduced the consumption so much that the plug now runs entirely off-grid from a small array of solar PV panels (under 200Wp) with a small (12V, 40Ah) battery to cover nights and very dull days...
Rgds
Damon
I'm about halfway through moving my main server onto a SheevaPlug: a fairly stock Linux (2.6.31) with three lots of solid-state (flash) storage totalling ~160GB: it boots in ~30s (I just timed it 5 minutes ago).
Rgds
Damon
PS. It only consumes 2.5W when quiet, and runs entirely from off-grid solar power: http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html
PPS. Yes, I know it's not Windows and it's not 1s, but we don't have to live with 20-minute reboot times these days...
Hi,
Shark should be ready by December so Xerxes Ranby tells me.
For now I'm evaluating Sun's embedded SE JRE for ARMv5 and though it only has a C1 (client) compiler it works pretty well.
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html#Java
Rgds
Damon
The total including shipping and duty was ~£100 for me in the UK (with UK plug, FWIW).
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
I'm in the process of moving my main Internet-facing server onto an ARM-based SheevaPlug (1.2GHz, 512MB memory) that consumes 3W--5W (pegged at 5W right now doing a large Java build/obfuscation).
http://plugcomputer.org/
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html
Rgds
Damon
Goodness, that's very precious of you.
Nominally I'm at the top of my profession and one of the highest paid for what I do in the world.
It is absolutely right that the client check that *I* can do the tech, not some substitute over the phone, and see if they think I'll fit with other people there. It's slightly annoying but a necessary consequence of the presence of the unscrupulous and inept.
Plus I do the same when I'm on the other side of the interview desks.
And though (from an earlier thread) minimising the number of on-site interviews is good (to minimise the inconvenience to the candidate *and* the interviewers), sometimes several have to be done. My last contract required a couple of face-to-face interviews, and the one one I'm going for at the moment may (and two screening rounds, email and phone, have already happened).
The "I'm too important to be questioned" attitude is unhelpful. Presidents and CEOs get questioned too: regularly unless they are dangerous and evasive.
After 20-odd years I'm glad that people are still checking carefully who they hire: I've seen some real shysters slip through for jobs and university places when the process is less rigorous.
Rgds
Damon
The WTO (think UIGEA)? I'm personally down over $1m on that little bit of failure to follow the rules that the US was so keen to have others follow.
Rgds
Damon
There are many ways, and this is necessary to protect turbines against storm damage anyway.
The most obvious for large turbine IMHO is to have blades with adjustable pitch and change the pitch so that they simply extract no energy from the air and stop turning.
Rgds
Damon
This sort of lopsided silliness (and the RIP Act) was why I walked away from being a ISP (one of the very first in the UK, with sensible notions of who owned the data passing over our wires).
So glad that I'm out of it, and still not really believing anyone makes money being an ISP.
Rgds
Damon
Umm, I make sure that my sites work without JavaScript (indeed in just the way you want them to work). I too am technically and ethically and otherwise distressed by designers who break HTML's original contract just because they can and/or they are too lazy or ignorant to do better.
I don't take my ball and go home if you won't contribute because I provide many pro-bono services from my own pocket and accept that there are some freeloaders and some who genuinely cannot pay (for whom I primarily provide the services) and I cannot distinguish between them with any simple reliable technical measure.
But there are lots of people who make up wonderfully complex rationalisations for simply being mean tightwads. Be sure that your principles are really principles and not merely failed justifications for freeloading. As humans we are amazing confabulators: it takes effort to overcome.
Rgds
Damon
Yes, with you there: I provide all my content free but it does cost me, out of my pocket. I typically only recover 30% of my costs from ad revenue, and that fraction continues to fall.
Remember that 'sticking it to the man' on some kind of principle is no kind of principle at all. In some cases that 'man' is a fellow geek being kind to you; would you piss in his/my beer too on some kind of principle (CmdrTaco excepted, my liege)?
And *no*, I absolutely seriously do not want advertisers' money stolen by clicking on ads that visitors are not interested in as some kind of misguided 'tip jar': I'm an advertiser to bring new traffic in too.
Just allow a few more shades of grey in!
(I run NoScript, BTW, but primarily for safety; it's a jungle out there!)
Rgds
Damon
True... B^>
I realise that I didn't mean quite what I said, but rather that gathering entropy for such tasks shouldn't just rely on scraping up whatever happens to be on your box at start-up. For example, you can collect more, with care, from HTTP hits on a busy server (with guards against being spoofed such as only using microsecond-scale jitter between hits).
Rgds
Damon
...should be importing it explicitly (eg to create important crypto keys) from an external source, such as random.hd.org (mine) or random.org or whatever.
Rgds
Damon
I admit that at that time of my life I might have sneered at the McD roles, but I wouldn't have sued and I wouldn't have felt entitled, and I was already running my own company on seed capital and 18 hours a day...
Rgds
Damon
Ignore cap-and-trade (and note that I'm in the EU and we're already doing it without the end of the world having passed) and climate change for a moment: all our current non-renewable fuels appear to be peaking (oil and Uranium) and/or have other problems (horrible toxic emissions from coal such as Mercury and Uranium again), so just 'building more power plants' won't cut it for more than about 40 years-ish without BAU. Note that BAU consumption is not steady, but rises exponentially (yes, I mean that, faster than polynomial).
And renewables will struggle to deliver the power we've become used to at times we demand it, given intermittency, its diffuse nature and NIMBYism.
Something has to give: this is one relatively painless way to help balance the system.
Rgds
Damon
There are times when there's much more generation than can otherwise consumed, eg when baseload nukes (or non-callable wind) are still pumping out on a Saturday at 3am while demand is at its minimum. That electricity might otherwise have to be run to earth and wasted. The domestic/retail electricity market was arguably invented to fill the gaps when industrial users (eg factories) weren't using the power.
So as long as not EVERYTHING switches on at once (and only about 1/3rd of electricity is supplied on the 'Economy 7' off-peak tariff in the UK in spite of significant bribes^W^W good rates) which would be bad for stability anyhow, no, it should reach a nice equilibrium.
Rgds
Damon
I love the entirely ignorant and self-absorbed "I'm alright Jack" and "Keep the Gubmint Outta My Fridge" and "I want the right to burn dioxins on my own lawn" comments.
Goodness.
For a start there's at least two sorts of appliance smartness that are useful.
1) For example, load-shifting use until there is low demand on the gird. Sometimes that electricity can be practically free (or even negative price) and reduces infrastructure costs (hardware built to cope with a smaller peak) and reduces use of often dirty and expensive 'peaking' plant. You don't have to subscribe to Climate Change to see this as a good idea. And yes, for the average family home the main candidates are the dishwasher and the washing machine. Just avoiding running your dishwasher right after dinner (until you go to bed or optimally ~3am) in the UK right now saves circa 100g CO2 emissions each time for no inconvenience at all usually:
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-UK-grid-CO2-intensity-variations.html
http://www.earth.org.uk/_gridCarbonIntensityGB.html
And indeed right now since the highs and the lows are at fairly fixed times then a simple timer will do a good job: not much Big Brother smartness there.
But as more intermittent power such as wind comes on line, those 'excess power available' moments will be less predictable. A really smart dishwasher lets you run it just when you want to, but if you're not in a hurry you could set it for "make sure it's done by the morning, but try to pick the time for minimum costs/emissions". I already do this in my house.
2) Balancing the grid cycle by cycle is a separate issue. In the UK fridge/freezers alone correspond to a base load of ~2GW. If a 'smart' fridge notes that the power frequency has dropped because the grid is struggling then it can postpone restarting the compressor so as to stay within normal temperature limits but coast a little while on its store of 'cool'. It might also suspend any auto-defrost for example. That helps keep the house lights on (yours and everybody else's) without spoiling your butter or denying you any rights at all. Last year we had a major nuke trip out in the UK and 500,000 people across the UK were 'load shed' and lost supply entirely. If all the fridges had been smart they may well have stayed on line without anyone noticing.
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-dynamic-demand-value.html
Hyperventilating about "communists" turning off the lights and freezer is so childish I find again /. posts failing to meet the IQ levels that I assumed were necessary to type. %-P
This is not to deny that such a mechanism can be royally f**ked up by individual governments and utilities, but going purple in the face while ignoring that the alternatives may well include more blackouts or higher prices, even ignoring climate-change issues, doesn't help.
Note: I already do some of this at home. I still haven't voted communist (though they may have had a local candidate here for the last elections).
Rgds
Damon
Hmm, that one brings its own agenda which I don't want to endorse either, necessarily! B^>
Rgds
Damon
PS. I wish to state that I have embraced no native Martians, yet.
That sounds like a narrowly sexualised western heterosexual male point of view: there may be others...
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
I still simply don't agree that "no one cares" and "everything is broken". Lots of people don't care, often for the reasons that you cite, and because they and those around them have now learned bad habits and low expectations, and lots of bits of tech stuff are indeed rickety. But if it's not running a safety-critical (or mission-critical) system then it may be better to do it much (1000x?) cheaper and have it fail 1% of the time, rather than build a system that essentially never fails even if we can do so. Do we really need Twitter and news.bbc.co.uk up ALL the time and would we be prepared to pay for the implementations that were? No, I say, much as it would warm my heart.
So, I'm still strongly objecting to your self-flagellating absolutism.
Put down that monochrome binary viewpoint and step away slowly with your hands up.
See the shades of grey and even eat some of the roses on the way.
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
OK, I hear what you say, though I still think you are over-egging the pudding. As it happens I was just mailing an old colleague/friend/boss/client who's come back from meetings with M$ and I said:
"I still vastly prefer Java/LAMP to any of the M$ tech offerings though finally finally M$ has been taking security and reliability (ie the pig under the lipstick) more seriously, so the game may change."
In other words I think that (for example) M$ has had a malign effect on the entire software industry by pumping out meretricious crap that only just works and lowers expectations all round; when 9 out of the 10 ways of calling a M$-supplied interface are undocumented or crash or both... I've certainly cut back in the past on engineering my components that I've interfaced with or run on M$ code on the grounds that further improvements in my stuff will be entirely nugatory and masked by M$ crapness.
One reason that I like(d) Sun has been its engineering focus. Not perfect, not bug-free, but it aims to be and it cares. Lets hope that Oracle doesn't squash that aspect.
Rgds
Damon
If you said "all gays/blacks/women can't design or write concurrent code that works" then should I regard it as more or less offensive depending on whether I am gay/black/female and thus personally addressed in some way?
The fact is that your simplification resulted in a clearly untrue statement and also one offensive in its obliteration of the important differences between individuals covered by your swipe and their skill levels and professionalism. There are people that produce crap that are CS and EE and whatever.
You have to hope that I'm not the lawyer sitting next to you the next time that you make a careless and unnecessary remark like that. Please: loose lips sink egos.
Rgds
Damon
What a hideous and offensive generalisation: "everything is programmed using procedural code, and nothing works right anymore." That may be how *some* programmers work, but I give a sh*t, and I write concurrent (and more generally concurrency-safe) code all the time. And I can do that procedurally or by graph reduction or however you like.
As to: "Electrical engineers are trained in how to design things that really work"; do you have any snooty views about all EE grads being better people than all CS grads for example? My first interest was electronics but I don't see a halo.
Any other bigotry about "natural rhythm" or "education shrivelling the uterus".
I must be new here: I expect better reasoned objectivity from someone apparently able to type with reasonable spelling and grammar.
Rgds
Damon