Uh, I don't ever remember M$ being that favourite child. My one and only communication with Mr Gates was 20-odd years ago (by telex) to ask him to force his UK office to honour its bloody contract with us. Which he did, very quickly, all credit to him.
Also, the most expensive (and pretty much the most crap) technical manual I ever had to buy was a £100 ($200 today) book from M$ in the same sort of epoch, so maybe £300/$600 today.
No, M$ was never ever as highly regarded as G still generally is, tin-foil-hat wearers et al aside. And G sets out to do good whereas M$ never gave a rat's arse if the alternative was more $$$.
A perfectly legitimate way to behave for a company, but G is trying not to be in that mold IMHO. They do have duties to shareholders of course, and other than Google.org, they're not a philanthropy.
Partial disclaimer: I use Google (and Microsoft) products, and know people at Google.
Well, I love working in the big open buzzy space of a dealing/trading floor in an investment bank with hundreds of people in view, though today I'm working from home and that's good too.
Open plan isn't bad in itself, it's what you do with it IMHO.
I have little flag you can toggle at the top of every page on my main site (gallery.hd.org) to switch between 'lite' and 'normal' mode (and where possible your first page hit is always 'lite' for speed).
And I have an even lighter version (smlpx.mobi) for handheld devices.
Plenty wrong with those sites, but the bandwidth and presentation issues are not hard once you have a CMS or some sort.
I already use SSD (4GB SD card) as my primary Linux boot/main storage device to keep power consumption of my primary HTTP/SMTP/NTP/... Internet-facing server to under 20W. I also have a 160GB HDD, spun down as much as possible, for bulk data.
If this 160GB drive had existed in the middle of last year when I speced the machine, I'd have had bought it like a shot to simplify life no end (and save a little more power). Laptop-mode - who needs it? (Actually it still might save a little power by batching and conflating operations, but much less I imagine.)
This is what I already do for my primary Net-facing server. Boot and most-frequently-accessed stuff on a 4GB SD card, the rest on the HDD which sleeps most of the time.
Don't worry, I can tell the difference between individual Americans and the US govt!
My major client is a large US investment bank and has been for over a decade. American individuals and corporations are fine (well I guess I've met a few bad ones, but in fact mainly of non-US origin strangely), but the 'security theatre' rhetoric of marking all foreigners as potential rapists^Wterrorists is just stupid and pisses off natural friends of the US.
No, I don't trust our (UK) govt with all my sensitive data either: some of ours was amongst the 25 million records recently 'mislaid'...
Well, there's been a lot of heat and little light so far...
I've actually been exchanging emails with the UK's National Grid on a very similar topic: if I add some extra batteries to a grid-tie/UPS solar PV system, are they interested in it for frequency/fast standby support? Nominally I could automatically switch it on in one cycle to pump back at maximum for 30 minutes or more, which meets several of their key requirements. (See towards bottom of this page: http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html under From Net-Zero Electricity to Negative-Carbon.)
So, I'd get paid for the electricity AND for providing a standby service to help grid stability.
1) Even if you don't cycle batteries they still have a finite life: use them or loose them.
2) You could easily set your system so that if the batteries are below 90% charge you won't support the grid: you'd hardly ever notice diminished capacity and you'd still be able to make a significant stability and peak-shaving contribution, and you'd also avoid deep-cycling for the grid which would wear them out faster.
3) You avoid frying linespeople in a power cut with a system approved to G83/1 or similar: this is old tech.
I think that the UK government agrees with you that the meter has to be easily visible and inside: the kitchen is often cited (and indeed sited!) as the ideal location. From early next year our (retail) electricity supplier will have to supply us with such a meter for free if we ask for it.
Monitoring of individual circuits would be good, I agree.
It's totally unglamorous, but relatively easy. I managed to cut our home (and home-office) consumption from 33kWh/day (very high, from powering lots of Internet-facing servers) to 7kWh/day (fairly low: typical for a UK household is between 11kWh/day and 20kWh/dayt depending on whose figures you use) without any significant pain or loss of services etc.
Most people could make significant cuts in their own consumption at home and work with zero or minimal spend and without giving up anything they currently do if they (a) wanted to (b) had the information. That's much better than technical fixes alone. One result of a US-based utility study was that simply telling people what they were using when and what it cost to generate helped cut their consumption 10%--15%. (And 78.35435102% of all such stats are hotly contested, natch...)
And there are slightly smarter things than just saving power and money that you can do if you feel inclined, which cost you nothing at all and make a disproportionate saving in CO2 and an improvement in grid stability, eg don't run big appliances at peak demand if you can easily avoid it.
For example, peak demand in the UK is in winter from 4pm to 8pm. At home we're avoiding running our washing machine and dishwasher in that 4 hour window since providing power to us (and everyone else then) is probably the dirtiest and most carbon-intense and expensive of the whole year, and with the biggest losses and strain in the distribution network. We're not sitting in the dark and cold humming whalesong: we just put off running the dishwasher for an hour or two. No one will ever notice, and our electricity bill will be just the same, so I want my medal now, of course! B^>
All of the five that I listed are real carriers. We have MVNOs too, such as Virgin.
I hear what you say about covering low-density populations. We maybe get close in the UK with some of the more remote bits of Scotland.
But remember also that all of (well, maybe not "3", I don't know) our national operators have big markets all over the EU and beyond, so the geographical size issue is possibly less significant than the density issue.
Note, though, that the places I can use my (UK-purchased) SIM are of course much wider than just the UK, and thanks to a bit of regulator intervention the whole EU market is starting to get sane... And indeed a customer of (say) Vodafone can get some reasonable deals in most Vodafone territories outside the EU too, without much/any specific prior arrangement, just turning up and roaming.
Note that the UK alone musters T-mobile, Orange, Vodafone, O2 and 3 as real physical national carriers with very high coverage.
I notice that someone modded this 'Flamebait'! Goodness! This is a statement of fact about my business operations, and is not an uncommon point of view with all the MFAs and malware sites floating around that would just love some anonymity to hide behind. Read up at publisher-world.com or webmasterworld.com for example.
Because of the possibly fragile/temporary nature of such links, and because rogues might hide behind them, I refuse to by or sell Google ads (on AdSense or AdWords) in my normal course of business that use a TinyURL or other redirector. I want you know who the buyer/seller is before potentially damaging my reputation by association with someone who won't even use a 'real' URL...
I know that every over-testosteroned male with wheels feels the pressing and generous need to share their LOUD CRAP NASTY 'music' with ME NOW YES NOW but I don't kinda agree. (Never mind the non-personal stereos and maxed out mobile phone ghetto-blaster stand-ins in public places, often toted by angry-looking teenage girls.)
Get me one of these zappers now please, and I'll point and shoot every anti-social LOUD system for free, to help with public order.
It seems to me that this would be especially useful to reduce the amount of induced radio noise when communicating with L1 (etc) radio telescopes or other instruments potentially sensitive to the normal radio frequencies used for communication, eg keep the comms out-of-band of what is being measured as far as possible.
I would say that people have squandered automotive production and engine efficiencies by buying bigger (and thus disproportionally wasteful) cars, such as 4x4s ("Chelsea Tractors") and SUVs even for urban driving.
Probably quite power-efficient with that chipset so long as they have a recent (tickless) kernel in it, such as with Gutsy, though I would like a little more memory for one of my apps:
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, I don't ever remember M$ being that favourite child. My one and only communication with Mr Gates was 20-odd years ago (by telex) to ask him to force his UK office to honour its bloody contract with us. Which he did, very quickly, all credit to him.
Also, the most expensive (and pretty much the most crap) technical manual I ever had to buy was a £100 ($200 today) book from M$ in the same sort of epoch, so maybe £300/$600 today.
No, M$ was never ever as highly regarded as G still generally is, tin-foil-hat wearers et al aside. And G sets out to do good whereas M$ never gave a rat's arse if the alternative was more $$$.
A perfectly legitimate way to behave for a company, but G is trying not to be in that mold IMHO. They do have duties to shareholders of course, and other than Google.org, they're not a philanthropy.
Partial disclaimer: I use Google (and Microsoft) products, and know people at Google.
Rgds
Damon
Well, I love working in the big open buzzy space of a dealing/trading floor in an investment bank with hundreds of people in view, though today I'm working from home and that's good too.
Open plan isn't bad in itself, it's what you do with it IMHO.
Rgds
Damon
Yes, you're right about the CMS.
I have little flag you can toggle at the top of every page on my main site (gallery.hd.org) to switch between 'lite' and 'normal' mode (and where possible your first page hit is always 'lite' for speed).
And I have an even lighter version (smlpx.mobi) for handheld devices.
Plenty wrong with those sites, but the bandwidth and presentation issues are not hard once you have a CMS or some sort.
Rgds
Damon
You must be new round here! B^>
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
I'm here to quibble with "SSDs are always going to be for secondary computers, and portable devices."
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
I already use SSD (4GB SD card) as my primary Linux boot/main storage device to keep power consumption of my primary HTTP/SMTP/NTP/... Internet-facing server to under 20W. I also have a 160GB HDD, spun down as much as possible, for bulk data.
If this 160GB drive had existed in the middle of last year when I speced the machine, I'd have had bought it like a shot to simplify life no end (and save a little more power). Laptop-mode - who needs it? (Actually it still might save a little power by batching and conflating operations, but much less I imagine.)
Rgds
Damon
This is what I already do for my primary Net-facing server. Boot and most-frequently-accessed stuff on a 4GB SD card, the rest on the HDD which sleeps most of the time.
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
Rgds
Damon
I already boot my low-power Linux server off CF:
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
Don't worry, I can tell the difference between individual Americans and the US govt!
My major client is a large US investment bank and has been for over a decade. American individuals and corporations are fine (well I guess I've met a few bad ones, but in fact mainly of non-US origin strangely), but the 'security theatre' rhetoric of marking all foreigners as potential rapists^Wterrorists is just stupid and pisses off natural friends of the US.
No, I don't trust our (UK) govt with all my sensitive data either: some of ours was amongst the 25 million records recently 'mislaid'...
Rgds
Damon
It's the major reason that I won't travel to the US these days.
I don't want to be treated as a criminal before I've even left airside.
Rgds
Damon
Well, there's been a lot of heat and little light so far...
I've actually been exchanging emails with the UK's National Grid on a very similar topic: if I add some extra batteries to a grid-tie/UPS solar PV system, are they interested in it for frequency/fast standby support? Nominally I could automatically switch it on in one cycle to pump back at maximum for 30 minutes or more, which meets several of their key requirements. (See towards bottom of this page: http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html under From Net-Zero Electricity to Negative-Carbon.)
So, I'd get paid for the electricity AND for providing a standby service to help grid stability.
1) Even if you don't cycle batteries they still have a finite life: use them or loose them.
2) You could easily set your system so that if the batteries are below 90% charge you won't support the grid: you'd hardly ever notice diminished capacity and you'd still be able to make a significant stability and peak-shaving contribution, and you'd also avoid deep-cycling for the grid which would wear them out faster.
3) You avoid frying linespeople in a power cut with a system approved to G83/1 or similar: this is old tech.
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
I think that the UK government agrees with you that the meter has to be easily visible and inside: the kitchen is often cited (and indeed sited!) as the ideal location. From early next year our (retail) electricity supplier will have to supply us with such a meter for free if we ask for it.
Monitoring of individual circuits would be good, I agree.
Rgds
Damon
Dead right.
It's totally unglamorous, but relatively easy. I managed to cut our home (and home-office) consumption from 33kWh/day (very high, from powering lots of Internet-facing servers) to 7kWh/day (fairly low: typical for a UK household is between 11kWh/day and 20kWh/dayt depending on whose figures you use) without any significant pain or loss of services etc.
http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html
Most people could make significant cuts in their own consumption at home and work with zero or minimal spend and without giving up anything they currently do if they (a) wanted to (b) had the information. That's much better than technical fixes alone. One result of a US-based utility study was that simply telling people what they were using when and what it cost to generate helped cut their consumption 10%--15%. (And 78.35435102% of all such stats are hotly contested, natch...)
And there are slightly smarter things than just saving power and money that you can do if you feel inclined, which cost you nothing at all and make a disproportionate saving in CO2 and an improvement in grid stability, eg don't run big appliances at peak demand if you can easily avoid it.
For example, peak demand in the UK is in winter from 4pm to 8pm. At home we're avoiding running our washing machine and dishwasher in that 4 hour window since providing power to us (and everyone else then) is probably the dirtiest and most carbon-intense and expensive of the whole year, and with the biggest losses and strain in the distribution network. We're not sitting in the dark and cold humming whalesong: we just put off running the dishwasher for an hour or two. No one will ever notice, and our electricity bill will be just the same, so I want my medal now, of course! B^>
Rgds
Damon
All of the five that I listed are real carriers. We have MVNOs too, such as Virgin.
I hear what you say about covering low-density populations. We maybe get close in the UK with some of the more remote bits of Scotland.
But remember also that all of (well, maybe not "3", I don't know) our national operators have big markets all over the EU and beyond, so the geographical size issue is possibly less significant than the density issue.
Rgds
Damon
Well, I'm glad if I'm wrong!
Note, though, that the places I can use my (UK-purchased) SIM are of course much wider than just the UK, and thanks to a bit of regulator intervention the whole EU market is starting to get sane... And indeed a customer of (say) Vodafone can get some reasonable deals in most Vodafone territories outside the EU too, without much/any specific prior arrangement, just turning up and roaming.
Note that the UK alone musters T-mobile, Orange, Vodafone, O2 and 3 as real physical national carriers with very high coverage.
Rgds
Damon
...from most carriers anyway (some like Orange have a fee to get phones on or off their network).
Ie, if you have a GSM or 3G phone and a SIM card then you can just use it in the UK.
You'll have to pay the carrier for the SIM and traffic of course, but from any reasonable device you want.
Rgds
Damon
PS. I think most Europeans, used to being behind on technology, are baffled by the US phone 'notwork'...
So it seems.
My particular use is non-profit and non-political and non-news, so seems well within the spirit and the letter of the rules.
Rgds
Damon
I have a personal ICP licence and I am a UK national.
Rgds
Damon
I notice that someone modded this 'Flamebait'! Goodness! This is a statement of fact about my business operations, and is not an uncommon point of view with all the MFAs and malware sites floating around that would just love some anonymity to hide behind. Read up at publisher-world.com or webmasterworld.com for example.
Flamebait? Not my style.
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
Because of the possibly fragile/temporary nature of such links, and because rogues might hide behind them, I refuse to by or sell Google ads (on AdSense or AdWords) in my normal course of business that use a TinyURL or other redirector. I want you know who the buyer/seller is before potentially damaging my reputation by association with someone who won't even use a 'real' URL...
Rgds
Damon
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
And the site is hosted by the new equipment!
Rgds
Damon
I know that every over-testosteroned male with wheels feels the pressing and generous need to share their LOUD CRAP NASTY 'music' with ME NOW YES NOW but I don't kinda agree. (Never mind the non-personal stereos and maxed out mobile phone ghetto-blaster stand-ins in public places, often toted by angry-looking teenage girls.)
Get me one of these zappers now please, and I'll point and shoot every anti-social LOUD system for free, to help with public order.
Arrrgh! B^>
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
It seems to me that this would be especially useful to reduce the amount of induced radio noise when communicating with L1 (etc) radio telescopes or other instruments potentially sensitive to the normal radio frequencies used for communication, eg keep the comms out-of-band of what is being measured as far as possible.
Rgds
Damon
I would say that people have squandered automotive production and engine efficiencies by buying bigger (and thus disproportionally wasteful) cars, such as 4x4s ("Chelsea Tractors") and SUVs even for urban driving.
This might be partly the "Rebound Effect": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7071463.stm
But I'm afraid a lot of it is just greed and showing off, by manufacturers and consumers.
So Windows bloat is probably not a unique effect, even though geeks might find it especially irritating.
Rgds
Damon
Probably quite power-efficient with that chipset so long as they have a recent (tickless) kernel in it, such as with Gutsy, though I would like a little more memory for one of my apps:
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
Might also do nicely as an off-the-shelf monitoring device for networks, HVAC, etc...
If they sell one at a similar price here I might buy one to play with.
Rgds
Damon
Complexity. If I can KISS and it won't wear out for at least a year or two then that's all I need.
Reducing logging, etc, hasn't taken much effort at all anyway.
Rgds
Damon
PS. Plus more USB devices is more power draw, and this project is minimising power draw.