right road vehicles account for 33M tonnes of CO2, and London represents roughly 10% of UK electricity consumption. So, moving the whole of the UK to local generation would reduce CO2 emissions the same ammount as scrapping _all_ road transport in the UK (and not allowing that usage to be shifted to other forms of transport). If you consider that those trips will have to take place by train or EV, then you can see that moving to local power generation will reduce CO2 emissions much more than scrapping all petrol/diesel cars. So the savings are a _lot_.
According to the market... If people wanted them they would buy them, the show rooms would be full of them.
People don't want to risk running low on charge and having no option of a quick fill-up.
Besides which the government do not want to get rid of all the filling stations, so they would need to have a role in the future. Quick charge electric satisfies that too.
You don't have to believe me though, just watch what happens. It would make me happy to be wrong, but I don't think so...
The British governments report on this issue, from transport and car industry experts is betting on diesel short term and hydrogen long term, precisely because of the charging and weight problems of electric cars.
Honda have a hydrogen fuel-cell car ready to go to market. It looks like a normal car, not a toy, and as far as I can tell it is the future of green transport... not battery/electric cars.
I agree on the whole with what you say, but I still feel that electric cars will have to offer people something better than petrol to succeed.
Diesel is the short term solution, and in Europe we have cars achieving fantastic 70+mpg with 100+mpg on the horizon. These are not factory figures either, we get a real 62mpg from a Ford Fiesta Zetec.
I am talking about the mass market though, and if I am right you will not see electric cars selling in big numbers until people can use them just like a petrol car - including stopping at a filling station for 10 minutes... oh and they have to be nearly the same price as well.
So what about:
http://www.lowcarboneconomy.com/community_content/_low_carbon_news/2691
I guess it depends on how efficient you think is efficient. The above study shows that sending electricity over wires is less efficient than piping gas or driving/shipping oil/coal.
Moving to localised generation would save london 3.5 million tonnes of C02 per year.
Decentralised generation also allows CHP (combined heat and power plants to be used which can be nearly 100% efficient because waste heat is used to heat nearby buildings).
Actually both are the same. AFAIK the "Martial" Chen style is the oldest, and from this the "Martial" Yang style was derived. The "Medicinal" Wu Style Tai-Chi did not arrive until later. If you watch two people practicing the Yang and Wu long forms in sync you can see the movements are the same, just the extent of the movement is greatly limited in the Wu Style. For example a rotation and lift of the heel in the Wu style becomes a turn with knee to the floor in the Yang style.
The point is to produce aspirational vehicles. Remember all the kids into cars used to have posters of a Lamborghini on their walls? Now I think of it doesn't that Shelby look a lot like a Lamborghini? Anyway the idea is that if all the kids want one when they grow up, electric cars will become cool, and people will want one. Of course they wont be able to afford a Shelby so they will end up with an electric Ford Focus (or equivalent), but they will want the Shelby.
Transmission is _not_ efficient. In fact it has been estimated the UK could meet its CO2 requirements simply by moving to localised power generation, and eliminating the transmission losses.
So the green solution is localised generation (in the community) and by using this we could meet CO2 targets without reducing the ammount generated from coal and oil.
Also most people do not want a car they can drive 100 miles, and then re-charge over night. They want it to charge at a filling station in about the time it takes to refill a car, a little longer would be acceptable, say 5-10 mins.
The problem is almost nobody wants a car that takes 10 hours to charge. People are used to driving and stopping at a filling station when they need to. The solution is batteries like the Altair NanoSafe, used in the Lightning car, which can charge in 5 minutes from a 440V industrial 3-phase supply. This however will put a load on the grid. In summary the grid is fine for cars most people don't want.
My company have been successfully migrating VMs from 32bit Intel to 64bit AMD to 64bit Intel for years. We use Linux VServers and OpenVZ. This shared kernel approach to virtualisation is much lower overhead than VMWare, Xen or KVM. We can even run different distro's inside the VMs, the only limitiation is that all the VMs see the same Linux kernel version.
So whilst we haven't done this with a hypervisor style VM, for what we want (migrating server images between physical hosts, backing up server images) Linux VServers/OpenVZ is a much better choice anyway.
Give away the single player mode as the demo, and charge a subscription for the multi-player online mode. It works, its a business model, everybody's happy.
In the UK "Be" internet have 24Mb/s (if you live close enough to a supported exchange) and have a 1:1 contention ratio.
So if I pay for a Be account with 1:1 contention ratio, I am already paying to be able to access high bandwidth content. Why should the BBC pay as well? If your ISP does not want to pay for the upgrades to their networks, just change ISP to one who does.
There are obviously ISPs who have paid for the extra bandwidth, and still charge a resonable rate, the other ISPs are just wining about not getting enough $$$ because they are greedy.
What about Semco? They have no IT department (at least not at the time the last book was written).
Let users take responsibility for their own machine... If they can't use it then they have to use pen and paper. If one employee is more productive because he keeps his computer up and running, he is the employee I want.
If you crash your PC, and as a result lose a big contract, that is your own fault.
So Let users manage their own PCs but you also have to remove the safety net of an IT department.
The Panasonic R7 is the best ultralight IMHO... 2 pounds weight, 2 gig ram, dual core CPU 1024x768 graphics and 8 hour battery life. Passive cooling (no fan) means it quiet too.
There is an issue regarding patents here. With the GPL you cannot distribute the software/hardware if you are aware of a patent that would affect the software/hardware. With MIT/BSD there is no such provision, so I can patent my device, and then freely distribute the designs under the MIT/BSD license. I can then sue anyone who implements those supposedly free designs for patent infingement.
Still think my panasonic R4 is better... its lighter 999 gramms (3lbs = 1.36kg) has an 8 hour battery life, and changeable battey... okay its a bit thicker, but its smaller in length and width (9"x7.2"x0.9") even though its thicker at the back (1.6") this gives the whole thing a nice downward slope... I might upgrade to the new R7 though as mine only has a pentium-M 1.2GHz being a couple of years old, and the new ones have a core2-duo. This quote sums it up quite nicely: "The remarkable 2 lb Panasonic R7 has an 8 hour battery life, and comes in 11 colors."
Actually science can never prove anything, only disprove things. How it works is this... we don't understand something, somebody proposes an idea (a hypothesis), people conduct experiments. If no evidence contradicting the idea is found it is promoted to a theory. However there is the possibility that new evidence can be found at any time that contradicts the theory, and invalidates it. Hence the scientific method can only ever disprove theories... positive proof is impossible as it would require complete knowledge of everthing ever done, or going to be done, which is omniscience, ie God.
For example, Rutherford proposes his model of the atom (a hypothesis), people all around the world conduct experiments, and none of them (for a while) contradict his hypothosis, so some vague time later it gets generally accepted as a theory. Eventually some weird results show up, and people have to propose a quantum hypothesis to explain where Rutherford went wrong - however because Rutherfords model is still useful to understand things in an approximate way, it still maintains its status as a theory.
So here we see infact _all_ theories are wrong, in that they are either inaccurate (but we still use them) or they are yet to be proved wrong by some more in-depth experiment yet to be performed. (note: this itself is a hypothesis, as statistically a theory might be correct by chance, however in an ininitely complex universe, this probability tends to zero)
On this basis, I propose the hypothosis that God exists, If after some time you cannot disprove my hypothesis, it gets promoted to a theory. Infact as there connot be any proof that God exists (as proving God exists would deny faith, and faith is a necessary part of religeon) what we have is the "null hypothesis", that is something that is by definition impossible to disprove, and therefore God exists! corollary: but therefore He doesn't, because that denies faith.
However we know from above _all_ theories are wrong, so God does not exist. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the effect on the corollary to my theory, under the assumption that all theories are wrong.
Of course if we ignore what the causes are, and we believe this report, we are left with the fact that by going after P2P file sharers aggressively, the record industry is attacking its best customers... this does not seem sensible behaviour for any business.
The problem is not the spin down time, but the fact that the drive is being spun up too frequently. You should use the features of laptop-mode to change the page-cache write back time... use lm_profiler to find which processes are causing the spin-ups, and disable, or reconfigure them to cause less frequent writes. This will catch all reads and writes to the disk from processes, but not from the kernel (swap)... so disable swap, and your laptop should go for hours without a disk access when idle...
Of course nothing can stop disk accesses if you are actually loading or saving data...
Another thing to consider is setting your laptop to suspend to RAM when idle, I know some people have problems with this, but it works perfectly for me.
Except Linux has supported _more_ devices than any version of Microsoft-windows for some time now. Okay so most of those drivers are for older hardware that is no longer supported by new versions of Microsoft-windows... but that doesn't change the facts. You need to qualify your statement, and say what you mean. I guess something like "Microsoft Windows gets support for some new devices more quickly than Linux"... thats about it. I am not even sure there is any truth to OSX supporting more of anything than Linux, Apple-mac hardware is all the same after all.
Infact Linux supports more devices that any other operating system ever... and thats one of the advantages of open-source kernel drivers... they are maintained with the Kernel, so they remain usable through kernel architecture changes with zero effort from the original contributer of the device-driver. I am sure Microsoft would love to do this with windows, but of course they cannot, as they don't have the source code to the drivers they did not write themselves.
It doesn't make any difference if its SATA or SCSI... It is the partition table format that is the problem. The BIOS boots by reading the partition table to find the first active partition then looking at the block numbers that mark the start and end of the partition. The BIOS only understands partition-tables with 32bit block numbers. 2^32 * 512 (max sector number) = 2TB... So infact any disk over 2TB is not bootable. Of course if the OS supports other format partition tables (like the EFI partition table format) then you can mount disks greater than 2TB, but you still cannot boot from them if the BIOS only supports 32 bit partition tables. As it happens my array is ATA to SCSI... this means it looks like a single giant 4TB SCSI disk to the computer, but is made up of 16 250Gb ATA discs. It is also RAID6 for extra redundancy because it uses a large number of discs making failure more likely... RAID6 is much better than RAID5 + 1 hot swap.
Slashdot Mirror
Time will tell who is right...
See: http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/ Feel so confident about hydrogen being a "dead horse"...
right road vehicles account for 33M tonnes of CO2, and London represents roughly 10% of UK electricity consumption. So, moving the whole of the UK to local generation would reduce CO2 emissions the same ammount as scrapping _all_ road transport in the UK (and not allowing that usage to be shifted to other forms of transport). If you consider that those trips will have to take place by train or EV, then you can see that moving to local power generation will reduce CO2 emissions much more than scrapping all petrol/diesel cars. So the savings are a _lot_.
According to the market... If people wanted them they would buy them, the show rooms would be full of them. People don't want to risk running low on charge and having no option of a quick fill-up. Besides which the government do not want to get rid of all the filling stations, so they would need to have a role in the future. Quick charge electric satisfies that too. You don't have to believe me though, just watch what happens. It would make me happy to be wrong, but I don't think so... The British governments report on this issue, from transport and car industry experts is betting on diesel short term and hydrogen long term, precisely because of the charging and weight problems of electric cars. Honda have a hydrogen fuel-cell car ready to go to market. It looks like a normal car, not a toy, and as far as I can tell it is the future of green transport... not battery/electric cars.
I agree on the whole with what you say, but I still feel that electric cars will have to offer people something better than petrol to succeed. Diesel is the short term solution, and in Europe we have cars achieving fantastic 70+mpg with 100+mpg on the horizon. These are not factory figures either, we get a real 62mpg from a Ford Fiesta Zetec. I am talking about the mass market though, and if I am right you will not see electric cars selling in big numbers until people can use them just like a petrol car - including stopping at a filling station for 10 minutes... oh and they have to be nearly the same price as well.
So what about: http://www.lowcarboneconomy.com/community_content/_low_carbon_news/2691 I guess it depends on how efficient you think is efficient. The above study shows that sending electricity over wires is less efficient than piping gas or driving/shipping oil/coal. Moving to localised generation would save london 3.5 million tonnes of C02 per year. Decentralised generation also allows CHP (combined heat and power plants to be used which can be nearly 100% efficient because waste heat is used to heat nearby buildings).
Actually both are the same. AFAIK the "Martial" Chen style is the oldest, and from this the "Martial" Yang style was derived. The "Medicinal" Wu Style Tai-Chi did not arrive until later. If you watch two people practicing the Yang and Wu long forms in sync you can see the movements are the same, just the extent of the movement is greatly limited in the Wu Style. For example a rotation and lift of the heel in the Wu style becomes a turn with knee to the floor in the Yang style.
The point is to produce aspirational vehicles. Remember all the kids into cars used to have posters of a Lamborghini on their walls? Now I think of it doesn't that Shelby look a lot like a Lamborghini? Anyway the idea is that if all the kids want one when they grow up, electric cars will become cool, and people will want one. Of course they wont be able to afford a Shelby so they will end up with an electric Ford Focus (or equivalent), but they will want the Shelby.
Transmission is _not_ efficient. In fact it has been estimated the UK could meet its CO2 requirements simply by moving to localised power generation, and eliminating the transmission losses. So the green solution is localised generation (in the community) and by using this we could meet CO2 targets without reducing the ammount generated from coal and oil. Also most people do not want a car they can drive 100 miles, and then re-charge over night. They want it to charge at a filling station in about the time it takes to refill a car, a little longer would be acceptable, say 5-10 mins.
The problem is almost nobody wants a car that takes 10 hours to charge. People are used to driving and stopping at a filling station when they need to. The solution is batteries like the Altair NanoSafe, used in the Lightning car, which can charge in 5 minutes from a 440V industrial 3-phase supply. This however will put a load on the grid. In summary the grid is fine for cars most people don't want.
The Altair NanoSafe battery is being used in this car: http://www.lightningcarcompany.co.uk/
My company have been successfully migrating VMs from 32bit Intel to 64bit AMD to 64bit Intel for years. We use Linux VServers and OpenVZ. This shared kernel approach to virtualisation is much lower overhead than VMWare, Xen or KVM. We can even run different distro's inside the VMs, the only limitiation is that all the VMs see the same Linux kernel version. So whilst we haven't done this with a hypervisor style VM, for what we want (migrating server images between physical hosts, backing up server images) Linux VServers/OpenVZ is a much better choice anyway.
Give away the single player mode as the demo, and charge a subscription for the multi-player online mode. It works, its a business model, everybody's happy.
In the UK "Be" internet have 24Mb/s (if you live close enough to a supported exchange) and have a 1:1 contention ratio. So if I pay for a Be account with 1:1 contention ratio, I am already paying to be able to access high bandwidth content. Why should the BBC pay as well? If your ISP does not want to pay for the upgrades to their networks, just change ISP to one who does. There are obviously ISPs who have paid for the extra bandwidth, and still charge a resonable rate, the other ISPs are just wining about not getting enough $$$ because they are greedy.
What about Semco? They have no IT department (at least not at the time the last book was written). Let users take responsibility for their own machine... If they can't use it then they have to use pen and paper. If one employee is more productive because he keeps his computer up and running, he is the employee I want. If you crash your PC, and as a result lose a big contract, that is your own fault. So Let users manage their own PCs but you also have to remove the safety net of an IT department.
Linux has alredy had this functionality for years: su nobody -c firefox
The Panasonic R7 is the best ultralight IMHO... 2 pounds weight, 2 gig ram, dual core CPU 1024x768 graphics and 8 hour battery life. Passive cooling (no fan) means it quiet too.
There is an issue regarding patents here. With the GPL you cannot distribute the software/hardware if you are aware of a patent that would affect the software/hardware. With MIT/BSD there is no such provision, so I can patent my device, and then freely distribute the designs under the MIT/BSD license. I can then sue anyone who implements those supposedly free designs for patent infingement.
Still think my panasonic R4 is better... its lighter 999 gramms (3lbs = 1.36kg) has an 8 hour battery life, and changeable battey... okay its a bit thicker, but its smaller in length and width (9"x7.2"x0.9") even though its thicker at the back (1.6") this gives the whole thing a nice downward slope... I might upgrade to the new R7 though as mine only has a pentium-M 1.2GHz being a couple of years old, and the new ones have a core2-duo. This quote sums it up quite nicely: "The remarkable 2 lb Panasonic R7 has an 8 hour battery life, and comes in 11 colors."
Actually science can never prove anything, only disprove things. How it works is this... we don't understand something, somebody proposes an idea (a hypothesis), people conduct experiments. If no evidence contradicting the idea is found it is promoted to a theory. However there is the possibility that new evidence can be found at any time that contradicts the theory, and invalidates it. Hence the scientific method can only ever disprove theories... positive proof is impossible as it would require complete knowledge of everthing ever done, or going to be done, which is omniscience, ie God.
For example, Rutherford proposes his model of the atom (a hypothesis), people all around the world conduct experiments, and none of them (for a while) contradict his hypothosis, so some vague time later it gets generally accepted as a theory. Eventually some weird results show up, and people have to propose a quantum hypothesis to explain where Rutherford went wrong - however because Rutherfords model is still useful to understand things in an approximate way, it still maintains its status as a theory.
So here we see infact _all_ theories are wrong, in that they are either inaccurate (but we still use them) or they are yet to be proved wrong by some more in-depth experiment yet to be performed. (note: this itself is a hypothesis, as statistically a theory might be correct by chance, however in an ininitely complex universe, this probability tends to zero)
On this basis, I propose the hypothosis that God exists, If after some time you cannot disprove my hypothesis, it gets promoted to a theory. Infact as there connot be any proof that God exists (as proving God exists would deny faith, and faith is a necessary part of religeon) what we have is the "null hypothesis", that is something that is by definition impossible to disprove, and therefore God exists! corollary: but therefore He doesn't, because that denies faith.
However we know from above _all_ theories are wrong, so God does not exist. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the effect on the corollary to my theory, under the assumption that all theories are wrong.
Of course if we ignore what the causes are, and we believe this report, we are left with the fact that by going after P2P file sharers aggressively, the record industry is attacking its best customers... this does not seem sensible behaviour for any business.
The problem is not the spin down time, but the fact that the drive is being spun up too frequently. You should use the features of laptop-mode to change the page-cache write back time... use lm_profiler to find which processes are causing the spin-ups, and disable, or reconfigure them to cause less frequent writes. This will catch all reads and writes to the disk from processes, but not from the kernel (swap)... so disable swap, and your laptop should go for hours without a disk access when idle...
Of course nothing can stop disk accesses if you are actually loading or saving data...
Another thing to consider is setting your laptop to suspend to RAM when idle, I know some people have problems with this, but it works perfectly for me.
Except Linux has supported _more_ devices than any version of Microsoft-windows for some time now. Okay so most of those drivers are for older hardware that is no longer supported by new versions of Microsoft-windows... but that doesn't change the facts. You need to qualify your statement, and say what you mean. I guess something like "Microsoft Windows gets support for some new devices more quickly than Linux"... thats about it. I am not even sure there is any truth to OSX supporting more of anything than Linux, Apple-mac hardware is all the same after all.
Infact Linux supports more devices that any other operating system ever... and thats one of the advantages of open-source kernel drivers... they are maintained with the Kernel, so they remain usable through kernel architecture changes with zero effort from the original contributer of the device-driver. I am sure Microsoft would love to do this with windows, but of course they cannot, as they don't have the source code to the drivers they did not write themselves.
And what if I told you this 4TB server cost less than 1700 pounds?
It doesn't make any difference if its SATA or SCSI... It is the partition table format that is the problem. The BIOS boots by reading the partition table to find the first active partition then looking at the block numbers that mark the start and end of the partition. The BIOS only understands partition-tables with 32bit block numbers. 2^32 * 512 (max sector number) = 2TB... So infact any disk over 2TB is not bootable. Of course if the OS supports other format partition tables (like the EFI partition table format) then you can mount disks greater than 2TB, but you still cannot boot from them if the BIOS only supports 32 bit partition tables. As it happens my array is ATA to SCSI... this means it looks like a single giant 4TB SCSI disk to the computer, but is made up of 16 250Gb ATA discs. It is also RAID6 for extra redundancy because it uses a large number of discs making failure more likely... RAID6 is much better than RAID5 + 1 hot swap.