Instead of trying to churn out 48 Volts which is serious overkill to run a Wifi router, it seems to make more sense to engineer it for lower power. Slashdotters may remember the articles announcing Meraki's stuff. They built a cheap, low power autoconfiguring mesh network Wifi router. The indoor one is $50 and the outdoor is $100. They're bringing a solar product out as well, but apparently it's not ready for sale yet. Oh, and did I mention they run linux? Of course, any solar contractor could hook up a panel, inverter, and battery set to run one off solar now. The difference is the pre-engineered solution has the potential to be cheap.
That might be marginally true for the term grammar nazi given its now widespread use. However in conjunction with the OP's failure to present facts, lots of unfounded accusations, and the appelation of nazi to create an uncommonly used term, it certainly was meant to imply the opposition are like nazis.
It's pretty funny how comments bashing Wikipedia get modded up with such ease even when they have nothing insightful or informative to say. "You can very easily get your IP address banned if some Wikinazi disagrees with your opinion, no matter who knowledgeable or correct your opinion is." In addition to fulfilling
Godwin's law for us, it's false. One actually has to work pretty hard and behave pretty poorly to get blocked and it's really easy to get unblocked unless you're misbehaving. It's really nearly impossible to get blocked just for disagreeing with people. Any admin that did that would get blocked themselves. The reality is you have to misbehave to get blocked.
"There are a great many open source projects that really benefit the community. There are projects that are struggling and this funding would help them. Wikipedia is not one of them." - Oh yes, Wikipedia just gets millions of hits per day because it's pure trash, thank you for letting us know that it doesn't help anyone. I do however agree there are lots of deserving projects out there and that's why this credit card program is a great idea. It lets people donate without giving up cash flow. Even if you carry no balance, merchants still pay in the range of 4% to the cc company for the service and part of that fee is what goes to this donation.
Just because it's obvious to the author that the only thing to do with very smart kids is to move them ahead multiple grades, or separate them from their families and isolate them with other very smart kids, doesn't mean that's really the best way to maximize their potential
That's because just moving kids ahead faster does no good. I was years ahead in math in school because that happened to be the only subject our school would allow that for. We still had to fight the school board to allow it. But being ahead did little good because I still learned the material at the same superficial level as all the other students and was still bored to tears. And by the time I got to honors math at a relatively rigorous university, it made it feel like I'd never had more than junior high math in comparison to the material I was being presented.
What advanced students need is to learn the material at a deeper level so they can get to the real math (hint it's well past calculus) and be able to run with it. I still got my degree in math, but I had to do a lot of catching up even though in HS I had taken the most advanced classes available to me. But giving the more advanced material requires tailoring to the needs of the student (exactly what "special needs" students get). But there's no will right now to allocate those resources. And our country is hurting for it.
Dude, at least make a partial attempt to check your facts, especially when you're being snide about someone else's supposed errors. The ruling states "For the reasons stated above, the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights." http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200708101 65237718#comments in what appears to be the first sentence of the conclusion.
Well of course SCO v. IBM isn't fully decided, there's lots of paperwork and it's a different case with lots of claims and counterclaims. And Novell doesn't have to direct SCO to waive their claims against IBM. I haven't read the 120 page ruling myself, but it may be to the benefit of the Linux community for Novell to not force SCO to waive their claims. Then SCO v IBM could go to fruition and get the final ruling we all know is coming. That's what the GP post was referring to, it seems he missed the verbage from the court about what Novell can do (but does not have to--note "at it's sole discretion").
That could well be part of it--I don't know about graphics hardware specifically. But If you read what driver writers say, a big reason many companies don't want to release specs or opensource drivers is because their hardware is full of bugs and they don't want everyone to know how crappy it is. Add that to some hardware vendor's belief that the open sourcing of the driver will give away even small bits of competitive edge and you have the situation that we do where a lot of hardware doesn't have gpl or bsd drivers. What I can't understand is why they don't release specs for older hardware that's not on the competitive edge. I suspect it's because of the buggy hardware reason I gave above since that's the only reason I can see left.
You're right, it doesn't seem McClelland et al's paper makes the claims that Reuter's article does. Scientific American's article did a much better job explaining the realities and the SA author appears to have actually understood what McClelland et al were getting at.
This page has existed nearly since the beginning of Wikipedia. For a long long time it contained a disclaimer that it was just for the fun of it, and not to be taken too seriously. I think the disclaimer was taken off because it should be inherently obvious. Well apparently not to the submitter, who submitted what amounts to a flame bait story. Oh well, such is slashdot. Gotta get pageviews I suppose. But the submitter should have known better than to trump it up so much in the submission.
He said when profit was flat or negative, not the stock price. Yahoo doesn't carry more than the last three year's income statements, but those show still growing revenues. Not huge profit growth, but not flat either. The net income number is still an enormous one. The tax bill increased by 1.5 Billion from one year to the next.
But of course, the fact that the stock price has been so flat is clearly a dissapointment for Microsoft and it's because they've failed to offer anything truly compelling for customers. Google and Apple are the ones coming up with the great new ideas. That's why Microsoft keeps downplaying what the others are doing and acting like it's not a big deal that they themselves are failing to.
The energy return ratio on ethanol from corn is generally agreed to be about 1.3 meaning that for every unit of fossil fuel input you get 1.3 units of useable energy. That's pretty pathetic, and if that were the only factor you'd never do it. It's the subsidies that are allowing an inneficient crop to be used for ethanol. Biodiesel's energy ratio is over 3, especially for efficient crops but the corn lobby is stronger obviously.
Is it just me, or doesn't anyone else thing that MS must be rather worried about the fact that a large manufacturer is looking hard at selling a non-MS operating system?
Of course they are, but they also have a huge amount of pressure that they can put on Dell to not offer it through increasing the amount Dell has to pay for licenses. Eventually Dell may be able to live without Microsoft if Linux becomes viable, but that day isn't soon. So I find it hard to believe that Dell will go through with this and especially hard to believe they'll do a good job with it, but anything's possible. They are claiming on the blog they send you to after the survey that they are going to go through with it, but who knows. We'll see. You do make a very good point about this solving the chicken and egg problem, if done right. But Like I said I'm pretty confident MS will make sure it's not.
But firms that enter the market cause a shift in the supply curve (ie an increase in the quantity supplied at all prices), not just the increase along the same fixed supply curve that goes along with the higher demand. No offense, but this is fundamental Econ 101.
Even if you can justify a higher cost for everyone it would be extremely easy to show that the people that don't pay to support Wikipedia are free-riding on the work and financial support of those that do provide it. If Wikipedia is successful in producing high quality content, everyone will be a little better off because of that. That increase in standard of living may come from many sources, one possible one being the lowering of costs of everything that takes advantage of Wikipedia as a free research service during the development of a product or service and bringing it to market.
Even if you don't accept that economic effect, the minute rise in prices that might possibly come as a result of advertising on Wikipedia, would likely be dwarfed by the general benefits of a successful Wikipedia. Again successful defined in terms of high information quality and depth and breadth of coverage.
Ads raise the demand for the advertised goods, that's what they are designed to do. Increased demand results in increased prices, by the law of supply and demand.
In the short run that's true. But then the higher demand can of course also result in increasing supply as either more firms enter the market, or the supplier simply wants to produce more.
Replying to the grandparent post, what I can't figure out is what is the opposition to OPT-IN. That alone could make a fortune from the people that want to choose that as a donation method. But the people that are hysterically opposed to ads shut down even that. I say hysterically, because when you think of it all content on Wikipedia already has ads through mirror sites. The Wikimedia Foundation just isn't getting any of the money. Opt in ads have none of the downsides. After all, the reader has to choose that option.
You've actually made a decent comparison even though people will probably heckle you for it. Computer service is not great probably because the industry's margins are relatively low. But one little important fact to add is that even if Apple's service isn't great it's still practically the best in the industry. Consumer reports regularly puts Apple's service ahead of all other large consumer computer sales and service such as Dell, HP etc, or at least near the top in all categories.
I still grant your broader point that being king of the dipshits isn't necesarily a good thing.
Finally, while I contribute a lot, the quality of most articles is most definitely not fairly high. From random sampling, the large majority of articles are very poor quality. If all you want is a reasonable intro to a topic a decent percentage are ok for that. Anything more, and its a very small percentage of articles that are high quality. So yes, it's working to produce and improve material, but not fast enough to reach the goal of a high quality reference work. Hence the point of the essay, change is needed.
I do agree the way to fix it is stable versions (along with other problems such as vandalism being presented to the unwary reader), but your conclusion that the devlopers don't want to bother with stable versions is misplaced. I can't comment on the craptasticness of the code, but there have been several submitted patches implementing various stable version proposals. There is code that is ready, and the German Wikipedia is working on taking it live. Once a workable system is chosen the code will follow trivially.
I'm all for giving people choice, but lets at least make sure we're letting them make the right choice. The problem with the current system is that allowing people to drive 7mpg cars has a significant negative externality that they don't have to pay for. If the externality was accounted for and they had to pay for the higher polution then the game would be even. So add a carbon and other polutants tax/fee on that pays for reducing the polution and you're closer to a system that has the right incentives. Buy the thing anyway if you want to, but it's going to cost you. That way the costs of taking care of the polution are paid where they are incurred, instead of by everyone else.
Oh, and did I mention that the top prize is a new laptop?
No, you hadn't and if you actually read your story summaries you would have seen that in the first few sentences before that, it hadn't been mentioned.:P Ok, just kidding, and go Flying Dutchmen, Taco.
More importantly what another poster (Un1xlOsr or something like that:) mentioned, the redesign isn't the thing you should be working on. He laid out the other things that keep Slashdot from being a growing (and thus more profitable) web property, and instead have lead to it declining in quality and popularity.
That's kind of my point. You might as well link to where your numbers are coming from instead of your blog. Especially considering you did copy an error verbatim and it has been corrected on Wikipedia for quite some time now. I don't even think it existed for long at all in mistake form, and I wasn't the one the contributed the mistake.
The source for the numbers is from Briggs paper, which draws heavily on the NREL research also cited in the article. It is listed as a reference and discussed in the article but not cited directly to that fact. When the NREL's research money dried up, it seems all research into algal biodiesel is by private enterprises, and is focused on commercializing it. The issues seem to be cost, how to keep the algal strains focused on those that produce the most oil. But GreenFuel technologies claims to have a working system and to have deployed it at MIT's cogen facility. There hasn't been much else out of them besides press releases that I've seen, so I'm assuming they haven't figured out how to make it cost effective. Proposed algae systems can work on either air CO2 or power plant emissions, and I don't know about water usage. Some claims have been that salt water can be used if the right strains are grown.
My god, I was hoping you had made some of those errors copying it over, but there they are right on Ford's website. Sounds like Ford is just trying once again to explain why they are not helping to develop cleaner technology, but still want to say they are.
*Requires special... - Yes that's true biodiesel gels at higher temperatures
*Storage is a problem due to higher then normal risk of microbial contamination due to water absorption as well as a higher rate of oxidation stability which creates insoluble gums and sediment deposits - Did they really just say higher rate of oxidative stability?? Biodiesel is more biodegradable, thus more degradable and doesn't store for as long. There's tradeoffs--less toxic if you spill it means it doesn't store as well.
*Biodiesel tends to cause... - There's not really any evidence of this as it contradicts the last point of biodiesel being a good solvent/detergent. It cleans engine parts. If there is evidence of this, I haven't seen it, and Ford certainly doesn't present any.
*The methyl esters... - People have already pointed out that everyone else just switched to seals and hoses that are more resistant to this type of thing. Marginal cost difference.
*It is an effective solvent... - This is true, but the end of it is stupid sticking they're head in the sand. All you do it check your fuel filters more for a little while and once the crud is cleaned out you're better off.
Engine's just need to be designed for biodiesel and this won't happen until the market matures more and there are greater economic incentives to do so.
The other way to combat the free fatty acid (FFA) problem in the base oil is the use acid esterification before the base catalyzed transesterification. That way less soap is created, and less excess base catalyst is needed. The lower quality the oil input (the more it has been used for frying, etc or animal fats, etc) the more FFA's there are and the more it tips the balance towards the acid esterification step making sense. I'm not sure what most biodiesel plants actually do though, as it may be more industrially efficient to just deal with the extra soap rather than bothering with the acid step that needs neutralizing before the base step. It would depend on the quality of the oil comin in. I do know commercial plants wouldn't use a batch method, the continuous methods are more efficient for producing large quantities.
But you're right, these new reactors would still probably require filtering and drying of the oil to make it work well. I'd assume dirt particles would clog up the micro channels and make them worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of trying to churn out 48 Volts which is serious overkill to run a Wifi router, it seems to make more sense to engineer it for lower power. Slashdotters may remember the articles announcing Meraki's stuff. They built a cheap, low power autoconfiguring mesh network Wifi router. The indoor one is $50 and the outdoor is $100. They're bringing a solar product out as well, but apparently it's not ready for sale yet. Oh, and did I mention they run linux? Of course, any solar contractor could hook up a panel, inverter, and battery set to run one off solar now. The difference is the pre-engineered solution has the potential to be cheap.
That might be marginally true for the term grammar nazi given its now widespread use. However in conjunction with the OP's failure to present facts, lots of unfounded accusations, and the appelation of nazi to create an uncommonly used term, it certainly was meant to imply the opposition are like nazis.
It's pretty funny how comments bashing Wikipedia get modded up with such ease even when they have nothing insightful or informative to say. "You can very easily get your IP address banned if some Wikinazi disagrees with your opinion, no matter who knowledgeable or correct your opinion is." In addition to fulfilling Godwin's law for us, it's false. One actually has to work pretty hard and behave pretty poorly to get blocked and it's really easy to get unblocked unless you're misbehaving. It's really nearly impossible to get blocked just for disagreeing with people. Any admin that did that would get blocked themselves. The reality is you have to misbehave to get blocked.
"There are a great many open source projects that really benefit the community. There are projects that are struggling and this funding would help them. Wikipedia is not one of them." - Oh yes, Wikipedia just gets millions of hits per day because it's pure trash, thank you for letting us know that it doesn't help anyone. I do however agree there are lots of deserving projects out there and that's why this credit card program is a great idea. It lets people donate without giving up cash flow. Even if you carry no balance, merchants still pay in the range of 4% to the cc company for the service and part of that fee is what goes to this donation.
Just because it's obvious to the author that the only thing to do with very smart kids is to move them ahead multiple grades, or separate them from their families and isolate them with other very smart kids, doesn't mean that's really the best way to maximize their potential
That's because just moving kids ahead faster does no good. I was years ahead in math in school because that happened to be the only subject our school would allow that for. We still had to fight the school board to allow it. But being ahead did little good because I still learned the material at the same superficial level as all the other students and was still bored to tears. And by the time I got to honors math at a relatively rigorous university, it made it feel like I'd never had more than junior high math in comparison to the material I was being presented.
What advanced students need is to learn the material at a deeper level so they can get to the real math (hint it's well past calculus) and be able to run with it. I still got my degree in math, but I had to do a lot of catching up even though in HS I had taken the most advanced classes available to me. But giving the more advanced material requires tailoring to the needs of the student (exactly what "special needs" students get). But there's no will right now to allocate those resources. And our country is hurting for it.
Dude, at least make a partial attempt to check your facts, especially when you're being snide about someone else's supposed errors. The ruling states "For the reasons stated above, the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights." http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200708101 65237718#comments in what appears to be the first sentence of the conclusion.
Well of course SCO v. IBM isn't fully decided, there's lots of paperwork and it's a different case with lots of claims and counterclaims. And Novell doesn't have to direct SCO to waive their claims against IBM. I haven't read the 120 page ruling myself, but it may be to the benefit of the Linux community for Novell to not force SCO to waive their claims. Then SCO v IBM could go to fruition and get the final ruling we all know is coming. That's what the GP post was referring to, it seems he missed the verbage from the court about what Novell can do (but does not have to--note "at it's sole discretion").
I was under the impression that a new scheduler that was supposed to drastically improve performance went into the kernel a couple years ago?
There was and it did. That was the O(1) scheduler. (significantly behind FreeBSD's O(1) scheduler btw.) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O(1)_scheduler
This patchset is different, it is an interactivity patch that works to be more fair to desktop processes, making the desktop feel more snappy.
That could well be part of it--I don't know about graphics hardware specifically. But If you read what driver writers say, a big reason many companies don't want to release specs or opensource drivers is because their hardware is full of bugs and they don't want everyone to know how crappy it is. Add that to some hardware vendor's belief that the open sourcing of the driver will give away even small bits of competitive edge and you have the situation that we do where a lot of hardware doesn't have gpl or bsd drivers. What I can't understand is why they don't release specs for older hardware that's not on the competitive edge. I suspect it's because of the buggy hardware reason I gave above since that's the only reason I can see left.
You're right, it doesn't seem McClelland et al's paper makes the claims that Reuter's article does. Scientific American's article did a much better job explaining the realities and the SA author appears to have actually understood what McClelland et al were getting at.
This page has existed nearly since the beginning of Wikipedia. For a long long time it contained a disclaimer that it was just for the fun of it, and not to be taken too seriously. I think the disclaimer was taken off because it should be inherently obvious. Well apparently not to the submitter, who submitted what amounts to a flame bait story. Oh well, such is slashdot. Gotta get pageviews I suppose. But the submitter should have known better than to trump it up so much in the submission.
He said when profit was flat or negative, not the stock price. Yahoo doesn't carry more than the last three year's income statements, but those show still growing revenues. Not huge profit growth, but not flat either. The net income number is still an enormous one. The tax bill increased by 1.5 Billion from one year to the next.
But of course, the fact that the stock price has been so flat is clearly a dissapointment for Microsoft and it's because they've failed to offer anything truly compelling for customers. Google and Apple are the ones coming up with the great new ideas. That's why Microsoft keeps downplaying what the others are doing and acting like it's not a big deal that they themselves are failing to.
The energy return ratio on ethanol from corn is generally agreed to be about 1.3 meaning that for every unit of fossil fuel input you get 1.3 units of useable energy. That's pretty pathetic, and if that were the only factor you'd never do it. It's the subsidies that are allowing an inneficient crop to be used for ethanol. Biodiesel's energy ratio is over 3, especially for efficient crops but the corn lobby is stronger obviously.
Is it just me, or doesn't anyone else thing that MS must be rather worried about the fact that a large manufacturer is looking hard at selling a non-MS operating system?
Of course they are, but they also have a huge amount of pressure that they can put on Dell to not offer it through increasing the amount Dell has to pay for licenses. Eventually Dell may be able to live without Microsoft if Linux becomes viable, but that day isn't soon. So I find it hard to believe that Dell will go through with this and especially hard to believe they'll do a good job with it, but anything's possible. They are claiming on the blog they send you to after the survey that they are going to go through with it, but who knows. We'll see. You do make a very good point about this solving the chicken and egg problem, if done right. But Like I said I'm pretty confident MS will make sure it's not.
But firms that enter the market cause a shift in the supply curve (ie an increase in the quantity supplied at all prices), not just the increase along the same fixed supply curve that goes along with the higher demand. No offense, but this is fundamental Econ 101.
Even if you can justify a higher cost for everyone it would be extremely easy to show that the people that don't pay to support Wikipedia are free-riding on the work and financial support of those that do provide it. If Wikipedia is successful in producing high quality content, everyone will be a little better off because of that. That increase in standard of living may come from many sources, one possible one being the lowering of costs of everything that takes advantage of Wikipedia as a free research service during the development of a product or service and bringing it to market.
Even if you don't accept that economic effect, the minute rise in prices that might possibly come as a result of advertising on Wikipedia, would likely be dwarfed by the general benefits of a successful Wikipedia. Again successful defined in terms of high information quality and depth and breadth of coverage.
Ads raise the demand for the advertised goods, that's what they are designed to do. Increased demand results in increased prices, by the law of supply and demand.
In the short run that's true. But then the higher demand can of course also result in increasing supply as either more firms enter the market, or the supplier simply wants to produce more.
Replying to the grandparent post, what I can't figure out is what is the opposition to OPT-IN. That alone could make a fortune from the people that want to choose that as a donation method. But the people that are hysterically opposed to ads shut down even that. I say hysterically, because when you think of it all content on Wikipedia already has ads through mirror sites. The Wikimedia Foundation just isn't getting any of the money. Opt in ads have none of the downsides. After all, the reader has to choose that option.
You've actually made a decent comparison even though people will probably heckle you for it. Computer service is not great probably because the industry's margins are relatively low. But one little important fact to add is that even if Apple's service isn't great it's still practically the best in the industry. Consumer reports regularly puts Apple's service ahead of all other large consumer computer sales and service such as Dell, HP etc, or at least near the top in all categories.
I still grant your broader point that being king of the dipshits isn't necesarily a good thing.
It's really not enough to run the site considering the growth. First consider the financials to have a look at the expenses. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2 /28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf a fstats/trafficstats-yearly.png
Then look at the traffic growth path:
http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/tr
Putting those together it will cost many times last years expenses just to keep the site running, much less reach the real goal of getting information to people in their language. Many of those people have no internet access.
Finally, while I contribute a lot, the quality of most articles is most definitely not fairly high. From random sampling, the large majority of articles are very poor quality. If all you want is a reasonable intro to a topic a decent percentage are ok for that. Anything more, and its a very small percentage of articles that are high quality. So yes, it's working to produce and improve material, but not fast enough to reach the goal of a high quality reference work. Hence the point of the essay, change is needed.
All your incomes (and assets) are belong to us!
I do agree the way to fix it is stable versions (along with other problems such as vandalism being presented to the unwary reader), but your conclusion that the devlopers don't want to bother with stable versions is misplaced. I can't comment on the craptasticness of the code, but there have been several submitted patches implementing various stable version proposals. There is code that is ready, and the German Wikipedia is working on taking it live. Once a workable system is chosen the code will follow trivially.
I'm all for giving people choice, but lets at least make sure we're letting them make the right choice. The problem with the current system is that allowing people to drive 7mpg cars has a significant negative externality that they don't have to pay for. If the externality was accounted for and they had to pay for the higher polution then the game would be even. So add a carbon and other polutants tax/fee on that pays for reducing the polution and you're closer to a system that has the right incentives. Buy the thing anyway if you want to, but it's going to cost you. That way the costs of taking care of the polution are paid where they are incurred, instead of by everyone else.
Oh, and did I mention that the top prize is a new laptop?
:P Ok, just kidding, and go Flying Dutchmen, Taco.
:) mentioned, the redesign isn't the thing you should be working on. He laid out the other things that keep Slashdot from being a growing (and thus more profitable) web property, and instead have lead to it declining in quality and popularity.
No, you hadn't and if you actually read your story summaries you would have seen that in the first few sentences before that, it hadn't been mentioned.
More importantly what another poster (Un1xlOsr or something like that
That's kind of my point. You might as well link to where your numbers are coming from instead of your blog. Especially considering you did copy an error verbatim and it has been corrected on Wikipedia for quite some time now. I don't even think it existed for long at all in mistake form, and I wasn't the one the contributed the mistake.
The source for the numbers is from Briggs paper, which draws heavily on the NREL research also cited in the article. It is listed as a reference and discussed in the article but not cited directly to that fact. When the NREL's research money dried up, it seems all research into algal biodiesel is by private enterprises, and is focused on commercializing it. The issues seem to be cost, how to keep the algal strains focused on those that produce the most oil. But GreenFuel technologies claims to have a working system and to have deployed it at MIT's cogen facility. There hasn't been much else out of them besides press releases that I've seen, so I'm assuming they haven't figured out how to make it cost effective. Proposed algae systems can work on either air CO2 or power plant emissions, and I don't know about water usage. Some claims have been that salt water can be used if the right strains are grown.
My god, I was hoping you had made some of those errors copying it over, but there they are right on Ford's website. Sounds like Ford is just trying once again to explain why they are not helping to develop cleaner technology, but still want to say they are. ... - Yes that's true biodiesel gels at higher temperatures ... - There's not really any evidence of this as it contradicts the last point of biodiesel being a good solvent/detergent. It cleans engine parts. If there is evidence of this, I haven't seen it, and Ford certainly doesn't present any. ... - People have already pointed out that everyone else just switched to seals and hoses that are more resistant to this type of thing. Marginal cost difference.
*Requires special
*Storage is a problem due to higher then normal risk of microbial contamination due to water absorption as well as a higher rate of oxidation stability which creates insoluble gums and sediment deposits - Did they really just say higher rate of oxidative stability?? Biodiesel is more biodegradable, thus more degradable and doesn't store for as long. There's tradeoffs--less toxic if you spill it means it doesn't store as well.
*Biodiesel tends to cause
*The methyl esters
*It is an effective solvent... - This is true, but the end of it is stupid sticking they're head in the sand. All you do it check your fuel filters more for a little while and once the crud is cleaned out you're better off.
Engine's just need to be designed for biodiesel and this won't happen until the market matures more and there are greater economic incentives to do so.
The other way to combat the free fatty acid (FFA) problem in the base oil is the use acid esterification before the base catalyzed transesterification. That way less soap is created, and less excess base catalyst is needed. The lower quality the oil input (the more it has been used for frying, etc or animal fats, etc) the more FFA's there are and the more it tips the balance towards the acid esterification step making sense. I'm not sure what most biodiesel plants actually do though, as it may be more industrially efficient to just deal with the extra soap rather than bothering with the acid step that needs neutralizing before the base step. It would depend on the quality of the oil comin in. I do know commercial plants wouldn't use a batch method, the continuous methods are more efficient for producing large quantities. But you're right, these new reactors would still probably require filtering and drying of the oil to make it work well. I'd assume dirt particles would clog up the micro channels and make them worthless.