Hard links do not work across paritions/drives symlinks are what you want.
I think you may be misunderstanding what he's saying. Let's say you want to have a hard link to R:
The easiest approach doesnt even require a redirect. Simply point everything hard linked to the RAMdisk (R:). A simple batch file on startup is all it takes to set back up the ramdisk during boot so it's functional as if it was always there and always a part of the system. That also makes it easy to have the "safe copy" nicely tucked away for repeat reloading whenever one wants - or on each reboot when the ramdisk is set back up. I've used a similar scenario for various serving (ie: internet daemon) activities where using a ramdisk is ideal and better suited to hard caching or increasing cache size and expire to address high load systems. System starts, creates ramdisk R:, dumps a copy of the needed contents on it, starts appropriate daemons, with their hard links to the content on drive R:. A simple sync routine will ensure that changes made to the "original" content get written to the ramdisk as well. Etc, etc, etc... you get the picture.
Thus, the hardlink pointer is being pointed to a structure that allows such... no partition/drive spanning... simply pointing to the ramdisk, which can be recreated each and every boot.
Actually, it will also come in handy for various people with disabilities. One of our employees used to use a similar setup to use the touch-laptop attached to his motorized wheelchair. His phone was mounted to it too...
Do they warn you before you buy it that you will be tracked by Google with every app and function that uses location awareness? If not, then they may have a case. Without that prior warning, someone may buy a phone, and not realize that it would be severely crippled since there is no way to opt out of this tracking without losing core functionality on the phone as well as a wide array of apps.
They're Idiots. I just got my first Android phone. You get warned when you go through setup. You get warned when you install and start EVERY APPLICATION that they'll be tracking you. There is no ambiguity if you have half a brain.
Idiots.
Hmmm... by "severely crippled" do you mean "works fine"? My G1 had no location services enabled except GPS use for Nav (which is something I didn't have to use, and often didnt, because Nav would drain the G1 battery faster than it could be charged). So... with a fully functional phone, I could easily have gotten away with not using location aware services.
On my G2, I CHOOSE to use those services (Latitude, Facebook Places (which is faaaaaaar worse than any Google location aware services - Google at least doesnt sell out the information), Nav and rarely search with location awareness).
And honestly, even if things were quite the way you say, you forget one MAJOR fact (it's a multiparter):
(1a) When you turn the phone on, ie, usually DAY ONE, you get presented with all this information, and every app that can use location awareness tells you it does, combined with (1b) the MINIMUM "remorse" period in ANY state is 14 days for full, free, unpenalized return... 30 in some states, like California.
Thus, they could have easily turned in their phone for a full credit, full contract cancellation and not had any worries. Instead, they WAIT to finally decide it's an issue to them? BULLSHIT! Thus, no matter how you want to look at it, they've got no leg to stand on. From DAY ONE, they knew the ramifications and had PLENTY of time to return the phone and cancel their contract - or to replace the phone with one that has no location aware services.
Caps and bold not shouting at you - used entirely to point out the points making this case sit in the realm of the absurd.
I am not a light user either. I run legal torrents as well, and use Netflix almost constantly while playing four clients of Eve Online, and keeping that patched on two installs (around 4 GB of patches a month there) and running my own Teamspeak, Ventrilo, and Web servers.
Thanks. There was no typo in my post though.;-) I really did mean TERAbytes a month (heck, the forums and website alone come close to a terabyte during busy months). Once our friends started hitting the low hundreds, they were throttled (semi lucky one), port blocked (two semi lucky friends) or disconnected (totally screwed friend). They wouldnt offer us a suitable SLA either - unless we went to (slower) business DSL or (faster) T3 and up. You don't even wanna know what those would have cost.
Correct. The first thing the phone does when you got to set it up is ask if you want to share your location data with Google. If someone shows that Google collects that data even when told not to, then there is a problem. Otherwise there isn't. The big hoopla over Apple was that they collected data even when location services were turned off.
My location is personal. Much like other personal things, consent is the difference between fun and abuse.
Ya know, I think we all just made Google's case... I wonder if we can all split a chunk of the legal fees...;-)
...separate issue from google collecting location data all the time.
Huh? My GPS only turns on when I use Maps, Latitude or Nav (or do a Facebook check-in). And those are all by choice with me fully knowing the repercussions (since Google spells them out pretty clearly).
And as far as user agreements, in this corporately run society, you have only two choices: take it or leave it.
I've chosen to leave it and I'm quite happy, thank-you-very-much.
Entirely irrelevant to this discussion, since you can actually choose not to turn on location aware services on Android (and they are off by default). Additionally, the "user agreement" warning for this is two sentences that are easy to understand.
this mandatory "give phone makers your location all the time" thing has got to be put down.
Unless a CARRIER modified some app or service on the phone, Google is VERY clear about their location aware services, and allow enabling or disabling them. Thus, (a) either these people are idiots, or (b) they need to sue the CARRIER who fucked with the software to hide the location awareness aspects. Either way, Google is not the issue here.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. Google is very clear about the ramifications of their location based/enhanced services. Either these people are idiots, or they need to sue whatever carrier modified the code to not sure Google's location aware warnings.
I've played around with Google's OCR framework (tesseract) and it is far from perfect. So, this isn't really a surprise.
Its also far from new. Didn't they get that from some long dead Open Source project?
Answered in the order you mentioned each:
Yes, far from new (project started 26 years ago).
No, not long dead. Just "recently" (roughly 6 years ago, give or take) open sourced and ported/compiled for Linux, OS/2 (and other platforms I am sure).
Yes (open source project), and I think it was called... Tesseract. Kinda like the poster you responded to mentioned.;-)
To save you the work, it was an HP/UNLV project, started in 1985, that was open-sourced in 2005. It is still available on SourceForge.
If you can get Verizon FiOS where you are, get it. I have it in Glen Burnie, and love it. I have 25/25, and routinely hit those speeds, have never had an item blocked (my own web server..no email server yet) and don't see throttling on my connection for any service (bittorent included).
I use way too much traffic (hint: see my sig) to use FIOS. At my level (from friends' experiences in the area, who use about 1/10th the traffic), they throttle, block or entirely disconnect. As I run the STP2 Post Production FTP servers, my bandwidth usage often hits into the multi-terabyte range per month... so while you haven't had a problem, I do know people running into the 100-250GB range who are (as you can see, 1/10th of my current traffic is no small number).
And, whatever call centers service this area are pathetic. Sadly, for my paying job, I've run into innumerable times I've had to call FIOS support on behalf of a customer. In that, Cablevision is top of the line. No "read questions from a script" and very easy to ask for the next level at any point in the call (and even if I dont ask, and what I start talking about is above their heads, they OFFER to transfer me).
For small scale stuff, they're probably a good fit - but alas, I've long since passed that stage.
Wow, just give up. You just admitted I am correct in that the map only shows "warm areas", that our current drilling methods can cause geological instability, and more.
As for the USGS thing... believe THEM. Look for their actual stats and info - but NOT the "keep the public from worrying" crap that's full of lies and contradictions.
Now, as for the "only" super volcano in the US... I mentioned this before, Yellowstone is NOT the only supervolcano in the US. much of those hot spots on the map are OTHER supervolcanoes. For instance, Long Valley, and Valles Caldera to name two (while not naming ones we've found more recently in the last few years). Long Valley and Valles (in conjunction with Yellowstone) cover a large portion of the warm zones on that map. And what sits inbetween are supervolcano created land structures (another big chunk of the map) built with "rock" of entirely different compositions that we have not yet adequately studied.
When it comes to natural geothermal/hydrothermal systems and supervolcanoes, our knowledge barely scratches the surface. As a matter of fact, for much of it, by the definition of such terms, we don't even have (scientific) theories to explain much of what we see (or dont see but speculate). All we have are ideas which do not fit the definition of scientific theory. That's how little we've progressed in that area - as most geologists will (or already have) admit(ted).
Eve Online...single shard, single universe... MS SQL server.
What AC below said...
This is the persistence layer of EVE Online. There is only one database server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008. This is backed up using online backups to the 'old' TQ DB hardware, a fiber channel RAID array. The current database resides entirely on solid state disk drives, two RAMSAN400 and 2 RAMSAN500 units from Texas Memory Systems. They are not SSD RAID disks, but rather single disk drives capable of high data throughput but crucially fully random requests. On traditional hard drives this incurs a lag due to disk seek operations while read heads are placed in the correct position on the platter and the data is read out.
At peak hours as of 2007 the database handles around 2-2.5k transactions per second, which generate roughly 40,000 input/output operations per second on the disks.
The server used is an IBM x3850 M2 server with 128 GB RAM and two 2.6 GHz six core Xeons (Dunnington) running Windows server 2008 x64 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
I could do that on 1/8th the hardware using a different DB solution.
I'll repeat: "Your whole post is based on confusion between the locations of subterranean magma chambers and the realizeable heat flow rates from drilled wells.". The fact that you defended yourself by once again mentioning the locations of subterranean magma chambers just drives the point home.
Let me explain this to you in a different way. The neat little article you point out is irrelevant, misleading, and improperly utilizes an entire data set while also dropping dozens of inter-related data sets. That "report" means absolutely nothing. It's entirely designed to push an agenda - the same agenda that nearly caused us to create a massive geothermal plant on the Yellowstone Volcano (if it weren't for environmentalists fighting that, it may just have happened, for as short lived as the project (and us) would have been).
Here's a few cases in point about such idiotic "reports" (that are not reports, but agenda pushing nonsense).
First, that document does not properly map out the following CRUCIAL data needed to determine the viability of a geothermal plant - much less the viable size of one: (1) thickness (depth) of rock that needs to be drilled through (a couple miles, btw, is VERY far for our current technology), (2) type of rock (for instance, much of hot zones on that map are volcanic remnants from super-explosions... such as the entire Snake River Plains), (3) how characteristics of such rock affect drilling, stability, seismic "damage" and so on (for instance, those lava bed remnants are made up of rock with vastly different characteristics than the mountains the volcanic activity obliterated), (4) location, placement and activity of the "dormant"/ancient faults that riddle that area (common misconception: the "extinct" older fault lines are not active... they ARE active... just not as "explosively" active as the currently more active fault lines), (5) what affect drilling on or around such "dormant" faults will have, (6) what makes the area geothermally "suited" and how does that impact the safety of drilling in that area (for instance, is it a deeply plumbed geothermal system, or a shallow geothermal system sitting on top of a close-to-surface volcanic structure?), (7) how does the proximity to the "volcanic" structures that drive such warm areas impact the environment once we start drilling (for instance, at some of the geothermal plants in Greenland and Iceland, there are periods where humans cannot exist near the plant without special breathing apparatuses due to sulfur dioxide and other volcanic contaminates), (8) location and size of hotspots (as a for instance, sorry, but Yellowstone's CALDERA is far more massive than the little triangle representing it - and it's magma chamber DWARFS the caldera)... I could go on and on...
Basically, the "report" you point out does not address ANY of that, making it and it's map useless for pointing out suitable areas for geothermal power.
Now... on to the dangers... large scale geothermal plants (building and/or operation) have ALREADY caused earthquakes... inotherwords, seismic activity increases due to man's interference combined with the geothermal and volcanic activity that are the cause of the hotspot. As only two examples, France and Switzerland can attest to this.
Now, digging further into the idiocy of these "reports" - including idiotic, and incorrect reports from places as "esteemed" as the USGS... these, while not directly relevant to the actual topic (though relevant in other ways) are simply examples to show you just how lacking in validity the "mass released to the public" reports are. Read Bob Christensen's report from a while back about Yellowstone. First, he starts with his conclusion (huh? Don't most scientists provide facts and observations first, along with a smattering of statistics perhaps, and then CLOSE with their summary and conclusion?). His conclusion is largely contradicted in his very own almost 100 page report. He starts with downplaying the possibility of an erup
On top of that, the data is ancient, when we had a very limited understanding of such.
Yes, the ancient year of 2004, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and John McCain was only a child.
Your whole post is based on confusion between the locations of subterranean magma chambers and the realizeable heat flow rates from drilled wells.
Yep. that ancient year when Yellowstone was 1/10 the size we know it to be today, when we didnt realize there's an almost as large super volcano not too far south of it, and another one SW of it, and one in Washington State, and a couple regular volcanoes on that coast that are not nearly as exctinct as we thought.
In terms of the subject matter we are discussing, the data is VERY VERY ancient.
We already have plenty of places we know we can tap geothermal without messing with surface volcanoes.
Our current drilling technologies are routinely drilling 2 miles below the sea floor, starting a mile below the sea surface. We've got plenty of drilling tech to drill plenty of geothermal.
Note 1: I said, numerous times, SUBTERRANEAN volcanic structures. Yellowstone, for instance, has it's heart 3 or more miles below the surface.
Note 2: The Earth's crust, is on average, a LOT thicker than 2 miles... (ten+ times thicker)
Note 3: Please take a look at your map... the red areas are either (a) volcanic or (b) active faults or (c) geothermal features/areas powered by volcanic like structures below the surface or (d) all of the above. The geothermally active areas (dotting virtually the whole map's "hot areas") are powered by volcanic like subterranean features - like I said in an earlier post.
-C'mon, you can note much of that by looking for the little volcano icons on the map - or the little geothermal icons. And that map doesn't even include a few of the super volcanoes in the US, nor active regular volcanoes we didnt know existed (or thought were dead) - for instance, a few in Washington State that are missing. Nor does that map take into account the scale of the super-volcanoes it does mark. Yellowstone, for instance, is marked with a couple little triangles, which does not even remotely indicate that it's subterranean structure is larger (in the 2 dimensions that parallel the surface) than many states. That alone makes the map pretty useless.
On top of that, the data is ancient, when we had a very limited understanding of such. Don't believe everything you read.
Of course, the Pacific Ocean "looks" viable on the map... except for the water depths and added expense of bringing the power back to the mainland.
No, volcanoes are around only where the most irresistibly cheap geothermal is an option. Like when oil was first collected from only pools on the surface.
There's more than enough tappable geothermal power available without taunting fickle volcanoes. Though doing so in more remote areas will teach us more about both power and the volcanoes. There's plenty of live labs to try it without worrying about causing a "super-eruption".
Not quite accurate. In order for geothermal energy (on a scale needed to power cities) to be possible (note, I did not say economical), we'd need better equipment to determine where to drill, how far and so on. The Earth's crust, in most places, is pretty thick (for our current drilling technologies). The areas of "warmth" happen to interestingly coincide with subterranean structures such as... get this... volcanoes or volcanic structures or magma structures akin to their volcanic counterparts - or very thin portions of the Earth's crust that sit above... the magma of the upper mantle. I guess we could do the "drill till we're deep enough" scenario, but that'd be kinda silly.
So, perhaps I could have been more clear, though I thought I was with the "or subterranean volcanic features and structures" comment in my first paragraph. Wherever there's natural geothermal activity near or at the surface, there's volcanic or "volcanic like" features powering it. We have yet to find exceptions to that. In the other areas, perhaps it's far enough down to not create detectable geothermal activity - but that also means it's difficult or impossible to detect (with our current technology) for use as a power source - not to mention the fact that there is only so far we are capable of drilling with our current technology.
Look into companies not owned or invested in by big oil (like the ones BP owns or sells to as BP Solar - their crappo panels are about 1/2 the efficiency of the good panels available from companies really interested in good solar). Their panels are not nearly as high efficiency as they claim - even though they bought the tech and patents to make better panels. For instance, (and they are hard to come buy - for some reason, almost only crappy panels are imported), there are 315W panels (3'x6') that are smaller than most other companies' 100-180W offerings (usually around 4'x8'). The prices per watt are a lot more attractive as well. This means you save both space and money. These panels are made by well respected companies and offered with great warranties - some with a slower efficiency decline as well.
The interesting problem seems to be that where geothermal is a "viable" option, there interestingly sits a volcano or subterranean volcanic features and structures.
There was a plan a while back to create geothermal energy in Yellowstone. Even though we (by then) understood the fact that there was a massive, far from dormant volcano there, using it as a source of geothermal energy probably would have been disasterous - considering the new information we have recently gained that indicates the Yellowstone volcano is far far more massive than previously believed (and that even the caldera, already thought to be the second largest in the world, is also larger than originally believed). Keep in mind, much of the Yellowstone volcano is underground, so the part of the volcano I am discussing is it's magma chamber. It is now believed to be over 15,000 cu km big. While "back in the day" when we almost put a geothermal plant on top of it, we also thought it was just a little pool of magma. Then a few years ago, we thought it went far enough down that it was actually connected to the upper mantle. Today, we think it and it's surface plumbing may go a LOT farther down - to the LOWER mantle.
Sounds like dangerous folly to me. This brings up the problem with large geothermal plants (which need to be in such locations to operate at the size they are). We are finding out we know very little about these underground monsters - something that may (or may not) have very serious and very dangerous repercussions. For instance, what would have happened if we had fractured the cap on Yellowstone's magma chamber? It's apparently already more than full enough for an explosion on the level of some of it's earlier ones - all that is preventing that is apparently a greater thickness of rock above it (3-10 miles... though even that number has decreased as we've gained a better understanding). If we triggered a "super-eruption", the theories all pretty much indicate we'd end up eradicating much of the life on the plant (some immediately, a vast majority of the rest over time as crops and food animals died, creating a scarcity that could no longer support the billions of humans on the planet).
Ah... well, try their Extreme105 then, since that's what I am talking about when it comes to weird throttling and caps. Or try a bunch of bittorrent and see how fast you get throttled. I could never use them... I use bittorrent a lot (in bursts every few months for weeks straight). Oh, I should clarify, I use it for LEGITIMATE purposes, such as helping to seed our newest Star Trek Phase 2 Episodes, or to grab copies off the torrent to check out what speeds our viewers should be seeing (ie: how the seeds are handling it, etc).
I had Comcast down in MD for a while... switched to one of the dish providers. I was much happier (I already had high speed Internet from elsewhere, so that loss that most people would feel didn't apply to me - though for a while, we were using them, and could never get rated speeds, to which they kept pulling out the "up to" clause while our connection was down at dial-up speeds). Glad to hear they're at least treating you well, but contrary to the "hardly typical" usage patterns you think you have, you don't fit the criteria for the points I made - not being an Extreme 105 customer - nor being someone who uses a protocol that fits within their regular throttling scheme.
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Hard links do not work across paritions/drives symlinks are what you want.
I think you may be misunderstanding what he's saying. Let's say you want to have a hard link to R:
The easiest approach doesnt even require a redirect. Simply point everything hard linked to the RAMdisk (R:). A simple batch file on startup is all it takes to set back up the ramdisk during boot so it's functional as if it was always there and always a part of the system. That also makes it easy to have the "safe copy" nicely tucked away for repeat reloading whenever one wants - or on each reboot when the ramdisk is set back up. I've used a similar scenario for various serving (ie: internet daemon) activities where using a ramdisk is ideal and better suited to hard caching or increasing cache size and expire to address high load systems. System starts, creates ramdisk R:, dumps a copy of the needed contents on it, starts appropriate daemons, with their hard links to the content on drive R:. A simple sync routine will ensure that changes made to the "original" content get written to the ramdisk as well. Etc, etc, etc... you get the picture.
Thus, the hardlink pointer is being pointed to a structure that allows such... no partition/drive spanning... simply pointing to the ramdisk, which can be recreated each and every boot.
Could just not use the phone in the bath....
Actually, it will also come in handy for various people with disabilities. One of our employees used to use a similar setup to use the touch-laptop attached to his motorized wheelchair. His phone was mounted to it too...
...where Judges are applying an understanding of the technical issues, common sense, and considering the situation of ordinary citizens?
I'm going with "The Twilight Zone" - I've seen some pretty weird, implausible or downright impossible crap on that show.
Do they warn you before you buy it that you will be tracked by Google with every app and function that uses location awareness? If not, then they may have a case. Without that prior warning, someone may buy a phone, and not realize that it would be severely crippled since there is no way to opt out of this tracking without losing core functionality on the phone as well as a wide array of apps.
Hmmm... by "severely crippled" do you mean "works fine"? My G1 had no location services enabled except GPS use for Nav (which is something I didn't have to use, and often didnt, because Nav would drain the G1 battery faster than it could be charged). So... with a fully functional phone, I could easily have gotten away with not using location aware services.
On my G2, I CHOOSE to use those services (Latitude, Facebook Places (which is faaaaaaar worse than any Google location aware services - Google at least doesnt sell out the information), Nav and rarely search with location awareness).
And honestly, even if things were quite the way you say, you forget one MAJOR fact (it's a multiparter):
(1a) When you turn the phone on, ie, usually DAY ONE, you get presented with all this information, and every app that can use location awareness tells you it does, combined with (1b) the MINIMUM "remorse" period in ANY state is 14 days for full, free, unpenalized return... 30 in some states, like California.
Thus, they could have easily turned in their phone for a full credit, full contract cancellation and not had any worries. Instead, they WAIT to finally decide it's an issue to them? BULLSHIT! Thus, no matter how you want to look at it, they've got no leg to stand on. From DAY ONE, they knew the ramifications and had PLENTY of time to return the phone and cancel their contract - or to replace the phone with one that has no location aware services.
Caps and bold not shouting at you - used entirely to point out the points making this case sit in the realm of the absurd.
Above post should read: "Once our friends started hitting the low hundreds gigabyte range..."
I am not a light user either. I run legal torrents as well, and use Netflix almost constantly while playing four clients of Eve Online, and keeping that patched on two installs (around 4 GB of patches a month there) and running my own Teamspeak, Ventrilo, and Web servers.
Thanks. There was no typo in my post though. ;-) I really did mean TERAbytes a month (heck, the forums and website alone come close to a terabyte during busy months). Once our friends started hitting the low hundreds, they were throttled (semi lucky one), port blocked (two semi lucky friends) or disconnected (totally screwed friend). They wouldnt offer us a suitable SLA either - unless we went to (slower) business DSL or (faster) T3 and up. You don't even wanna know what those would have cost.
Correct. The first thing the phone does when you got to set it up is ask if you want to share your location data with Google. If someone shows that Google collects that data even when told not to, then there is a problem. Otherwise there isn't. The big hoopla over Apple was that they collected data even when location services were turned off.
My location is personal. Much like other personal things, consent is the difference between fun and abuse.
Ya know, I think we all just made Google's case... I wonder if we can all split a chunk of the legal fees... ;-)
...separate issue from google collecting location data all the time.
Huh? My GPS only turns on when I use Maps, Latitude or Nav (or do a Facebook check-in). And those are all by choice with me fully knowing the repercussions (since Google spells them out pretty clearly).
And as far as user agreements, in this corporately run society, you have only two choices: take it or leave it.
I've chosen to leave it and I'm quite happy, thank-you-very-much.
Entirely irrelevant to this discussion, since you can actually choose not to turn on location aware services on Android (and they are off by default). Additionally, the "user agreement" warning for this is two sentences that are easy to understand.
this mandatory "give phone makers your location all the time" thing has got to be put down.
Unless a CARRIER modified some app or service on the phone, Google is VERY clear about their location aware services, and allow enabling or disabling them. Thus, (a) either these people are idiots, or (b) they need to sue the CARRIER who fucked with the software to hide the location awareness aspects. Either way, Google is not the issue here.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. Google is very clear about the ramifications of their location based/enhanced services. Either these people are idiots, or they need to sue whatever carrier modified the code to not sure Google's location aware warnings.
...your spaghetti code will actually look like spaghetti!
Hey, I'm half Italian... I dont see the problem with that. ;-)
With no sauce...
Oh, screw that, then!!!
...your spaghetti code will actually look like spaghetti!
Hey, I'm half Italian... I dont see the problem with that. ;-)
I've played around with Google's OCR framework (tesseract) and it is far from perfect. So, this isn't really a surprise.
Its also far from new. Didn't they get that from some long dead Open Source project?
Answered in the order you mentioned each:
Yes, far from new (project started 26 years ago).
No, not long dead. Just "recently" (roughly 6 years ago, give or take) open sourced and ported/compiled for Linux, OS/2 (and other platforms I am sure).
Yes (open source project), and I think it was called... Tesseract. Kinda like the poster you responded to mentioned. ;-)
To save you the work, it was an HP/UNLV project, started in 1985, that was open-sourced in 2005. It is still available on SourceForge.
They could, but it would be a dick move. As much as I'd like to think so, it's just not true that everyone at the FBI is a dick.
Some are asses. ;-)
If you can get Verizon FiOS where you are, get it. I have it in Glen Burnie, and love it. I have 25/25, and routinely hit those speeds, have never had an item blocked (my own web server..no email server yet) and don't see throttling on my connection for any service (bittorent included).
I use way too much traffic (hint: see my sig) to use FIOS. At my level (from friends' experiences in the area, who use about 1/10th the traffic), they throttle, block or entirely disconnect. As I run the STP2 Post Production FTP servers, my bandwidth usage often hits into the multi-terabyte range per month... so while you haven't had a problem, I do know people running into the 100-250GB range who are (as you can see, 1/10th of my current traffic is no small number).
And, whatever call centers service this area are pathetic. Sadly, for my paying job, I've run into innumerable times I've had to call FIOS support on behalf of a customer. In that, Cablevision is top of the line. No "read questions from a script" and very easy to ask for the next level at any point in the call (and even if I dont ask, and what I start talking about is above their heads, they OFFER to transfer me).
For small scale stuff, they're probably a good fit - but alas, I've long since passed that stage.
Much thanks for the suggestion, though. :-)
Wow, just give up. You just admitted I am correct in that the map only shows "warm areas", that our current drilling methods can cause geological instability, and more.
As for the USGS thing... believe THEM. Look for their actual stats and info - but NOT the "keep the public from worrying" crap that's full of lies and contradictions.
Now, as for the "only" super volcano in the US... I mentioned this before, Yellowstone is NOT the only supervolcano in the US. much of those hot spots on the map are OTHER supervolcanoes. For instance, Long Valley, and Valles Caldera to name two (while not naming ones we've found more recently in the last few years). Long Valley and Valles (in conjunction with Yellowstone) cover a large portion of the warm zones on that map. And what sits inbetween are supervolcano created land structures (another big chunk of the map) built with "rock" of entirely different compositions that we have not yet adequately studied.
When it comes to natural geothermal/hydrothermal systems and supervolcanoes, our knowledge barely scratches the surface. As a matter of fact, for much of it, by the definition of such terms, we don't even have (scientific) theories to explain much of what we see (or dont see but speculate). All we have are ideas which do not fit the definition of scientific theory. That's how little we've progressed in that area - as most geologists will (or already have) admit(ted).
Eve Online...single shard, single universe... MS SQL server.
What AC below said...
This is the persistence layer of EVE Online. There is only one database server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008. This is backed up using online backups to the 'old' TQ DB hardware, a fiber channel RAID array. The current database resides entirely on solid state disk drives, two RAMSAN400 and 2 RAMSAN500 units from Texas Memory Systems. They are not SSD RAID disks, but rather single disk drives capable of high data throughput but crucially fully random requests. On traditional hard drives this incurs a lag due to disk seek operations while read heads are placed in the correct position on the platter and the data is read out.
At peak hours as of 2007 the database handles around 2-2.5k transactions per second, which generate roughly 40,000 input/output operations per second on the disks.
The server used is an IBM x3850 M2 server with 128 GB RAM and two 2.6 GHz six core Xeons (Dunnington) running Windows server 2008 x64 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
I could do that on 1/8th the hardware using a different DB solution.
I'll repeat: "Your whole post is based on confusion between the locations of subterranean magma chambers and the realizeable heat flow rates from drilled wells.". The fact that you defended yourself by once again mentioning the locations of subterranean magma chambers just drives the point home.
Let me explain this to you in a different way. The neat little article you point out is irrelevant, misleading, and improperly utilizes an entire data set while also dropping dozens of inter-related data sets. That "report" means absolutely nothing. It's entirely designed to push an agenda - the same agenda that nearly caused us to create a massive geothermal plant on the Yellowstone Volcano (if it weren't for environmentalists fighting that, it may just have happened, for as short lived as the project (and us) would have been).
Here's a few cases in point about such idiotic "reports" (that are not reports, but agenda pushing nonsense).
First, that document does not properly map out the following CRUCIAL data needed to determine the viability of a geothermal plant - much less the viable size of one: (1) thickness (depth) of rock that needs to be drilled through (a couple miles, btw, is VERY far for our current technology), (2) type of rock (for instance, much of hot zones on that map are volcanic remnants from super-explosions... such as the entire Snake River Plains), (3) how characteristics of such rock affect drilling, stability, seismic "damage" and so on (for instance, those lava bed remnants are made up of rock with vastly different characteristics than the mountains the volcanic activity obliterated), (4) location, placement and activity of the "dormant"/ancient faults that riddle that area (common misconception: the "extinct" older fault lines are not active... they ARE active... just not as "explosively" active as the currently more active fault lines), (5) what affect drilling on or around such "dormant" faults will have, (6) what makes the area geothermally "suited" and how does that impact the safety of drilling in that area (for instance, is it a deeply plumbed geothermal system, or a shallow geothermal system sitting on top of a close-to-surface volcanic structure?), (7) how does the proximity to the "volcanic" structures that drive such warm areas impact the environment once we start drilling (for instance, at some of the geothermal plants in Greenland and Iceland, there are periods where humans cannot exist near the plant without special breathing apparatuses due to sulfur dioxide and other volcanic contaminates), (8) location and size of hotspots (as a for instance, sorry, but Yellowstone's CALDERA is far more massive than the little triangle representing it - and it's magma chamber DWARFS the caldera)... I could go on and on...
Basically, the "report" you point out does not address ANY of that, making it and it's map useless for pointing out suitable areas for geothermal power.
Now... on to the dangers... large scale geothermal plants (building and/or operation) have ALREADY caused earthquakes... inotherwords, seismic activity increases due to man's interference combined with the geothermal and volcanic activity that are the cause of the hotspot. As only two examples, France and Switzerland can attest to this.
Now, digging further into the idiocy of these "reports" - including idiotic, and incorrect reports from places as "esteemed" as the USGS... these, while not directly relevant to the actual topic (though relevant in other ways) are simply examples to show you just how lacking in validity the "mass released to the public" reports are. Read Bob Christensen's report from a while back about Yellowstone. First, he starts with his conclusion (huh? Don't most scientists provide facts and observations first, along with a smattering of statistics perhaps, and then CLOSE with their summary and conclusion?). His conclusion is largely contradicted in his very own almost 100 page report. He starts with downplaying the possibility of an erup
Yes, the ancient year of 2004, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and John McCain was only a child.
Your whole post is based on confusion between the locations of subterranean magma chambers and the realizeable heat flow rates from drilled wells.
Yep. that ancient year when Yellowstone was 1/10 the size we know it to be today, when we didnt realize there's an almost as large super volcano not too far south of it, and another one SW of it, and one in Washington State, and a couple regular volcanoes on that coast that are not nearly as exctinct as we thought.
In terms of the subject matter we are discussing, the data is VERY VERY ancient.
We already have plenty of places we know we can tap geothermal without messing with surface volcanoes.
Our current drilling technologies are routinely drilling 2 miles below the sea floor, starting a mile below the sea surface. We've got plenty of drilling tech to drill plenty of geothermal.
Note 1: I said, numerous times, SUBTERRANEAN volcanic structures. Yellowstone, for instance, has it's heart 3 or more miles below the surface.
Note 2: The Earth's crust, is on average, a LOT thicker than 2 miles... (ten+ times thicker)
Note 3: Please take a look at your map... the red areas are either (a) volcanic or (b) active faults or (c) geothermal features/areas powered by volcanic like structures below the surface or (d) all of the above. The geothermally active areas (dotting virtually the whole map's "hot areas") are powered by volcanic like subterranean features - like I said in an earlier post.
-C'mon, you can note much of that by looking for the little volcano icons on the map - or the little geothermal icons. And that map doesn't even include a few of the super volcanoes in the US, nor active regular volcanoes we didnt know existed (or thought were dead) - for instance, a few in Washington State that are missing. Nor does that map take into account the scale of the super-volcanoes it does mark. Yellowstone, for instance, is marked with a couple little triangles, which does not even remotely indicate that it's subterranean structure is larger (in the 2 dimensions that parallel the surface) than many states. That alone makes the map pretty useless.
On top of that, the data is ancient, when we had a very limited understanding of such. Don't believe everything you read.
Of course, the Pacific Ocean "looks" viable on the map... except for the water depths and added expense of bringing the power back to the mainland.
No, volcanoes are around only where the most irresistibly cheap geothermal is an option. Like when oil was first collected from only pools on the surface.
There's more than enough tappable geothermal power available without taunting fickle volcanoes. Though doing so in more remote areas will teach us more about both power and the volcanoes. There's plenty of live labs to try it without worrying about causing a "super-eruption".
Not quite accurate. In order for geothermal energy (on a scale needed to power cities) to be possible (note, I did not say economical), we'd need better equipment to determine where to drill, how far and so on. The Earth's crust, in most places, is pretty thick (for our current drilling technologies). The areas of "warmth" happen to interestingly coincide with subterranean structures such as... get this... volcanoes or volcanic structures or magma structures akin to their volcanic counterparts - or very thin portions of the Earth's crust that sit above... the magma of the upper mantle. I guess we could do the "drill till we're deep enough" scenario, but that'd be kinda silly.
So, perhaps I could have been more clear, though I thought I was with the "or subterranean volcanic features and structures" comment in my first paragraph. Wherever there's natural geothermal activity near or at the surface, there's volcanic or "volcanic like" features powering it. We have yet to find exceptions to that. In the other areas, perhaps it's far enough down to not create detectable geothermal activity - but that also means it's difficult or impossible to detect (with our current technology) for use as a power source - not to mention the fact that there is only so far we are capable of drilling with our current technology.
Look into companies not owned or invested in by big oil (like the ones BP owns or sells to as BP Solar - their crappo panels are about 1/2 the efficiency of the good panels available from companies really interested in good solar). Their panels are not nearly as high efficiency as they claim - even though they bought the tech and patents to make better panels. For instance, (and they are hard to come buy - for some reason, almost only crappy panels are imported), there are 315W panels (3'x6') that are smaller than most other companies' 100-180W offerings (usually around 4'x8'). The prices per watt are a lot more attractive as well. This means you save both space and money. These panels are made by well respected companies and offered with great warranties - some with a slower efficiency decline as well.
The interesting problem seems to be that where geothermal is a "viable" option, there interestingly sits a volcano or subterranean volcanic features and structures.
There was a plan a while back to create geothermal energy in Yellowstone. Even though we (by then) understood the fact that there was a massive, far from dormant volcano there, using it as a source of geothermal energy probably would have been disasterous - considering the new information we have recently gained that indicates the Yellowstone volcano is far far more massive than previously believed (and that even the caldera, already thought to be the second largest in the world, is also larger than originally believed). Keep in mind, much of the Yellowstone volcano is underground, so the part of the volcano I am discussing is it's magma chamber. It is now believed to be over 15,000 cu km big. While "back in the day" when we almost put a geothermal plant on top of it, we also thought it was just a little pool of magma. Then a few years ago, we thought it went far enough down that it was actually connected to the upper mantle. Today, we think it and it's surface plumbing may go a LOT farther down - to the LOWER mantle.
Sounds like dangerous folly to me. This brings up the problem with large geothermal plants (which need to be in such locations to operate at the size they are). We are finding out we know very little about these underground monsters - something that may (or may not) have very serious and very dangerous repercussions. For instance, what would have happened if we had fractured the cap on Yellowstone's magma chamber? It's apparently already more than full enough for an explosion on the level of some of it's earlier ones - all that is preventing that is apparently a greater thickness of rock above it (3-10 miles... though even that number has decreased as we've gained a better understanding). If we triggered a "super-eruption", the theories all pretty much indicate we'd end up eradicating much of the life on the plant (some immediately, a vast majority of the rest over time as crops and food animals died, creating a scarcity that could no longer support the billions of humans on the planet).
Ah... well, try their Extreme105 then, since that's what I am talking about when it comes to weird throttling and caps. Or try a bunch of bittorrent and see how fast you get throttled. I could never use them... I use bittorrent a lot (in bursts every few months for weeks straight). Oh, I should clarify, I use it for LEGITIMATE purposes, such as helping to seed our newest Star Trek Phase 2 Episodes, or to grab copies off the torrent to check out what speeds our viewers should be seeing (ie: how the seeds are handling it, etc).
I had Comcast down in MD for a while... switched to one of the dish providers. I was much happier (I already had high speed Internet from elsewhere, so that loss that most people would feel didn't apply to me - though for a while, we were using them, and could never get rated speeds, to which they kept pulling out the "up to" clause while our connection was down at dial-up speeds). Glad to hear they're at least treating you well, but contrary to the "hardly typical" usage patterns you think you have, you don't fit the criteria for the points I made - not being an Extreme 105 customer - nor being someone who uses a protocol that fits within their regular throttling scheme.