So after they've sold this second property after being turfed out by the electorate with the mortgage, furnishings and other expenses paid for by the taxpayer then they do, of course, have to return any capital gains made to the taxpayer and any residual value in the furnishings and other items? Nope - I thought not...
A general truth, once anybody gets there hands on other people's money (whether politicians, bankers, lawyers, proponents of Olympic gems bids, you name it) then it will find an undeserving home.
The most telling thing is the £300 free-standing mirror. Not that anybody is suggesting some politicians are a trifle narcissistic. I have to be fair - I'm pretty sure that neither Michael Foot or John Prescott ever made use of that particular allowance judging by their appearance.
OK - let's take on the principle that we should have usage-negative taxing on CO2 emissions (this is we tax all CO2 emission on the same basis whether it's used for heating, airline travel, industrial production etc.) then you'd have to deal with the increased pricing in those areas. Assuming that $85 per tonne is the "right" number (and I doubt that there's) a simple calculation, then for the average UK household you would see something liek the following :-
Approximately £90 per year extra on electricity bills
Approximately £180 per year on gas bills
Expect that airline trip to cost a more - it would add about £100 to a return flight to New York from the UK.
It doesn't stop there - much more energy gets used outside the home (industry, offices, farms, fertiliser etc.) and these would act as input costs into things that are bought.
Certainly it makes sense to me to adopt a usage-independent based pricing scheme if the aim is to drive the most cost-effective behaviour, but bear in mind that such an approach will have some huge social consequences. It will bear particularly hard on those who are not currently carrying their share of the CO2 burden (as they are "subsidised" in part by road users).
That's not to say I don't think it is a good idea. It would be much more rational and presumably the social issues could be dealt with. However, some people will lose out and people shouldn't expect such a change will necessarily mean that they will be better off, just because of a reduction in road fuel costs - it could be very easily outweighed by increases in other area.
Having had my card compromised twice in the space of four months, I'm getting familiar with this. Manning petrol stations and the like with short term staff who are her one week and gone the next doesn't help.
There clearly are ways of stopping cards being used abroad, at least for larger amounts, as I know a number of people who have been caught out this way when they haven't informed their bank and they can't get transactions authorised.
However, until we have a system of one-time passwords, then the whole credit and debit card system is vulnerable to replay attacks. In the interim, it strikes me that a sensible idea would be to allow customers to register a mobile phone number against their cards and receive an SMS every time there is an attempt to use it. It won't actually stop a fraudulent transaction, but it would certainly bring attention to it a lot faster. It would be easy to be able to return a message to alert the credit card company to a potential fraud.
That's until the credit card companies come up with a much more secure system. However, given the cost and length of time to get chip & pin in I wouldn't hold my breath.
I think the point about efficiency has been lots here (and 70% is beserk figure - you'd need a huge temperature difference to make that possible). However, it doesn't need to be that efficient - just sufficient power has to be generated to turn the fan. If there's 100W of thermal energy available and 7% of that could be turned into mechanical energy then that's 7W to turn the fan.
A CPU cooling fan I have is rated at 3W (although I have a chassis fan rated at just 2W). I suspect that the actual consumption is quite a bit lower - especially on temperature controlled cooling fans. So the energy saving isn't earth shattering, even if power supply overheads are taken into account. Just whether the energy savings will compensate for the extra used in manufacturing such a complex device is debatable (also it's quite liable to have a shorter lif if it is more complex).
As for the overclockers, there's bad news here (not that they tend to care one iota about power consumption save their ability to extravagantly cool it). Successful overclocking depends on cooling the processor to much lower temperatures than is required for normal running. As the thermodynamic efficiency of this device is inherently related to the difference between the heatsink and the ambient air in the case then this efficiency goes down (albeit that total heat energy available increases). To give an idea, to get 7% theoretical thermodynamic efficiency the chip thermal pad temperature would have to be 20 degrees above the ambient temperature in the case at anything like room temperature. So if it's 30 degrees air temperature in the case you need that to be at least 50 degrees. If they get anywhere remotely close to the theoretical figure for a carnot cycle I'd be amazed. The carnot cycle calculations make no allowances for things like mechanical losses. It would not surprise me if you need thermal pad temperatures closed to 60 or 70 degrees to hit an overall 7% thermodynamic efficiency.
It would be a nice little irony if the chassis cooling had to be boosted to make this little thing work. In all, I suspect this is an insignificant development and a much more elegant method of fanless cooling could be designed.
Well of course this is an obvious problem as bottles of cooking oil (readily usable as a diesel substitute) are always growing "clumps of goo" in the form of living organisms. Or rather they don't... Of all the potential problems with biofuel then this is the one that would least worry me. Any fuel sufficiently refined to work in a combustion engine is not going to be capable of sustaining life.
A nice common sense rule would be that if a WiFi configuration has no security on it is reasonable to assume that it is intentionally made free access (some people do that, although I wouldn't recommend it).
After all, the criminal law requires that to be found guilty then it has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Clearly if you crack the security system then that's clear evidence of intention. As an analogy, trespassing is not a criminal offence (except in a few special cases like on railways), but breaking a lock in order to enter is.
Perhaps if the police (and courts) followed this common sense rules the police can do something useful - like tracking down the people who have compromised my credit card security twice in three months.
It's always dangerous to criticise others for their spelling, and Liam O'Flaherty who is so proud of his Northern Ireland education, probably ought to know that supermarkets have aisles and not isles (and feeble explanations like supermarkets having islands of merchandise will not be accepted).
In addition, the comma after "Humans" really ought to be a semi-colon (the capitalisation is questionable, although a case might be made if this is making a point about the collection of humanity being some form of proper noun). Of course etc. is an abbreviation and should therefore sport a full stop to denote that. I was also taught that stringing two of those in a row was redundant (maybe another stylistic excuse might be made). Yogurt is also a perfectly acceptable spelling of that word; indeed I think it is usually of that form on the North American continent.
I'm not making any claims over my education - I was schooled in Slough and no doubt I will be taken to task. My escape is that this is a tongue-in-cheek posting and that a thick plating of irony deflects pretty well anything.
I can't think of one single reason why the IT department shouldn't be responsible for the electricity it consumes (apart from cases where gathering the information is disproportionately expensive). Electricity and related environmental are all fundamental cost inputs to running the IT services and surely have to be treated along with manpower costs, software licensing, equipment depreciation and so on. IT (like all business departments) are surely charged with a duty to run their services in a cost effective manner. Beyond mere cost issues, they will also have duties to comply with stated corporate policies - which might well include reductions in C02 emissions.
Certainly I would expect all medium and large data centres to know all their environmental costs - power, maintenance, building and so on. Rather more difficult if all you've got is a couple of small servers in an broom cupboard (but I guess we aren't talking about that sort of set-up here).
A more valid question is where should the boundaries apply. For instance, should an IT department be responsible for the power consumption of items of IT equipment outside the data centre or should that be devolved? Should the IT department be responsible for the power consumption of PCs? Should it be responsible for network kit in remote buildings? Then issues of span of control and costs of adminstering come into play.
It is not necessary to measure everything - assuming the IT department has a half-decent asset management system it's possible to estimate power consumption of distributed kit, including PCs, monitors, remote network kit and so on to a useful degree of accuracy. If there is no such reliable register - well very probably your whole IT deployment is heading towards a state of chaos (if it isn't there already) and the software licensing trolls will be heading your way some time.
We don't need to speculate on the ability of a terrorist to fly an airliner into a nuclear power station - the 9/11 perpetrators managed to fly an airliner straight into the front of the Pentagon. OK it's a very big building, but it's not that tall and the plane hit just above ground level. Finding a nuclear reactor in clear visibility on the coast would be easy.
What would have to be done is to make sure that if a Nuclear reactor was hit then it wouldn't result in the release of large amounts of radioactivity. I've no idea how strongly the containment domes are, but they are going to have to be mighty strong. A 777 packed with fuel at takeoff can weight up to 350 tonnes. Travelling at 500MPH or 222 metres/sec then that would be around 8,600MJ of kinetic energy. Even if we allow for some considerable reduction in maximum takeoff weight and allow say 5,000MJ. That's the same energy as in approximately 1,200Kg of TNT (of course that's a fraction of the energy contained in the tanks of a fully fuelled 777).
Whilst much of the fuselage is very light weight and fragile, there are some very dense objects (engines, undercarriage etc.). The experience at the Pentagon was these it was these heavy objects which punched holes through what was a very solid building (both sides I believe).
Now I've no idea on how a concrete dome is engineered, it's ability to withstand and deflect such an impact, but I'm sure it is an engineering challenge. We also know from experience that it is possible to hit fairly low buildings with an airliner with some accuracy. It would be unwise in the extreme not to design for this.
"I didn't know the throttles on a fly-by-wire aircraft weren't motorised, like the faders on a high-end mixing desk. I guess there's no real reason for them to be."
I would have thought that there is every reason to motorise them. If a pilot does have to take manual control and the levers had been left in some random position then either the switch would involve a rapid change in engine output (or at least a rapid change in the instructions to the engine - jet engines don't change power output as rapidly as a car engine). I suppose a pilot could estimate the right new position or it would also be possible to motorise the throttles so they move to the right place only when you switch to manual, but what's the point apart from maybe reducing a bit of wear-and-tear? Much better to motorise the throttle levers and that also has the great advantage of giving an immediate indication of the autothrottle working. It also means that a manual override be affected simply by grabbing the throttles and overriding a clutch mechanism (or some such equivalent). In reality I would have thought the whole throttle assembly and its ergonomics would be very carefully thought out to allow for rapid manual override.
What is so ambitious about a 25% cut in power consumption over a . Inneficient power supplies, more efficient power supplies, better power management, more efficient CPUs, DRAM and graphics.
I managed to substnatially reduce average power consumption on my home PC moving from a single core Athlon to quad core Intel through careful choice of components, better power management etc.
Of course some of the potential gain is bound to be swallowed up in higher specs but really 25% is not exactly demanding.
If Andy has the same lack of care and concern towards other road users as he exhibits in his grammar, and the content appears to indicate that this is so, then I hope he isn't driving or riding around this part of the world.
The video is wreckless because he didn't crash and leave a wreck. But reckless it most certainly is.
Many of us with experience of IBM in the past have seen the problems caused by organising sales along product lines. The interests of those selling mainframes was often directly in opposition to those selling competing AIX/Power based systems. What large customers wanted was the best solution - often what came up was something close to two competing bids from different teams rather than a complementary story. Often this split of self-interest was echoed in the structures of their customer's IT departments. The mainframe camp vs the UNIX camp later to be followed by the Windows camp (at which both the previous groups would sneer).
It's nothing like as bad now, but there are still shadows of these arguments (like Z-Linux vs x86 Linux issue still rumbles on in many IT departments).
"Why was the little red button not connected to the unfiltered side of the ups". Because it's actually called an emergency power off for good reasons - it's for very rare occasions when all power to all the servers and equipment has to be shut off immediately. It doesn't greatly matter that the mains voltage is providced from the UPS or not - the batteries will be designed to keep the centre running at full power for a couple of minutes before the auxilliaries kick in. It there's a fire or some chassis have gone live due to a wiring fault then there's plenty enough stored energy to cause a great deal of damage.
This thing required the glass to be broken so it's hardly an accidental thing. It's really rather difficult to protect equipment from attack by an insider. The fact that this guy blew his top because his Unix privileges had been withdrawn is interesting. Maybe it had become obvious that he had a volatile temperament. If so, then maybe he shouldn't be anywhere near the insides of a data centre anyway. In our datacentres sys admins do not normally have access to the computer halls.
In the final position, if the system is really so essential to keep the Californian power grid running on an hour-by-hour basis then you have to wonder why there isn't a backup centre. It doesn't require a disgruntled employee to kill a data centre - there are plenty of other ways of doing it.
This was prompted by JeffyPooh and his "To anyone using the word 'modem'" post.
The fact is that pretty well all long distance high-speed data transmission systems use modems. That's even when digital is used the name. That included "Digital Phones", "Digital Subscriber Line" and "Digital Television" - teh service may be digital, but the transmission is analogue. For the long distance part of the connections the signals are modulated and demodulated using schemes such as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM). GSM phones use a scheme called GMSK. Ethernet made use of PAM and so it goes on.
High speed purely digital signals are constrained to very short runs such as those in computer systems buses. The reason is that true digital signals are prone to all sort of long distance effects including signal skewing, interference, signal spreading etc. The only mid/long distance true digital standards, like RS232 and RS423 are inherently slow due to these effects. Relatively high speed digital interfaces, like SCSI are highly distance limited. (Before people quibble, yes I know that the signals are analogue, but they are interpreted digitaly by thresholds, differentials, polarity or whatever).
So in a very real sense a mobile phone includes a modem - that's how it communicates with the mast. In fact the journey that the data bits will take from the cellphone to the final destination will involve very many such modulation/demodulation steps. Quite possibly dozens. Of course that's not what the mobile phone company meant be using the cellphone as a modem here - they were just using it as a short hand term for how you connect a computer to the internet via the mobile phone.
All of this is made possible by the combination of incredibly high speed DA & AD converters and the modern miracle of Digital Signal Processing (DSP). This latter is a unheralded miracle which is one of the half dozen most important technologies in modern computing and telecommunication industry.
Another mistake that happens far too often - conflating energy with electricity use. The report states "IT now accounts for 10 per cent of energy consumption in the UK". That's going to be a difficult figure to support when in 2001 (according to the DTI) only about 9% of total energy use in the UK was "primary electricity".
That's not to say that IT doesn't need to be more efficient, but from the DTI's numbers it would appear that the actual percentage of energy consumption it is responsible for in the UK is nearer 1% than 10%. Now I've got no idea what they have included as IT - does it include everybody's domestic or even office PCs for instance? It's quite possible that the 10% is an underestimate of the electricity consumption.
Of course it's going to be vastly easier to make more power-efficient IT equipment than to do the same with transport. IT power efficiency (throughput/capacity per KW) improves fairly rapidly - the problem is the demand side. However, company economics will drive more efficient usage. Shifting stuff around inevitably uses energy. Of course using IT does, in theory, allow for less moving around of people and objects.
On the video feed, if these things are cost effective then you would have a point. However, the one Enterprise standard flash-based SSD I do know of which I've seen tested was over £150 per GB. Those sort of costs are higher than volatile memory (storing video files in main memory is much more efficient than pumping it through an I/O system). With efficient read-ahead algorithms, a single hard drive will easily be able to support five or more High Def video feeds (assuming efficient compressed).. For read-only data like that it is easy just to duplicate the data over multiple drives. That's very different to a transactional database where you need consistency of a highly dynamic enviornment.
With even 15K Enterprise drives costing less that £1.50 per GB then the SSDs will have a hard time cost-justifying something that is 100 times the unit cost if it's just a matter of running multiple drives for video feeds. Of course there are other costs like power, but even then the numbers don't look great. Also 230MBps isn't that high a rate for sequential access - it doesn't take many HDs to match that. By the time you get into several tens of High-Def video feeds then drive duplication will be required then, even for this option (by which time of course using system memory makes a lot of sense).
Of course we don't yet have pricing and there is a market for greatly improved transactional performance. It's certainly the future for high-performance storage, and that will no doubt include video streaming, but it will depend on price. The difference with the transactional database area is that there are technical limits imposed by the mechaniscal nature of the drives which cannot readily be overcome.
95% of the performance problems I see on large databases these days are I/O related.
As for 400 IOs a second off of traditional disks - well maybe if you are doing sequential I/Os, but for random-access type OLTP then 150 is nearer the mark. However, the real gain is not the number of I/Os - it's reduced latency, and it's especially reduced latency on random reads (Enterprise class arrays cache writes, and techniques like rolling up writes at the backend and striping can balance the traffic).
What I'm hoping to hear is that random read times are reduced by at least 90% to sub-millisecond and hopefully better. Large businesses and organisations struggle with transactional performance on large CRM, Billing and similar systems.
I'm not sure that the video-streaming thing makes a lot of sense as a market though - that sort of requirement fits large disks fairly well, and something that is overwhelming dominated by reads works very well with large volatile caches and duplication.
On the cost thing it would be nice to know how this compares with array-based cache. Arrays with 100s of GB of cache (plus battery backup) are freely available, if not exactly common or cheap (and it uses a lot of power).
Once of the biggest problems with this new generation of SSDs is that the arrays that these might fit wouldn't be able to cope with large numbers of these devices - my experience of a lot of Enterprise arrays at the top end is that the throughput is often a lot less than the back-end disks are able to achive. This sort of stuff is going to open up possibilities, but will also present the likes of EMC, HDS & IBM with major engineering challenges.
There are lots of people who talk glibly about the hyrdrogen economy. I have a supicion that many are just obsessed by this vision of producing only water. This stuff is in need of a reality check - it's far from clear that hydrogen is practical as an energy store. The whole cycle of production, storage and distribution is bedevilled by a lot of thermodynamically inefficient stages. Yes, using a fuel cell to generate electricity direct is notably more efficient than burning it (or anything else) in a combustion engine (although finding enough precious metals to build the things iby the hundreds of millions is going to get tricky), but the production/distribution/storage is full of thermodynamic inefficiencies. Just compressing hydrogen to 800bar uses 13% of its energy content and liquefaction 30%..
This is a nice little paper on the subject
http://www.efcf.com/reports/E13.pdf
The claim is that the consumer might only see 25% of the energy used in making the hydrogen in the first place.
The deep joy and irony of this story is that, having made so much money out of the innumerate, Camelot don't seem to understand that basic fact about much of their customer base. We'll now have the Jehova's Witnessess putting their members up from membership of Mensa.
I guess the mobile phone companies would love it. I guess it would work, and it would enhance the authentication mechanism. However, the downside of putting something like that into the actual authentication path is that it could be plagued by delays, poor reception, flat batteries, forgotten phones and so on. Imagine the queues at the checkout whilst somebody waited for their second SMS pin to come through. You'd need some form of way of dealing with those situations.
The advantage of the notification system is that I think it would be remarkably simple and cheap to implement and wouldn't delay the authentication. If you did the notification via SMS and somebody did spot something dodgy then it would be very easy to allow the card owner to reply with a suspect transaction message. It won't eliminate frauds, but they could be identified much quicker and the perpetrators might realise they are in grave danger of being identified much quicker.
Ultimately I'd still like to see the one time password identification scheme (that's until some bright spark in Government grabs the idea for ID cards). Lots of people are used to one-time passwords for signing onto their company systems.
The fundamental problem here is that the card authentication systems all have the same problem - security depends on static information like PINs, knowuing expiry dates, printed numbers on the back of cards and so on. It relies on every retailer having cast-iron security systems and is just wide open to snooping and fraud. The chip-and-pin sticking plaster system is hardly any more secure than the old signature-based system.
Until such time as the finance industry realises this and moves to a system that uses some form of one time password system, then all systems suffer from what is essentially a replay attack. Biometric identification systems also suffer from this if the reading is taken remotely (who knows if that fingerprint scan was spoofed or not?). Of course people won't want to carry around separate one-time password systems for each bank account, credit and debit card they carry, but if the finance industry got their heads together then it is surely possible to come up with a common device that can be used for authentication on multiple accounts.
I've no doubt there are a lot of technical and organisational difficulties here (for example, trusted third party authentication systems). No doubt there will be privacy concerns too for what amounts to a personal identification systems. I've also no doubt that some aspects of this can be broken, but if it is difficult enough then it just won't be cost-effective for the crooks.
In the meantime one extremely easy anti-fraud measure could be taken - that's to give credit, debit and electronic banking customers the option to be notified by SMS or email of every transaction as it happens. In fact it could be tied into the authentication systems which are inherently real-time. It won't stop the fraudulent transaction, but the use of a compromised card's detail would no doubt be picked up quicker than currently. I know - I've just been through this experience myself and if I'd had a notification of every card authentication attempt I would have picked it up much earlier.
Incidentally, none of this means retailers don't need to take proper care of personal data - they do. There's plenty of EU legislation on the matter. However, when you have a system that is fundamentally flawed as our current authentication systems then breaches will happen - guaranteed.
If anybody fancies going through the numbers and looking at the realities of alternative energy sources, then try looking at David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air". He's a Cambridge Professor of Natural Philosophy -
or physics as it's less quaintly known these days). The rough draft (basically work in progress) is available online for free here :-
http://www.withouthotair.com/
Unlike much of the Government inspired studies, this is an attempt to be objective about the practicality of energy generation and consumption in the UK economy. It presents some pretty stark numbers and doesn't stray into the area of wishful thinking that characterises this area.
Given that we are now in the position where almost half our (mostly decrepit and obsolete) nuclear electric generation capacity is offline for scheduled or un-scheduled reasons, then I predict the whole security of energy supply issue is going to very quickly replace CO2 concerns. There's nothing like the lights going out or hugely increased energy bills to refocus attention.
I should let this one go of course, but I can't help but point out that weaving in and out of lanes on the Motorway is specifically covered by the Highway Code and when you change lanes then the onus is on the driver/rider to chack there is a safe gap, look and signal. Most certainly it does not allow for the sort of high-speed weaving between vehicles at high speed :-
"242. Do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right. Do not weave in and out of lanes to overtake."
Now a breach of the Highway Code is not in itself an offense, but it can be considered as evidence. Even if it wasn't an offense, it's bloody dangerous. If you can't see why it's dangerous to weave amongst lines of close-packed vehicles travelling at speed on a motorcycle, then that maybe goes some way to explaining the excess deaths among rders. If you want some more interesting statistics to read, then start looking for the difference in accident stats between riders of performance motorcycles and others - or for that matter performance car against otheres. As usual, the best researched statistics are American, but given their overally experience appears to be similar to ours (in relation to other motor vehicles) then I doubt they are much difference.
If you go back to my original post you will see that somebody was bound to say it was the car drivers who caused most of the accidents and that if the overriding aim was to cut the fatality rate then banning motorcycles from public roads was the one things guaranteed to work. Didn't mean that I was really saying that they should really do it - just recognise the effect. Even if the statistic of just over two-thirds of accidents being due to motorists is true (and I'd want to see exactly what they are measuring here and how - self-interested motorcycle insurance specialists aren't a naturally unbiased source) and you adjusted out the effect of the extra accidents caused by motorists (so it was 50:50) would would still get a vast over-representation.
In fact this guy here states (from a US study) that 41% of motorcycling fatalities do not involve another vehicle. Apparently more than twice the number than any other cause. Well maybe these 41% don't make an insurance claim which, if true, immediately makes a "nonsense of the 70% are caused by motorists argument".
http://www.msgroup.org/TIP056.html
OK - it's an old report (1994), but given that fatality rate among motorcyclists has fallen far slower than for road deaths as a whole, then is it really the case that there has been such a turnaround? Here are a few sentences from the report:-
"MOTORCYCLES The 2,304 motorcyclist fatalities accounted for 6 percent of total fatalities in 1994. The motorcycle fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled is about 20 times that of passenger cars. Motorcycle operator error was identified as a contributing factor in 76 percent of fatal crashes involving motorcycles in 1994. Excessive speed was the contributing factor most often noted. "
Here's another more recent one from 2005 (again American). 44% of motorcycle fatalities did not involve another vehicle
So even if you eliminated all the motorcycle/vehicle accidents which were caused by the other vehicle driver (not all of which are cars) then 63% of all these motorcycle deaths are still attributable to the motorcyclist.
"Motorcycles are also more likely to be involved in an injury collision with a fixed object than are other vehicles. In 1996, 15 percent of the reported injury crashes involving motorcycles were fixed object crashes, compared to 8 percent for passenger cars, 8 percent for light trucks, and 5 percent for large trucks."
"In 1996, 42 percent of all motorcyclists involved in fatal crashes were speeding, nearly twice the rate for drivers of passenger cars or light trucks. The percentage of alcohol involvement was 50 percent higher for motorcyclists than for drivers of passenger vehicles."
Even if motorists did cause most accidents involving motorcycles, then you also ought to ask why this happens. Motorcycles are, of course, simply more difficult to see than cars or lorries. That's just a fact and no amount of "education" changes that. Maybe you can train everybody to be more cautious, but the disproportion will still arise. The "simply didn't see" syndrome is always going to happen - human beings are fallible. You can make it less likely to happen, but you can't eliminate it.
As for the fuel-efficiency of motorcycles, then there are plenty of people I know who get around 40-45mpg out of sports bikes (sometimes less). My rather old diesel car (which is far from an economy model) average 45mpg. Yes, you can get more economical motorcycles but the guys I see every day on the motorway weaving their way in and out of traffic, down white lines, across hatchings are not, in general, riding those type of bikes. So if you want to make a green case, ride one of those 100mpg bikes, but if you have a Hond Fireblade you are on weak ground (and that's even before you taking into account the difference in load and passenger carrying capabilities).
No, almost by their very nature, riders of high-powered motorcycles are less likely to be risk averse than road users as a whole. If safety was their prime concern then they simply wouldn't be exposing themselves to the extra dangers. My day-to-day experience is that this is the case. It was also my experience as a young motorcyclist (and we all know we are immortal at that age).
Given the style of this response, then I think it speaks for itself. Anyway, just to clarify things I have ridden motorcycles in the past (I've had a full license from the age of 17) but from personal experience they are undoubtedly dangerous. As for big cars, well I have a perfectly ordinary car which is 10 years old as I got rather fed up of paying the taxes on new ones and if I felt the need do excessive speed, I'd do it somewhere of less risk to me or others.
Nope - the point I was making is quiet simple. If you have motorcycles on the public road then fatality rates will be disproportionately elevated. I think given the response also glorifies the performance of these toys (and the sports bikes are most definitely not aimed primarily at transport), then I think it also goes some way to demonstrating what I suggested. That is motorcycle riders (especially the riders of sports bikes) are more likely to take risks. In hospitals motorcyclists are known as "organ doners" - maybe I ought to factor into my life-saving calculations this valuable service they provide.
Well this will never happen, but the one thing that would definitely guarantee saving significant numbers of lives would be to ban motorcycles from public roads. Looking at the 2004 DoT reports (you have to pay money to read the more recent ones) then something approaching 20% of road deaths are of motorcyle riders and their passengers. Other statistics available show that the rate of deaths in the UK are over 30 times higher per passenger-mile on motorcycles than on cars. Other studies have shown they are disporportionately involved in pedestrian accidents too.
Of course motorcyclists will bleat on about how most of the accidents aren't there fault (debatable), but ultimately it doesn't matter. The things are just inherently less stable, more vulnerable, more difficult to see and offer very little protection to their riders. Unlike cyclists (who suffer about one-thrid of the fatalities per mile),
the riders of those "sports bikes" can't even make the claim of being environmentally friendly - the more powerful ones use more fuel than the most economical cars.
Also I would add, if there are motorcyclists who ride responsibly, there aren't many of them round my part of the world. On the M4 on my journey into work in the morning it is pretty well universal for motorcyclists to ride down the while-line between the lanes within literally inches of cars and lorries on either side (even on those few occasions when traffic speeds get up towards 70MPH). They overtake on hatched lines pretty well everywhere, into the face of oncoming traffic. I'm amazed that this sort of stuff is just allowed - presumably the police just like to automate their convictions through speed cameras (so much easier on the paper work).
Well that's the other problem with the analysis - I have a suspicion if some of these impatient adrenalin monkeys did have to use cars they would become part of the four-wheeled motorised hooligans that seem to specialise in the aggressive driving of Subaru Imprezas and the like.
Anyway, by a very conservative estimate, that's a net saving of 15% road traffic fatalities, even being generous about the displacement of fatalities into other transport forms.
Of course none of this will happen so the motorcyclists needn't worry, but the penalty of having motorcycles on the public road is that they will disproportionately contribute to road deaths. That's a fact in every comparable western country where stats are available. It just needs to be recognised.
Oh - another big cause. Of pedestrian fatalities in autopsy samples in that year 38% were over the drink-drive limit (and 75% after 10PM). So drunk pedestrians - that must be quite a few, but I somehow don't see the police getting out on the pavements with breathalysers so rest easy...
As for planes getting faster, then that's wrong. Or at least it has been since the advent of the 707 in 1958. That had a cruising speed of 974km/hr. The 747 has a cruising speed of between 895 & 913km/hr depending on model. Increasingly modern jets have cruising speeds of 900km/hr or less - typically 10% slower than those first generation of jet airliners. Why? Quite simply fuel efficiency. A modern transatlantic twin engined jet is about 40 minutes slowerr across the Atlantic than those early 1970s vintage jets. In any event, it's very unlikely that modern jets will get much faster as they get disproportionately less efficient as they near the speed of sound.
Now if it was cars you were talking about, then maybe you'd have a point.
Also a modern Jet is more fuel efficient than a current car then it clearly does depend on load factors. An A380 can theoretically manage considerably over 100 passenger miles per (imperial) gallon, albeit on the unrealistic expectation that it is full of economy class passengers. That would put it above most cars carrying two passengers on a long journey (although some claim that the high altitude effects multiply the effective CO2 effect). Interestingly that also puts it only about 50% worse on CO2 per passenger mile than typical European high-speed long-distance trains on typical load factors (yes, and I know that this isn't a completely fair comparison).
No, the really pernicious effect of planes is that they allow you to use fuel so much more quickly. It's viable in time terms to consider a week's skiing holiday in Colorado and use the equivalent of a whole year's average UK motoring's fuel in just 2% of a year. You can do a day return business trip from London to Berlin rather than take at least three days over it.
My real problem with a lot of the green agenda people is that they tend to exaggerate savings and present unrealistic figures that just don't bear scrutiny (like the micro-generation lobby). This is such an article - frankly a little bit of realistic analysis with the numbers would reveal that the 90% saving on energy usage presented her is moonshine.
"Swap 1,000 PCs for a bunch of servers and the same number of thin clients, and you'll divide your electricity consumption by ten."
Nonsense. Given that at the very least a thin client is going to require a screen, then this implies that this component must be responsible for only 10% of your PC's power consumption. A typical corporate PC does not have to be a power-hungry monster with the latest 3D graphics card. For many it is a laptop. You can get a pretty powerful desktop running, on average, with less than 120W. Laptops or desktops using low power techniques can average down in the 50W region. Then your thin client will require at least some processing power of its own plus to offset the loss of local computing you will need more processing and storage at the centre (which will need air-conditioning) and higher speed (and more energy consumptive) networks. Then there is the little point that, during the winter at least, the cost of power used by local office computing is offset by some reduction in heating costs.
No - these claims of 90% reductions come from the same sort of unreliable sources that claim mobile phone chargers consume 4-5W from just being plugged in (witness all the adds all over London). Take a modern phone charger, measure it and you'll find the real figure is less than half a watt.
The answer to all this stuff is undoubtedly to produce more energy efficient appliances. But there is plenty of scope to do that on personal computers of whatever sort. Just don't put gaming cards and top-end processors in office PCs.
There are valid reasons for moving much computing resource centrally, but reduced electricity costs isn't the main one.
RAID sets by "chunks" of disks is not unique to 3PAR - it's used on several hiogh-end arrays. As for the effect on rebuild time, then rebuilding these will still be limited by the transfer rate on the single disk that failed. If you have a 300GB disk that needs to be rebuilt (whether configured as a whole disk in a single RAID set or into multiple RAID sets made up of "slices" of disks then you still have this ultimate bottleneck of having to regenerate 300GB of data onto a single spindle.
There is another point to note - if the recovery time is effectively dictated at the limit by the throughput of the regenerated volume and you involve more disks through this approach, then your exposure to a double disk failure is increased. If a RAID set of 5 disks (single parity) is involved in the rebuild, then you are exposed to a hard failure on just 4 disks during the rebuild time. However, if this one disk participates in 10 different RAID sets of this size, then there will be 40 other drives involved, the failure of any one of which would invalidate that RAID "chunk". Only if the rebuild time is reduced proportionately is that exposure equivalent (and at the limit you still have the throughput of that one drive).
Of course you have spread the read I/Os required for the regeneration over more disks, so the effect is averaged over more disks but if the sustainable write transfer rate to a 300GB drive is 40MBps then it will still take something over two hours to rebuild and cannot possibly trake less. This problem will get worse as disk capacities get larger. The reason? Well it's quite simple, if the disk rotational speed remains fixed as capacities get larger (and 15K appears to be about the cost-effective mechanical limit and even that isn't available on large capacity disks) then the transfer rate only goes up as to the square root of the increase in aerial density. In other words if technological improvements mean that the bit density increases by a factor of four, it will take twice as long to read or write a disk in its entirity. This problem is only set to get worse.
The real problem with RAID failures with large disks is not really the possibility of encountering a "hard" double disk failure. The problem is that during the rebuild operation an unrecoverable read error will occur. This can stop a rebuild operation dead in its tracks and is the real reason for multi-redundant parity schemes (whatever method is used). The MTBF figures quoted by disk vendors are those for a complete disk failure and not for single unrecoverable read operations. With the increase in size of disks, these exposures are increasing and many of the engineering limits which were deemed acceptable in the days of GB disks are no longer so in those 1,000 times larger.
For a long time it has seemed that the educational and media approach of this country has been to tain people in the ability to talk about science rather than practice it. We can see this in the frankly appalling state of TV coverage of science issues in the BBC (witness the state of Horizon and the appalling approach Panorama took to the school WiFi issue). Much of this is sold under the wrong-headed notion of making things "accessible", largely by down-playing what is the essence of the scientific method. That is an attempt to try and be objective. This is not helped by the mislabelling of some subjects (such as sociology) as "scientific" and the growth of relativism.
We now see approaches to the teaching of science full of politicised issues with the ability to repeat acceptable policy lines ranked ahead of attempted objective analysis. Given that parliament is stuffed full of those trained in advocacy (namely lawyers) and not in analysis, then you can see why this happens.
Certainly the lack of trained science teachers in schools is a real problem. However, where are the replacements to come from? I see all through business and much of scoiety that the ability to advocate is held far above that to analyse.
As has already been pointed out, tidal energy is not renewable in that it essentially comes from the kinetic energy of the Earth's rotation relative to other gravitational bodies (of which the Sun & Moon are the only significant ones as far as tidal forces are concerned).
However, as has been pointed out, the idea that somehow we will a significant effect on the Earth's rotation by exploiting tidal power is simply wildly wrong. Doing a simple bit of maths would show the real effect to be insignificant in the extreme, and that is making the assumption that the energy so generated would not have been wasted anyway by tidal drag (in fact it is precisely this effect that is already slowing down the Earth).
Of course on that basis, it is not a renewable source. However, the same applies to any energy source - Solar, WInd, Bio-energy - they all come by indirectly from the nuclear reactions in the Sun using a resource that will eventually run out. A more reasonable, and practical, definition of renewables as far as human activities is concerned is that it is energy sources that we will not accelerate the depletion of by exploiting them. For example, we won't somehow increase the depletion of hydrogen in the Sun by generating electricity through solar panels. Even then it is not simple - some forms of such power generation can exploit the use of distinctly finite resources, such as precious metals or natural habitat (see bio-energy). Unfortunately, as many people are noticing, so-called renewable energy resources are far from zero-impact and some, especially bio-fuels, have the potential to be extremely destructive. The tidal barrier scheme is one such.
As for the guy who says Jonathan Porritt bot knows and cares about his subject, well he cares, and maybe his knowledge is there, but his convictions tend to blind him to rational analysis in many cases. Witness his now rather fundamental disagreements with James Lovelock (who really does know what he's talking about).
One thing that might backfire on Windows users is that functionality that might have been bundled into the product in the future may have to be paid for separately. When regulators force unbundling (such as has happened in the telco arena) there is regulation of the wholesale pricing of the underlying products. In principle, this should mean that the base operating system should have a regulated price based on its stripped-down functionality. In plain speak, Windows stripped of media players, movie editors, web browsers and the like should be cheaper and these separate products provided as charged-for enhancements (there are some very grey areas here - there are the possibilities of "retailers" bundling products together; it's just that the product with a dominant market postiion is not allowed to effectively cross-subsidise the related products).
Personally I would like to see something done about the maze of complex licensing schemes that Microsoft uses to control aspects of the retail and wholesale markets. For example, the difference between OEM and ful retail licenses for products which owe virtually nothing to any real differences to costs. Why, for example should there be so m\any special cases where products can be bougfht at special prices (students, teachers, OEMs) where others have to pay full retail prices. That's largely a distortion of retail markets, largely as a long term marketing policy. If MS were compelled to provide products on a non-discriminatory basis at wholesale prices to retailers and OEMs who could bundle then as they sought fit then this might go some way to correcting this. This would apply to any of the areas where MS has "market power" - that includes, of course, Office Suites as just one example.
For those who are fans of Apple, then it is true that they don't appear to have "market power" for desktop operating systems (although given the market penetration among some of the "creative types", maybe there is really a sub-market here). However, where Apple clearly do seem to have such market power is in iTunes. Apple claiming that iTunes just applies conditions imposed by record companies won't wash here - that's no reason why they won't allow other media players to inter-operate with iTunes subject to satisfying DRM/security arrangements.
Finally there any fully unbundled OS product set presents a massive security problem. TO make this work there would have to be a very securely designed, layered OS which really did allow separately bundles products to run in a secure environment which wouldn't allow exploits in one exposed product to compromise an entire system. That's a hugely challenging technical job. The purists might argue that a properly designed OS would do that, but combining that with a unified users experience with multiple suppliers is difficult indeed.
There is no surcharge for debit cards - just credit cards, presumably to cover the percentage taken by the card companies (part, but not all of which of which is to cover the "credit" aspect). Debit cards charge a fixed fee which I guess is absorbed because no doubt the Post Office charged too.
I suppose this is a lightweight article, but the Kilogramme is a unit of mass, not weight. Mass is essentially a measure of the amount of matter in an iobject, whilst weight is the force due to the operation of gravity on an object (or rather objects - in our case overwhelmingly dominated by the mass of the Earth, although the Sun and Moon have readily measurable effects - witness the tides). The mass of an object remains essentially unchanged.
However, you can readily change the weight of a given object by moving it to different places on the Earth's surface (or away from the Earth's surface).
Using Kilogramme as a unit of weight ought to be left to greengrocers and the like, and has no place in referring to standard measures.
It's not necessary to have an "ugly battery" compartment with user-replaceable batteries. My Sandisk player has just such a user-replaceable battery and the back of the device is firmly held in place with a couple of screws. It's a trifle thicker than an iPod nano, but there is no technical reason why batteries shouldn't be user-replaceable. It's a marketing decision with only very minor cost savings of not making the devices user-replaceable. Of course it would be nice to be able to use a generic size of Lithium-ion rechargable batteries (does anybody know how many hundreds - or is it thousands - of proprietary Lithium-ion battery formats there are out these for MP3/media players, Laptops,. Phones, PDAs, cameras, camcorders etc.? If anything guarantees long term obsolense it must be that; if we can have standardised NiMH formats, why not more take up of generic Lithium-Ion formats; alright, I know the real answer to that one...)
No you don't lose the top and bottom end of the audio spectrum with CDs compared to vinyl. Sampling theory (which is based on mathematical proofs) demonstrates that you need to samplee at least twice the highest frequency signal to be recreated. Hence CDs are sampled at 44.1Khz which is more than twice the 20Khz range of human hearing. Of course, if you are getting on a bit, (which means out of your teens) then the maximum frequency that you can hear will be steadily be reduced as the years go on.
Now none of this means that CD encoding is perfect - there are all sorts of engineering issues which means that you don't get the full theoretical reproduction. The limit in bit depth limits dynamic range.
However, for those that think that vinyl perfectly represents the analogue form of sound, then that's untrue. In the translation of sound waves to pressing wiggles in plastic there are many, many stages where distortions and inaccuracies are introduced. Vinyl itself has engineering limits on just how fine a detail can be represented, not to mention the ability of physical transducers to reproduce it. Vinyl has its limits on dynamic range as at the lower end it disappears into surface noise and at the top end then there are limits on the modulation that can be achieved. Adjacent grooves in the spiral also affect one another - on some heavily modulated sections you can often hear a shadow of the next revolution.
There's no denying that vinyl sounds different - it might well, to some ears at least, sound better. However, that's probably more to do with the the introduced distortions being subjectively more pleasant than that the essential technology allowing for better audio fidelity.
The other thing to note is that a lot of modern CDs just sound artificial because of the appalling tricks that are done in some recording studios - introducing so-called compression techniques to boost quieter sessions is one, but many are so often ret-tracked, re-sampled and generally messed about by producers that what comes out bears little resemblence to what went in.
So just how long does it take to rip the CD in the first place making this idea completely redundant ? I suppose if you can't wait to get that brand new CD home then maybe it has that use. Given that virtually everybody with an MP3 player has access to a computer, then just where is the market for this thing?
As a desgn idea it looks great, as something I would buy I can't imagine why I would do it. I'd prefer all that extra space and weight taken up by the likes of motors and read heads to be allocated to more space for memory and batteries.
For those talking about the impossibility of spinning CDs at a different RPM rates at different distances, then of course you can't do that at the same time, but it is perfectly possible to vary the RPM rate as the head tracks across the disk. Indeed this was a technique called CLV (constant linear velocity) as opposed to CAV (constant angular velocity). Audio drives were (I hink) mostly CLV, but no doubt the same behavior is now mimiced using CAV and buffering as CAV is simpler mechanically.
I see the journalist that wrote this lazy article chooses to berate Ken Livingstone over his lack of qualifications in thermodynamics. Well I would be interested to hear what Andrew Orlowski's expertise is in this area. Anyway, for his information the efficiency of thermodynamic systems is expressed in terms of the percentage of useful work done or useful heat output by a given unit of input energy. In the context of warming up people, then expending the vast majority on heating open air and surroundings is manifestly inefficient. A typical patio heater (looking at a few catalogues) might have an output of 12KW - some are much higher. That's almost as much as some domestic gas boilers peak output designed to heat an entire house and hot-water system (average energy usage by a boiler will be much lower than that as the thermostats kick in).
The word he is struggling with, is effectiveness - yes, patio heaters would be effective at keeping you warm given enough energy output (just as an Oil Refinery fire was fairly effective at warming up a limited area on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead). But there is no way they can be considered thermodynamically efficient if the aim is to keep people warm.
So if you are going to be sarcastic about politicians (and I've no problem about that, when properly targetted), at least try and be familiar with at least the basic principles of what you are writing about.
This is not to mention the even more lazy attitude of not attempting to address the real facts, figures, impacts and options and preferring to just label those whose views he finds inconvenient as "miserablists". Now I'm not one of those that labels all human activity as destructive or goes for the trite simplification (TV's on standby are destroying the world). However, blind faith in the face of objective evidence to the contrary are not traits I am comfrotable with.
And yes, I was trained as a physicist, and if I may use a thermodynamic term in a different context, congratulations on such a high-entropy article...
This came up (of all places) on a musicians message page. I've been trying to make sense of the numbers, but my calculations using basic chemistry was that to equal the energy in one US gallon (it was an American site) that you need about 8.1Kg of aluminium. Or for a 20 US gallon tank you need 162Kg of aluminium - pretty close to the 350 pound the article talks about (and a similar amount of water is required). At $1 per pound, that's $350 for a "tankful". That's against $60 for a 20 US gallon tankful of gasoline. That means that using the hydrogen would have to be almost 6 times more efficient to be competitive (and even fuel cells aren't 6 times more efficient than and IC engine - maybe three times).
As has been pointed out by somebody the vast majority of this has to be lugged around all the time as only the hydrogen gets lost (less than 5% of the mass). And for the guy who says it is win-win as you have an empty truck going back, I think I ought to point out that the mass moved to the refueling stop (excluding the water) is close to three times higher than for the petrol/gasoline and that driving back a full truck of the waste is a lot less fuel efficient than and empty truck or tanker.
In fact this isn't a completely new idea; there was something similar mooted in the 1980s, but with completely
http://www.keelynet.com/energy/cornish.htm
From what I can see the cycle to hydrogen loses something like 70% of the electricity required to make the aluminium, and that's excluding the distribution costs of all that extra mass to move around. That's not to mention all the extra fuel and waste mass in the vehicle which is bound to damage mileage (plus the weight of the in-car converter).
In short, I don't see how this will be cost effective.
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Capital gains
So after they've sold this second property after being turfed out by the electorate with the mortgage, furnishings and other expenses paid for by the taxpayer then they do, of course, have to return any capital gains made to the taxpayer and any residual value in the furnishings and other items? Nope - I thought not...
A general truth, once anybody gets there hands on other people's money (whether politicians, bankers, lawyers, proponents of Olympic gems bids, you name it) then it will find an undeserving home.
The most telling thing is the £300 free-standing mirror. Not that anybody is suggesting some politicians are a trifle narcissistic. I have to be fair - I'm pretty sure that neither Michael Foot or John Prescott ever made use of that particular allowance judging by their appearance.
What about all the other power...
OK - let's take on the principle that we should have usage-negative taxing on CO2 emissions (this is we tax all CO2 emission on the same basis whether it's used for heating, airline travel, industrial production etc.) then you'd have to deal with the increased pricing in those areas. Assuming that $85 per tonne is the "right" number (and I doubt that there's) a simple calculation, then for the average UK household you would see something liek the following :-
Approximately £90 per year extra on electricity bills
Approximately £180 per year on gas bills
Expect that airline trip to cost a more - it would add about £100 to a return flight to New York from the UK.
It doesn't stop there - much more energy gets used outside the home (industry, offices, farms, fertiliser etc.) and these would act as input costs into things that are bought.
Certainly it makes sense to me to adopt a usage-independent based pricing scheme if the aim is to drive the most cost-effective behaviour, but bear in mind that such an approach will have some huge social consequences. It will bear particularly hard on those who are not currently carrying their share of the CO2 burden (as they are "subsidised" in part by road users).
That's not to say I don't think it is a good idea. It would be much more rational and presumably the social issues could be dealt with. However, some people will lose out and people shouldn't expect such a change will necessarily mean that they will be better off, just because of a reduction in road fuel costs - it could be very easily outweighed by increases in other area.
Credit Card fraud
Having had my card compromised twice in the space of four months, I'm getting familiar with this. Manning petrol stations and the like with short term staff who are her one week and gone the next doesn't help.
There clearly are ways of stopping cards being used abroad, at least for larger amounts, as I know a number of people who have been caught out this way when they haven't informed their bank and they can't get transactions authorised.
However, until we have a system of one-time passwords, then the whole credit and debit card system is vulnerable to replay attacks. In the interim, it strikes me that a sensible idea would be to allow customers to register a mobile phone number against their cards and receive an SMS every time there is an attempt to use it. It won't actually stop a fraudulent transaction, but it would certainly bring attention to it a lot faster. It would be easy to be able to return a message to alert the credit card company to a potential fraud.
That's until the credit card companies come up with a much more secure system. However, given the cost and length of time to get chip & pin in I wouldn't hold my breath.
Efficiency
I think the point about efficiency has been lots here (and 70% is beserk figure - you'd need a huge temperature difference to make that possible). However, it doesn't need to be that efficient - just sufficient power has to be generated to turn the fan. If there's 100W of thermal energy available and 7% of that could be turned into mechanical energy then that's 7W to turn the fan.
A CPU cooling fan I have is rated at 3W (although I have a chassis fan rated at just 2W). I suspect that the actual consumption is quite a bit lower - especially on temperature controlled cooling fans. So the energy saving isn't earth shattering, even if power supply overheads are taken into account. Just whether the energy savings will compensate for the extra used in manufacturing such a complex device is debatable (also it's quite liable to have a shorter lif if it is more complex).
As for the overclockers, there's bad news here (not that they tend to care one iota about power consumption save their ability to extravagantly cool it). Successful overclocking depends on cooling the processor to much lower temperatures than is required for normal running. As the thermodynamic efficiency of this device is inherently related to the difference between the heatsink and the ambient air in the case then this efficiency goes down (albeit that total heat energy available increases). To give an idea, to get 7% theoretical thermodynamic efficiency the chip thermal pad temperature would have to be 20 degrees above the ambient temperature in the case at anything like room temperature. So if it's 30 degrees air temperature in the case you need that to be at least 50 degrees. If they get anywhere remotely close to the theoretical figure for a carnot cycle I'd be amazed. The carnot cycle calculations make no allowances for things like mechanical losses. It would not surprise me if you need thermal pad temperatures closed to 60 or 70 degrees to hit an overall 7% thermodynamic efficiency.
It would be a nice little irony if the chassis cooling had to be boosted to make this little thing work. In all, I suspect this is an insignificant development and a much more elegant method of fanless cooling could be designed.
Need for effective biocides
Well of course this is an obvious problem as bottles of cooking oil (readily usable as a diesel substitute) are always growing "clumps of goo" in the form of living organisms. Or rather they don't... Of all the potential problems with biofuel then this is the one that would least worry me. Any fuel sufficiently refined to work in a combustion engine is not going to be capable of sustaining life.
Law and common sense
A nice common sense rule would be that if a WiFi configuration has no security on it is reasonable to assume that it is intentionally made free access (some people do that, although I wouldn't recommend it).
After all, the criminal law requires that to be found guilty then it has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Clearly if you crack the security system then that's clear evidence of intention. As an analogy, trespassing is not a criminal offence (except in a few special cases like on railways), but breaking a lock in order to enter is.
Perhaps if the police (and courts) followed this common sense rules the police can do something useful - like tracking down the people who have compromised my credit card security twice in three months.
So they don't know
Roughly stated they really don't know what caused this then. That's encouraging then.
Pot and black
It's always dangerous to criticise others for their spelling, and Liam O'Flaherty who is so proud of his Northern Ireland education, probably ought to know that supermarkets have aisles and not isles (and feeble explanations like supermarkets having islands of merchandise will not be accepted).
In addition, the comma after "Humans" really ought to be a semi-colon (the capitalisation is questionable, although a case might be made if this is making a point about the collection of humanity being some form of proper noun). Of course etc. is an abbreviation and should therefore sport a full stop to denote that. I was also taught that stringing two of those in a row was redundant (maybe another stylistic excuse might be made). Yogurt is also a perfectly acceptable spelling of that word; indeed I think it is usually of that form on the North American continent.
I'm not making any claims over my education - I was schooled in Slough and no doubt I will be taken to task. My escape is that this is a tongue-in-cheek posting and that a thick plating of irony deflects pretty well anything.
Why does this question need to be asked ?
I can't think of one single reason why the IT department shouldn't be responsible for the electricity it consumes (apart from cases where gathering the information is disproportionately expensive). Electricity and related environmental are all fundamental cost inputs to running the IT services and surely have to be treated along with manpower costs, software licensing, equipment depreciation and so on. IT (like all business departments) are surely charged with a duty to run their services in a cost effective manner. Beyond mere cost issues, they will also have duties to comply with stated corporate policies - which might well include reductions in C02 emissions.
Certainly I would expect all medium and large data centres to know all their environmental costs - power, maintenance, building and so on. Rather more difficult if all you've got is a couple of small servers in an broom cupboard (but I guess we aren't talking about that sort of set-up here).
A more valid question is where should the boundaries apply. For instance, should an IT department be responsible for the power consumption of items of IT equipment outside the data centre or should that be devolved? Should the IT department be responsible for the power consumption of PCs? Should it be responsible for network kit in remote buildings? Then issues of span of control and costs of adminstering come into play.
It is not necessary to measure everything - assuming the IT department has a half-decent asset management system it's possible to estimate power consumption of distributed kit, including PCs, monitors, remote network kit and so on to a useful degree of accuracy. If there is no such reliable register - well very probably your whole IT deployment is heading towards a state of chaos (if it isn't there already) and the software licensing trolls will be heading your way some time.
Hitting a Nuclear Reactor
We don't need to speculate on the ability of a terrorist to fly an airliner into a nuclear power station - the 9/11 perpetrators managed to fly an airliner straight into the front of the Pentagon. OK it's a very big building, but it's not that tall and the plane hit just above ground level. Finding a nuclear reactor in clear visibility on the coast would be easy.
What would have to be done is to make sure that if a Nuclear reactor was hit then it wouldn't result in the release of large amounts of radioactivity. I've no idea how strongly the containment domes are, but they are going to have to be mighty strong. A 777 packed with fuel at takeoff can weight up to 350 tonnes. Travelling at 500MPH or 222 metres/sec then that would be around 8,600MJ of kinetic energy. Even if we allow for some considerable reduction in maximum takeoff weight and allow say 5,000MJ. That's the same energy as in approximately 1,200Kg of TNT (of course that's a fraction of the energy contained in the tanks of a fully fuelled 777).
Whilst much of the fuselage is very light weight and fragile, there are some very dense objects (engines, undercarriage etc.). The experience at the Pentagon was these it was these heavy objects which punched holes through what was a very solid building (both sides I believe).
Now I've no idea on how a concrete dome is engineered, it's ability to withstand and deflect such an impact, but I'm sure it is an engineering challenge. We also know from experience that it is possible to hit fairly low buildings with an airliner with some accuracy. It would be unwise in the extreme not to design for this.
Motorised throtlles
"I didn't know the throttles on a fly-by-wire aircraft weren't motorised, like the faders on a high-end mixing desk. I guess there's no real reason for them to be."
I would have thought that there is every reason to motorise them. If a pilot does have to take manual control and the levers had been left in some random position then either the switch would involve a rapid change in engine output (or at least a rapid change in the instructions to the engine - jet engines don't change power output as rapidly as a car engine). I suppose a pilot could estimate the right new position or it would also be possible to motorise the throttles so they move to the right place only when you switch to manual, but what's the point apart from maybe reducing a bit of wear-and-tear? Much better to motorise the throttle levers and that also has the great advantage of giving an immediate indication of the autothrottle working. It also means that a manual override be affected simply by grabbing the throttles and overriding a clutch mechanism (or some such equivalent). In reality I would have thought the whole throttle assembly and its ergonomics would be very carefully thought out to allow for rapid manual override.
What's so difficult
What is so ambitious about a 25% cut in power consumption over a . Inneficient power supplies, more efficient power supplies, better power management, more efficient CPUs, DRAM and graphics.
I managed to substnatially reduce average power consumption on my home PC moving from a single core Athlon to quad core Intel through careful choice of components, better power management etc.
Of course some of the potential gain is bound to be swallowed up in higher specs but really 25% is not exactly demanding.
Wreckless and reckless
If Andy has the same lack of care and concern towards other road users as he exhibits in his grammar, and the content appears to indicate that this is so, then I hope he isn't driving or riding around this part of the world.
The video is wreckless because he didn't crash and leave a wreck. But reckless it most certainly is.
Product vs Customer Type Organisations
Many of us with experience of IBM in the past have seen the problems caused by organising sales along product lines. The interests of those selling mainframes was often directly in opposition to those selling competing AIX/Power based systems. What large customers wanted was the best solution - often what came up was something close to two competing bids from different teams rather than a complementary story. Often this split of self-interest was echoed in the structures of their customer's IT departments. The mainframe camp vs the UNIX camp later to be followed by the Windows camp (at which both the previous groups would sneer).
It's nothing like as bad now, but there are still shadows of these arguments (like Z-Linux vs x86 Linux issue still rumbles on in many IT departments).
It's called an emergency power off
"Why was the little red button not connected to the unfiltered side of the ups". Because it's actually called an emergency power off for good reasons - it's for very rare occasions when all power to all the servers and equipment has to be shut off immediately. It doesn't greatly matter that the mains voltage is providced from the UPS or not - the batteries will be designed to keep the centre running at full power for a couple of minutes before the auxilliaries kick in. It there's a fire or some chassis have gone live due to a wiring fault then there's plenty enough stored energy to cause a great deal of damage.
This thing required the glass to be broken so it's hardly an accidental thing. It's really rather difficult to protect equipment from attack by an insider. The fact that this guy blew his top because his Unix privileges had been withdrawn is interesting. Maybe it had become obvious that he had a volatile temperament. If so, then maybe he shouldn't be anywhere near the insides of a data centre anyway. In our datacentres sys admins do not normally have access to the computer halls.
In the final position, if the system is really so essential to keep the Californian power grid running on an hour-by-hour basis then you have to wonder why there isn't a backup centre. It doesn't require a disgruntled employee to kill a data centre - there are plenty of other ways of doing it.
Modems and digital data
This was prompted by JeffyPooh and his "To anyone using the word 'modem'" post.
The fact is that pretty well all long distance high-speed data transmission systems use modems. That's even when digital is used the name. That included "Digital Phones", "Digital Subscriber Line" and "Digital Television" - teh service may be digital, but the transmission is analogue. For the long distance part of the connections the signals are modulated and demodulated using schemes such as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM). GSM phones use a scheme called GMSK. Ethernet made use of PAM and so it goes on.
High speed purely digital signals are constrained to very short runs such as those in computer systems buses. The reason is that true digital signals are prone to all sort of long distance effects including signal skewing, interference, signal spreading etc. The only mid/long distance true digital standards, like RS232 and RS423 are inherently slow due to these effects. Relatively high speed digital interfaces, like SCSI are highly distance limited. (Before people quibble, yes I know that the signals are analogue, but they are interpreted digitaly by thresholds, differentials, polarity or whatever).
So in a very real sense a mobile phone includes a modem - that's how it communicates with the mast. In fact the journey that the data bits will take from the cellphone to the final destination will involve very many such modulation/demodulation steps. Quite possibly dozens. Of course that's not what the mobile phone company meant be using the cellphone as a modem here - they were just using it as a short hand term for how you connect a computer to the internet via the mobile phone.
All of this is made possible by the combination of incredibly high speed DA & AD converters and the modern miracle of Digital Signal Processing (DSP). This latter is a unheralded miracle which is one of the half dozen most important technologies in modern computing and telecommunication industry.
Conflating UK energy use with electricity
Another mistake that happens far too often - conflating energy with electricity use. The report states "IT now accounts for 10 per cent of energy consumption in the UK". That's going to be a difficult figure to support when in 2001 (according to the DTI) only about 9% of total energy use in the UK was "primary electricity".
That's not to say that IT doesn't need to be more efficient, but from the DTI's numbers it would appear that the actual percentage of energy consumption it is responsible for in the UK is nearer 1% than 10%. Now I've got no idea what they have included as IT - does it include everybody's domestic or even office PCs for instance? It's quite possible that the 10% is an underestimate of the electricity consumption.
Of course it's going to be vastly easier to make more power-efficient IT equipment than to do the same with transport. IT power efficiency (throughput/capacity per KW) improves fairly rapidly - the problem is the demand side. However, company economics will drive more efficient usage. Shifting stuff around inevitably uses energy. Of course using IT does, in theory, allow for less moving around of people and objects.
@Graham Wood
On the video feed, if these things are cost effective then you would have a point. However, the one Enterprise standard flash-based SSD I do know of which I've seen tested was over £150 per GB. Those sort of costs are higher than volatile memory (storing video files in main memory is much more efficient than pumping it through an I/O system). With efficient read-ahead algorithms, a single hard drive will easily be able to support five or more High Def video feeds (assuming efficient compressed).. For read-only data like that it is easy just to duplicate the data over multiple drives. That's very different to a transactional database where you need consistency of a highly dynamic enviornment.
With even 15K Enterprise drives costing less that £1.50 per GB then the SSDs will have a hard time cost-justifying something that is 100 times the unit cost if it's just a matter of running multiple drives for video feeds. Of course there are other costs like power, but even then the numbers don't look great. Also 230MBps isn't that high a rate for sequential access - it doesn't take many HDs to match that. By the time you get into several tens of High-Def video feeds then drive duplication will be required then, even for this option (by which time of course using system memory makes a lot of sense).
Of course we don't yet have pricing and there is a market for greatly improved transactional performance. It's certainly the future for high-performance storage, and that will no doubt include video streaming, but it will depend on price. The difference with the transactional database area is that there are technical limits imposed by the mechaniscal nature of the drives which cannot readily be overcome.
Price and latency figures/.
95% of the performance problems I see on large databases these days are I/O related.
As for 400 IOs a second off of traditional disks - well maybe if you are doing sequential I/Os, but for random-access type OLTP then 150 is nearer the mark. However, the real gain is not the number of I/Os - it's reduced latency, and it's especially reduced latency on random reads (Enterprise class arrays cache writes, and techniques like rolling up writes at the backend and striping can balance the traffic).
What I'm hoping to hear is that random read times are reduced by at least 90% to sub-millisecond and hopefully better. Large businesses and organisations struggle with transactional performance on large CRM, Billing and similar systems.
I'm not sure that the video-streaming thing makes a lot of sense as a market though - that sort of requirement fits large disks fairly well, and something that is overwhelming dominated by reads works very well with large volatile caches and duplication.
On the cost thing it would be nice to know how this compares with array-based cache. Arrays with 100s of GB of cache (plus battery backup) are freely available, if not exactly common or cheap (and it uses a lot of power).
Once of the biggest problems with this new generation of SSDs is that the arrays that these might fit wouldn't be able to cope with large numbers of these devices - my experience of a lot of Enterprise arrays at the top end is that the throughput is often a lot less than the back-end disks are able to achive. This sort of stuff is going to open up possibilities, but will also present the likes of EMC, HDS & IBM with major engineering challenges.
Practicality of Hydrogen as a fuel
There are lots of people who talk glibly about the hyrdrogen economy. I have a supicion that many are just obsessed by this vision of producing only water. This stuff is in need of a reality check - it's far from clear that hydrogen is practical as an energy store. The whole cycle of production, storage and distribution is bedevilled by a lot of thermodynamically inefficient stages. Yes, using a fuel cell to generate electricity direct is notably more efficient than burning it (or anything else) in a combustion engine (although finding enough precious metals to build the things iby the hundreds of millions is going to get tricky), but the production/distribution/storage is full of thermodynamic inefficiencies. Just compressing hydrogen to 800bar uses 13% of its energy content and liquefaction 30%..
This is a nice little paper on the subject
http://www.efcf.com/reports/E13.pdf
The claim is that the consumer might only see 25% of the energy used in making the hydrogen in the first place.
Exploiting the innumerate
The deep joy and irony of this story is that, having made so much money out of the innumerate, Camelot don't seem to understand that basic fact about much of their customer base. We'll now have the Jehova's Witnessess putting their members up from membership of Mensa.
Steve J
Re SMS PIN idea
I guess the mobile phone companies would love it. I guess it would work, and it would enhance the authentication mechanism. However, the downside of putting something like that into the actual authentication path is that it could be plagued by delays, poor reception, flat batteries, forgotten phones and so on. Imagine the queues at the checkout whilst somebody waited for their second SMS pin to come through. You'd need some form of way of dealing with those situations.
The advantage of the notification system is that I think it would be remarkably simple and cheap to implement and wouldn't delay the authentication. If you did the notification via SMS and somebody did spot something dodgy then it would be very easy to allow the card owner to reply with a suspect transaction message. It won't eliminate frauds, but they could be identified much quicker and the perpetrators might realise they are in grave danger of being identified much quicker.
Ultimately I'd still like to see the one time password identification scheme (that's until some bright spark in Government grabs the idea for ID cards). Lots of people are used to one-time passwords for signing onto their company systems.
Fundamentally broken
The fundamental problem here is that the card authentication systems all have the same problem - security depends on static information like PINs, knowuing expiry dates, printed numbers on the back of cards and so on. It relies on every retailer having cast-iron security systems and is just wide open to snooping and fraud. The chip-and-pin sticking plaster system is hardly any more secure than the old signature-based system.
Until such time as the finance industry realises this and moves to a system that uses some form of one time password system, then all systems suffer from what is essentially a replay attack. Biometric identification systems also suffer from this if the reading is taken remotely (who knows if that fingerprint scan was spoofed or not?). Of course people won't want to carry around separate one-time password systems for each bank account, credit and debit card they carry, but if the finance industry got their heads together then it is surely possible to come up with a common device that can be used for authentication on multiple accounts.
I've no doubt there are a lot of technical and organisational difficulties here (for example, trusted third party authentication systems). No doubt there will be privacy concerns too for what amounts to a personal identification systems. I've also no doubt that some aspects of this can be broken, but if it is difficult enough then it just won't be cost-effective for the crooks.
In the meantime one extremely easy anti-fraud measure could be taken - that's to give credit, debit and electronic banking customers the option to be notified by SMS or email of every transaction as it happens. In fact it could be tied into the authentication systems which are inherently real-time. It won't stop the fraudulent transaction, but the use of a compromised card's detail would no doubt be picked up quicker than currently. I know - I've just been through this experience myself and if I'd had a notification of every card authentication attempt I would have picked it up much earlier.
Incidentally, none of this means retailers don't need to take proper care of personal data - they do. There's plenty of EU legislation on the matter. However, when you have a system that is fundamentally flawed as our current authentication systems then breaches will happen - guaranteed.
Energy Sources
If anybody fancies going through the numbers and looking at the realities of alternative energy sources, then try looking at David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air". He's a Cambridge Professor of Natural Philosophy -
or physics as it's less quaintly known these days). The rough draft (basically work in progress) is available online for free here :-
http://www.withouthotair.com/
Unlike much of the Government inspired studies, this is an attempt to be objective about the practicality of energy generation and consumption in the UK economy. It presents some pretty stark numbers and doesn't stray into the area of wishful thinking that characterises this area.
Given that we are now in the position where almost half our (mostly decrepit and obsolete) nuclear electric generation capacity is offline for scheduled or un-scheduled reasons, then I predict the whole security of energy supply issue is going to very quickly replace CO2 concerns. There's nothing like the lights going out or hugely increased energy bills to refocus attention.
to Chris Roughneen
I should let this one go of course, but I can't help but point out that weaving in and out of lanes on the Motorway is specifically covered by the Highway Code and when you change lanes then the onus is on the driver/rider to chack there is a safe gap, look and signal. Most certainly it does not allow for the sort of high-speed weaving between vehicles at high speed :-
"242. Do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right. Do not weave in and out of lanes to overtake."
Now a breach of the Highway Code is not in itself an offense, but it can be considered as evidence. Even if it wasn't an offense, it's bloody dangerous. If you can't see why it's dangerous to weave amongst lines of close-packed vehicles travelling at speed on a motorcycle, then that maybe goes some way to explaining the excess deaths among rders. If you want some more interesting statistics to read, then start looking for the difference in accident stats between riders of performance motorcycles and others - or for that matter performance car against otheres. As usual, the best researched statistics are American, but given their overally experience appears to be similar to ours (in relation to other motor vehicles) then I doubt they are much difference.
TO Chris Roughneen
If you go back to my original post you will see that somebody was bound to say it was the car drivers who caused most of the accidents and that if the overriding aim was to cut the fatality rate then banning motorcycles from public roads was the one things guaranteed to work. Didn't mean that I was really saying that they should really do it - just recognise the effect. Even if the statistic of just over two-thirds of accidents being due to motorists is true (and I'd want to see exactly what they are measuring here and how - self-interested motorcycle insurance specialists aren't a naturally unbiased source) and you adjusted out the effect of the extra accidents caused by motorists (so it was 50:50) would would still get a vast over-representation.
In fact this guy here states (from a US study) that 41% of motorcycling fatalities do not involve another vehicle. Apparently more than twice the number than any other cause. Well maybe these 41% don't make an insurance claim which, if true, immediately makes a "nonsense of the 70% are caused by motorists argument".
http://www.msgroup.org/TIP056.html
OK - it's an old report (1994), but given that fatality rate among motorcyclists has fallen far slower than for road deaths as a whole, then is it really the case that there has been such a turnaround? Here are a few sentences from the report:-
"MOTORCYCLES The 2,304 motorcyclist fatalities accounted for 6 percent of total fatalities in 1994. The motorcycle fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled is about 20 times that of passenger cars. Motorcycle operator error was identified as a contributing factor in 76 percent of fatal crashes involving motorcycles in 1994. Excessive speed was the contributing factor most often noted. "
Here's another more recent one from 2005 (again American). 44% of motorcycle fatalities did not involve another vehicle
http://www.kentuckystatepolice.org/hsp/pdf/kentucky_state_police_factsheet.pdf
So even if you eliminated all the motorcycle/vehicle accidents which were caused by the other vehicle driver (not all of which are cars) then 63% of all these motorcycle deaths are still attributable to the motorcyclist.
Then there is this one :-
http://www.usroads.com/journals/aruj/9805/ru980502.htm
"Motorcycles are also more likely to be involved in an injury collision with a fixed object than are other vehicles. In 1996, 15 percent of the reported injury crashes involving motorcycles were fixed object crashes, compared to 8 percent for passenger cars, 8 percent for light trucks, and 5 percent for large trucks."
"In 1996, 42 percent of all motorcyclists involved in fatal crashes were speeding, nearly twice the rate for drivers of passenger cars or light trucks. The percentage of alcohol involvement was 50 percent higher for motorcyclists than for drivers of passenger vehicles."
Even if motorists did cause most accidents involving motorcycles, then you also ought to ask why this happens. Motorcycles are, of course, simply more difficult to see than cars or lorries. That's just a fact and no amount of "education" changes that. Maybe you can train everybody to be more cautious, but the disproportion will still arise. The "simply didn't see" syndrome is always going to happen - human beings are fallible. You can make it less likely to happen, but you can't eliminate it.
As for the fuel-efficiency of motorcycles, then there are plenty of people I know who get around 40-45mpg out of sports bikes (sometimes less). My rather old diesel car (which is far from an economy model) average 45mpg. Yes, you can get more economical motorcycles but the guys I see every day on the motorway weaving their way in and out of traffic, down white lines, across hatchings are not, in general, riding those type of bikes. So if you want to make a green case, ride one of those 100mpg bikes, but if you have a Hond Fireblade you are on weak ground (and that's even before you taking into account the difference in load and passenger carrying capabilities).
No, almost by their very nature, riders of high-powered motorcycles are less likely to be risk averse than road users as a whole. If safety was their prime concern then they simply wouldn't be exposing themselves to the extra dangers. My day-to-day experience is that this is the case. It was also my experience as a young motorcyclist (and we all know we are immortal at that age).
Dear anonymous
Given the style of this response, then I think it speaks for itself. Anyway, just to clarify things I have ridden motorcycles in the past (I've had a full license from the age of 17) but from personal experience they are undoubtedly dangerous. As for big cars, well I have a perfectly ordinary car which is 10 years old as I got rather fed up of paying the taxes on new ones and if I felt the need do excessive speed, I'd do it somewhere of less risk to me or others.
Nope - the point I was making is quiet simple. If you have motorcycles on the public road then fatality rates will be disproportionately elevated. I think given the response also glorifies the performance of these toys (and the sports bikes are most definitely not aimed primarily at transport), then I think it also goes some way to demonstrating what I suggested. That is motorcycle riders (especially the riders of sports bikes) are more likely to take risks. In hospitals motorcyclists are known as "organ doners" - maybe I ought to factor into my life-saving calculations this valuable service they provide.
Something that would make a difference
Well this will never happen, but the one thing that would definitely guarantee saving significant numbers of lives would be to ban motorcycles from public roads. Looking at the 2004 DoT reports (you have to pay money to read the more recent ones) then something approaching 20% of road deaths are of motorcyle riders and their passengers. Other statistics available show that the rate of deaths in the UK are over 30 times higher per passenger-mile on motorcycles than on cars. Other studies have shown they are disporportionately involved in pedestrian accidents too.
Of course motorcyclists will bleat on about how most of the accidents aren't there fault (debatable), but ultimately it doesn't matter. The things are just inherently less stable, more vulnerable, more difficult to see and offer very little protection to their riders. Unlike cyclists (who suffer about one-thrid of the fatalities per mile),
the riders of those "sports bikes" can't even make the claim of being environmentally friendly - the more powerful ones use more fuel than the most economical cars.
Also I would add, if there are motorcyclists who ride responsibly, there aren't many of them round my part of the world. On the M4 on my journey into work in the morning it is pretty well universal for motorcyclists to ride down the while-line between the lanes within literally inches of cars and lorries on either side (even on those few occasions when traffic speeds get up towards 70MPH). They overtake on hatched lines pretty well everywhere, into the face of oncoming traffic. I'm amazed that this sort of stuff is just allowed - presumably the police just like to automate their convictions through speed cameras (so much easier on the paper work).
Well that's the other problem with the analysis - I have a suspicion if some of these impatient adrenalin monkeys did have to use cars they would become part of the four-wheeled motorised hooligans that seem to specialise in the aggressive driving of Subaru Imprezas and the like.
Anyway, by a very conservative estimate, that's a net saving of 15% road traffic fatalities, even being generous about the displacement of fatalities into other transport forms.
Of course none of this will happen so the motorcyclists needn't worry, but the penalty of having motorcycles on the public road is that they will disproportionately contribute to road deaths. That's a fact in every comparable western country where stats are available. It just needs to be recognised.
Oh - another big cause. Of pedestrian fatalities in autopsy samples in that year 38% were over the drink-drive limit (and 75% after 10PM). So drunk pedestrians - that must be quite a few, but I somehow don't see the police getting out on the pavements with breathalysers so rest easy...
Title
To Dave - yes Concorde is a special case.
As for planes getting faster, then that's wrong. Or at least it has been since the advent of the 707 in 1958. That had a cruising speed of 974km/hr. The 747 has a cruising speed of between 895 & 913km/hr depending on model. Increasingly modern jets have cruising speeds of 900km/hr or less - typically 10% slower than those first generation of jet airliners. Why? Quite simply fuel efficiency. A modern transatlantic twin engined jet is about 40 minutes slowerr across the Atlantic than those early 1970s vintage jets. In any event, it's very unlikely that modern jets will get much faster as they get disproportionately less efficient as they near the speed of sound.
Now if it was cars you were talking about, then maybe you'd have a point.
Also a modern Jet is more fuel efficient than a current car then it clearly does depend on load factors. An A380 can theoretically manage considerably over 100 passenger miles per (imperial) gallon, albeit on the unrealistic expectation that it is full of economy class passengers. That would put it above most cars carrying two passengers on a long journey (although some claim that the high altitude effects multiply the effective CO2 effect). Interestingly that also puts it only about 50% worse on CO2 per passenger mile than typical European high-speed long-distance trains on typical load factors (yes, and I know that this isn't a completely fair comparison).
No, the really pernicious effect of planes is that they allow you to use fuel so much more quickly. It's viable in time terms to consider a week's skiing holiday in Colorado and use the equivalent of a whole year's average UK motoring's fuel in just 2% of a year. You can do a day return business trip from London to Berlin rather than take at least three days over it.
My real problem with a lot of the green agenda people is that they tend to exaggerate savings and present unrealistic figures that just don't bear scrutiny (like the micro-generation lobby). This is such an article - frankly a little bit of realistic analysis with the numbers would reveal that the 90% saving on energy usage presented her is moonshine.
Yet another exaggerated power saving claim...
"Swap 1,000 PCs for a bunch of servers and the same number of thin clients, and you'll divide your electricity consumption by ten."
Nonsense. Given that at the very least a thin client is going to require a screen, then this implies that this component must be responsible for only 10% of your PC's power consumption. A typical corporate PC does not have to be a power-hungry monster with the latest 3D graphics card. For many it is a laptop. You can get a pretty powerful desktop running, on average, with less than 120W. Laptops or desktops using low power techniques can average down in the 50W region. Then your thin client will require at least some processing power of its own plus to offset the loss of local computing you will need more processing and storage at the centre (which will need air-conditioning) and higher speed (and more energy consumptive) networks. Then there is the little point that, during the winter at least, the cost of power used by local office computing is offset by some reduction in heating costs.
No - these claims of 90% reductions come from the same sort of unreliable sources that claim mobile phone chargers consume 4-5W from just being plugged in (witness all the adds all over London). Take a modern phone charger, measure it and you'll find the real figure is less than half a watt.
The answer to all this stuff is undoubtedly to produce more energy efficient appliances. But there is plenty of scope to do that on personal computers of whatever sort. Just don't put gaming cards and top-end processors in office PCs.
There are valid reasons for moving much computing resource centrally, but reduced electricity costs isn't the main one.
RAID set by "chunks"
RAID sets by "chunks" of disks is not unique to 3PAR - it's used on several hiogh-end arrays. As for the effect on rebuild time, then rebuilding these will still be limited by the transfer rate on the single disk that failed. If you have a 300GB disk that needs to be rebuilt (whether configured as a whole disk in a single RAID set or into multiple RAID sets made up of "slices" of disks then you still have this ultimate bottleneck of having to regenerate 300GB of data onto a single spindle.
There is another point to note - if the recovery time is effectively dictated at the limit by the throughput of the regenerated volume and you involve more disks through this approach, then your exposure to a double disk failure is increased. If a RAID set of 5 disks (single parity) is involved in the rebuild, then you are exposed to a hard failure on just 4 disks during the rebuild time. However, if this one disk participates in 10 different RAID sets of this size, then there will be 40 other drives involved, the failure of any one of which would invalidate that RAID "chunk". Only if the rebuild time is reduced proportionately is that exposure equivalent (and at the limit you still have the throughput of that one drive).
Of course you have spread the read I/Os required for the regeneration over more disks, so the effect is averaged over more disks but if the sustainable write transfer rate to a 300GB drive is 40MBps then it will still take something over two hours to rebuild and cannot possibly trake less. This problem will get worse as disk capacities get larger. The reason? Well it's quite simple, if the disk rotational speed remains fixed as capacities get larger (and 15K appears to be about the cost-effective mechanical limit and even that isn't available on large capacity disks) then the transfer rate only goes up as to the square root of the increase in aerial density. In other words if technological improvements mean that the bit density increases by a factor of four, it will take twice as long to read or write a disk in its entirity. This problem is only set to get worse.
The real problem with RAID failures with large disks is not really the possibility of encountering a "hard" double disk failure. The problem is that during the rebuild operation an unrecoverable read error will occur. This can stop a rebuild operation dead in its tracks and is the real reason for multi-redundant parity schemes (whatever method is used). The MTBF figures quoted by disk vendors are those for a complete disk failure and not for single unrecoverable read operations. With the increase in size of disks, these exposures are increasing and many of the engineering limits which were deemed acceptable in the days of GB disks are no longer so in those 1,000 times larger.
About time
For a long time it has seemed that the educational and media approach of this country has been to tain people in the ability to talk about science rather than practice it. We can see this in the frankly appalling state of TV coverage of science issues in the BBC (witness the state of Horizon and the appalling approach Panorama took to the school WiFi issue). Much of this is sold under the wrong-headed notion of making things "accessible", largely by down-playing what is the essence of the scientific method. That is an attempt to try and be objective. This is not helped by the mislabelling of some subjects (such as sociology) as "scientific" and the growth of relativism.
We now see approaches to the teaching of science full of politicised issues with the ability to repeat acceptable policy lines ranked ahead of attempted objective analysis. Given that parliament is stuffed full of those trained in advocacy (namely lawyers) and not in analysis, then you can see why this happens.
Certainly the lack of trained science teachers in schools is a real problem. However, where are the replacements to come from? I see all through business and much of scoiety that the ability to advocate is held far above that to analyse.
Definition of renewable
As has already been pointed out, tidal energy is not renewable in that it essentially comes from the kinetic energy of the Earth's rotation relative to other gravitational bodies (of which the Sun & Moon are the only significant ones as far as tidal forces are concerned).
However, as has been pointed out, the idea that somehow we will a significant effect on the Earth's rotation by exploiting tidal power is simply wildly wrong. Doing a simple bit of maths would show the real effect to be insignificant in the extreme, and that is making the assumption that the energy so generated would not have been wasted anyway by tidal drag (in fact it is precisely this effect that is already slowing down the Earth).
Of course on that basis, it is not a renewable source. However, the same applies to any energy source - Solar, WInd, Bio-energy - they all come by indirectly from the nuclear reactions in the Sun using a resource that will eventually run out. A more reasonable, and practical, definition of renewables as far as human activities is concerned is that it is energy sources that we will not accelerate the depletion of by exploiting them. For example, we won't somehow increase the depletion of hydrogen in the Sun by generating electricity through solar panels. Even then it is not simple - some forms of such power generation can exploit the use of distinctly finite resources, such as precious metals or natural habitat (see bio-energy). Unfortunately, as many people are noticing, so-called renewable energy resources are far from zero-impact and some, especially bio-fuels, have the potential to be extremely destructive. The tidal barrier scheme is one such.
As for the guy who says Jonathan Porritt bot knows and cares about his subject, well he cares, and maybe his knowledge is there, but his convictions tend to blind him to rational analysis in many cases. Witness his now rather fundamental disagreements with James Lovelock (who really does know what he's talking about).
Possible backfire ?
One thing that might backfire on Windows users is that functionality that might have been bundled into the product in the future may have to be paid for separately. When regulators force unbundling (such as has happened in the telco arena) there is regulation of the wholesale pricing of the underlying products. In principle, this should mean that the base operating system should have a regulated price based on its stripped-down functionality. In plain speak, Windows stripped of media players, movie editors, web browsers and the like should be cheaper and these separate products provided as charged-for enhancements (there are some very grey areas here - there are the possibilities of "retailers" bundling products together; it's just that the product with a dominant market postiion is not allowed to effectively cross-subsidise the related products).
Personally I would like to see something done about the maze of complex licensing schemes that Microsoft uses to control aspects of the retail and wholesale markets. For example, the difference between OEM and ful retail licenses for products which owe virtually nothing to any real differences to costs. Why, for example should there be so m\any special cases where products can be bougfht at special prices (students, teachers, OEMs) where others have to pay full retail prices. That's largely a distortion of retail markets, largely as a long term marketing policy. If MS were compelled to provide products on a non-discriminatory basis at wholesale prices to retailers and OEMs who could bundle then as they sought fit then this might go some way to correcting this. This would apply to any of the areas where MS has "market power" - that includes, of course, Office Suites as just one example.
For those who are fans of Apple, then it is true that they don't appear to have "market power" for desktop operating systems (although given the market penetration among some of the "creative types", maybe there is really a sub-market here). However, where Apple clearly do seem to have such market power is in iTunes. Apple claiming that iTunes just applies conditions imposed by record companies won't wash here - that's no reason why they won't allow other media players to inter-operate with iTunes subject to satisfying DRM/security arrangements.
Finally there any fully unbundled OS product set presents a massive security problem. TO make this work there would have to be a very securely designed, layered OS which really did allow separately bundles products to run in a secure environment which wouldn't allow exploits in one exposed product to compromise an entire system. That's a hugely challenging technical job. The purists might argue that a properly designed OS would do that, but combining that with a unified users experience with multiple suppliers is difficult indeed.
Correction to the Correction
There is no surcharge for debit cards - just credit cards, presumably to cover the percentage taken by the card companies (part, but not all of which of which is to cover the "credit" aspect). Debit cards charge a fixed fee which I guess is absorbed because no doubt the Post Office charged too.
It's a unit of mass, not weight
I suppose this is a lightweight article, but the Kilogramme is a unit of mass, not weight. Mass is essentially a measure of the amount of matter in an iobject, whilst weight is the force due to the operation of gravity on an object (or rather objects - in our case overwhelmingly dominated by the mass of the Earth, although the Sun and Moon have readily measurable effects - witness the tides). The mass of an object remains essentially unchanged.
However, you can readily change the weight of a given object by moving it to different places on the Earth's surface (or away from the Earth's surface).
Using Kilogramme as a unit of weight ought to be left to greengrocers and the like, and has no place in referring to standard measures.
Replaceable Batteries
It's not necessary to have an "ugly battery" compartment with user-replaceable batteries. My Sandisk player has just such a user-replaceable battery and the back of the device is firmly held in place with a couple of screws. It's a trifle thicker than an iPod nano, but there is no technical reason why batteries shouldn't be user-replaceable. It's a marketing decision with only very minor cost savings of not making the devices user-replaceable. Of course it would be nice to be able to use a generic size of Lithium-ion rechargable batteries (does anybody know how many hundreds - or is it thousands - of proprietary Lithium-ion battery formats there are out these for MP3/media players, Laptops,. Phones, PDAs, cameras, camcorders etc.? If anything guarantees long term obsolense it must be that; if we can have standardised NiMH formats, why not more take up of generic Lithium-Ion formats; alright, I know the real answer to that one...)
Vinyl religous wars
No you don't lose the top and bottom end of the audio spectrum with CDs compared to vinyl. Sampling theory (which is based on mathematical proofs) demonstrates that you need to samplee at least twice the highest frequency signal to be recreated. Hence CDs are sampled at 44.1Khz which is more than twice the 20Khz range of human hearing. Of course, if you are getting on a bit, (which means out of your teens) then the maximum frequency that you can hear will be steadily be reduced as the years go on.
Now none of this means that CD encoding is perfect - there are all sorts of engineering issues which means that you don't get the full theoretical reproduction. The limit in bit depth limits dynamic range.
However, for those that think that vinyl perfectly represents the analogue form of sound, then that's untrue. In the translation of sound waves to pressing wiggles in plastic there are many, many stages where distortions and inaccuracies are introduced. Vinyl itself has engineering limits on just how fine a detail can be represented, not to mention the ability of physical transducers to reproduce it. Vinyl has its limits on dynamic range as at the lower end it disappears into surface noise and at the top end then there are limits on the modulation that can be achieved. Adjacent grooves in the spiral also affect one another - on some heavily modulated sections you can often hear a shadow of the next revolution.
There's no denying that vinyl sounds different - it might well, to some ears at least, sound better. However, that's probably more to do with the the introduced distortions being subjectively more pleasant than that the essential technology allowing for better audio fidelity.
The other thing to note is that a lot of modern CDs just sound artificial because of the appalling tricks that are done in some recording studios - introducing so-called compression techniques to boost quieter sessions is one, but many are so often ret-tracked, re-sampled and generally messed about by producers that what comes out bears little resemblence to what went in.
Title
So just how long does it take to rip the CD in the first place making this idea completely redundant ? I suppose if you can't wait to get that brand new CD home then maybe it has that use. Given that virtually everybody with an MP3 player has access to a computer, then just where is the market for this thing?
As a desgn idea it looks great, as something I would buy I can't imagine why I would do it. I'd prefer all that extra space and weight taken up by the likes of motors and read heads to be allocated to more space for memory and batteries.
For those talking about the impossibility of spinning CDs at a different RPM rates at different distances, then of course you can't do that at the same time, but it is perfectly possible to vary the RPM rate as the head tracks across the disk. Indeed this was a technique called CLV (constant linear velocity) as opposed to CAV (constant angular velocity). Audio drives were (I hink) mostly CLV, but no doubt the same behavior is now mimiced using CAV and buffering as CAV is simpler mechanically.
Lazy hournalist
I see the journalist that wrote this lazy article chooses to berate Ken Livingstone over his lack of qualifications in thermodynamics. Well I would be interested to hear what Andrew Orlowski's expertise is in this area. Anyway, for his information the efficiency of thermodynamic systems is expressed in terms of the percentage of useful work done or useful heat output by a given unit of input energy. In the context of warming up people, then expending the vast majority on heating open air and surroundings is manifestly inefficient. A typical patio heater (looking at a few catalogues) might have an output of 12KW - some are much higher. That's almost as much as some domestic gas boilers peak output designed to heat an entire house and hot-water system (average energy usage by a boiler will be much lower than that as the thermostats kick in).
The word he is struggling with, is effectiveness - yes, patio heaters would be effective at keeping you warm given enough energy output (just as an Oil Refinery fire was fairly effective at warming up a limited area on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead). But there is no way they can be considered thermodynamically efficient if the aim is to keep people warm.
So if you are going to be sarcastic about politicians (and I've no problem about that, when properly targetted), at least try and be familiar with at least the basic principles of what you are writing about.
This is not to mention the even more lazy attitude of not attempting to address the real facts, figures, impacts and options and preferring to just label those whose views he finds inconvenient as "miserablists". Now I'm not one of those that labels all human activity as destructive or goes for the trite simplification (TV's on standby are destroying the world). However, blind faith in the face of objective evidence to the contrary are not traits I am comfrotable with.
And yes, I was trained as a physicist, and if I may use a thermodynamic term in a different context, congratulations on such a high-entropy article...
Thermodynamic Efficiency
This came up (of all places) on a musicians message page. I've been trying to make sense of the numbers, but my calculations using basic chemistry was that to equal the energy in one US gallon (it was an American site) that you need about 8.1Kg of aluminium. Or for a 20 US gallon tank you need 162Kg of aluminium - pretty close to the 350 pound the article talks about (and a similar amount of water is required). At $1 per pound, that's $350 for a "tankful". That's against $60 for a 20 US gallon tankful of gasoline. That means that using the hydrogen would have to be almost 6 times more efficient to be competitive (and even fuel cells aren't 6 times more efficient than and IC engine - maybe three times).
As has been pointed out by somebody the vast majority of this has to be lugged around all the time as only the hydrogen gets lost (less than 5% of the mass). And for the guy who says it is win-win as you have an empty truck going back, I think I ought to point out that the mass moved to the refueling stop (excluding the water) is close to three times higher than for the petrol/gasoline and that driving back a full truck of the waste is a lot less fuel efficient than and empty truck or tanker.
In fact this isn't a completely new idea; there was something similar mooted in the 1980s, but with completely
http://www.keelynet.com/energy/cornish.htm
From what I can see the cycle to hydrogen loses something like 70% of the electricity required to make the aluminium, and that's excluding the distribution costs of all that extra mass to move around. That's not to mention all the extra fuel and waste mass in the vehicle which is bound to damage mileage (plus the weight of the in-car converter).
In short, I don't see how this will be cost effective.
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